F 
 
 -I ^'9^ 
 
Class L 
 
 Book. 
 
 l/^b 
 
r\ 
 
 ViL^.-iJ " CHICAGO. ILL 
 
 lie Gulf Coast 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 WRITTEN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS "TIMES-DEMOCRAT,' 
 BY MR. R. A. WILKINSON. 
 
 .<^>, 
 
 R. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE 
 
 Passenger Department Louisville & Nashville R. 
 1886. 
 
In Jbxcn. 
 VVis. Hist. SoOf 
 
 
 'o'c 
 
IHTRODUCTORY. 
 
 ' fj-f E take pleasure iu preseutiug, iu book form, the with- 
 in in letters writteu by IMr. R. A. Wilkinsou, of the 
 '^j^'' New Orleans Times-Democrat. Those who follow 
 Mr. Wilkinson in his graphic description of the Gulf 
 Coast (lying on the Southern Division of the Louisville 
 & Nashville Railroad, between Mobile and New Orleans) 
 will spend a pleasant hour and be amply repaid for the time 
 spent in its perusal. 
 
 Although Mr. Wilkinson is a very gifted writer, we 
 know from personal experience that he has not drawn upon 
 bis imagination in describing the attractions of this coast, 
 and that the tourist visiting it \yill find its reality fully up 
 to the portrayal. 
 
 Sportsmen will see at a glance that Mr. Wilkinson is a 
 lover of the rod and reel, and knows something in regard 
 to handling the gun. He could not possibly have selected 
 a more favorable location in which to experience the 
 delights to be had with the breech-loader or the split, 
 bamboo, than the very spots he has so graphically written of. 
 This is, truly, a sportsman's paradise ; especially so in the 
 winter months, when all other sections are barred on account 
 of climatic influences. At this season, this region gives an 
 extended field for all outdoor spprts. To the denizens of a 
 less favored latitude, the Gulf Coast presents attractions of 
 a more varied nature than any other Southern locality. 
 The train service of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad 
 
 3 
 
is of such a character that the cities of New Orleans aud 
 Mobile can be reached in a very short time, and at a trifling 
 expense. Those locating on the coast will find very low 
 commutation rates between Gulf Coast points and these 
 cities. It is unlike any other Southern resort ; you can, if 
 you so desire, have the New Orleans Times-Democrat, 
 Picayune, or Mobile morning papers to peruse at breakfast. 
 In a word, you are in the midst of all climatic and sporting 
 attractions, and yet by no means isolated. At each of the 
 places descri]>ed in Mr. Wilkinson's letters can be found 
 telegraph, express, and ticket offices, aud polite and atten- 
 tive agents ; baggage is checked betv/een these points and 
 all principal cities and towns in the United States. 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 
 English Lookout, La., 1886. 
 
 •tOUR correspondent, accompanied by an artist companion, 
 departed from New Orleans in a palatial coach of ti)e 
 Louisville & Nashville Railroad two days ago. In leaving 
 ^ the Crescent City by this route, one, be he stranger or 
 home-folk, gets a fair impression of all the various branches of its 
 immense business, and has a favorable opportunity to note the 
 various phases of its cosmopolitan life. The st irt is at the foot 
 of Canal street, the broad boulevard of its fashion, the leading 
 tiioroughfare of its population, and the meeting line where the old 
 C(>l(ftiial town of French dominion io merged into the more mod- 
 ern American city. 
 
 As the train rolls out from the depot on its north-eastward 
 journey, the crescent sv/eep of the mighty Mississippi, the empress 
 of rivers, is seen to the right. The wide stream bears upon its 
 breast, like so many palaces afloat, white and sparkling with glass, 
 the fine passenger and freight packets that course the main water- 
 way and the many long affluents that reach from mountains to 
 mountains of the Mississippi valley. Its banks are lined by the 
 long black hulls of ocean steamers from every continent and 
 clime, or they are fringed by a naked forest of masts and spars 
 standing above brown heaps of cotton bales, rows of sugar hogs- 
 head?, and barrels or piles of rice-bags. 
 
 Turning from the fleets of river steamboats, cotton, grain, and 
 fruit steamers, stately sailing ships, huge freight piles, hamming 
 elevators, creaking derricks, struggling teams, busy longshoremen 
 and crews of listless sailors leaning over the dark sides of their ves- 
 sels, to the left are seen rising the tall buildings of our largest 
 sugar refineries. Near these the handsome Sugar Exchange, im- 
 posing rows of mercantile buildings, and extensive barrel factories 
 and cooperage establishments, emphasize the fact that here is the 
 great Louisiana sugar market. 
 
 A little further on, behind its shrubbery-clad foregrounds of 
 the Place d'Armes, stands the quaint old Cathedral St. Louis, 
 
■ flanked by the more ancient palaces of archbishop and governor. 
 ' The grassy plot of the Place d'Armcs of ancient days, with its 
 ; pleasant winding walks and rows and clusters of evergreen plants 
 : and trees, is now known by the stranger under the more brusque 
 
 ■ and homely title of Jackson Square. 
 
 r The train, with clanging bell, rumbles slowly by long rows 
 I of buildings, with low, peaked roofs and heavy-arched columns. 
 i They are resonant with the dialect ot every race and nation on 
 I the globe, from the taciturn tongue of the native Western Indian 
 to the verbose vocalization of the almond-eyed, pig-tailed child 
 of the Orient, from the harsh consonant-conquering speech of the 
 ; Norseman and the Teuton to the melodious and softly-modulated 
 ; language of the Latin. The rumble of the train can not drown 
 I the hum of converse in this modern Babel. This is the famous 
 : French Market, one of the greatest curiosities of New Orleans, 
 i Leaving behind the French Market, with its wonderful anom- 
 aly of sounds and smells, the train stops to make connection with 
 Morgan's Louisiana & Texas Kailway, one of the Pacific trunk 
 [ lines; and here the Louisville & Nashville Railroad possesses an 
 ; advantage. Tliey have no transfer between Texas, Mexico, and 
 ! the extreme West and the cities of the South-east or those ot the 
 : North-east, as the Eastern division of the Southern Pacific termi- 
 nates where their track crosses it, and passengers step from one 
 train to another. 
 
 After a fleeting glimpse at the extensive buildings of the 
 ' United States Mint, the luxurious residences on the lower end of 
 Esplanade street, and some of the largest Louisiana rice-mills, the 
 traveler is transported northward through the city down the mid- 
 dle of another thoroughfare. This is the old Champs Elysees, the 
 "fields of pleasure" that once m.arked the lower boundaries of 
 New Orleans, where the provincial people were wont to have their 
 evening promenades and meetings. The Americans built up the 
 grounds, ran a street out toward Lake Pontchartrain through their 
 center, and named it with the less euphonious translation of 
 Elysian Fields. 
 
 Finally the train crosses the last drainage canal, and the city 
 
 is left behind, with its outlying cottages and gardens, its distgint 
 
 factories and steeples, and its line of dim masts and smoking fun- 
 
 • nels that marks the sweep of its long river frontage, and the level 
 
steel roadway lies along the crest of the Gentilly Ridge. This is 
 crossed at last, with its farms and gardens and its old sugar planta- 
 tions, and the cars suddenly plunge into a piece of typical Louisiana 
 scenery. 
 
 Our artist's eyes brighten percpptibly at the picture of this dis- 
 mal swanip, where pale cypress trunks tower aloft, straight and 
 ■round as the pillars of a tall cathedral, supporting their dome of 
 :dark green foliage, and looped and festooned with the funeieal 
 'ornamentation of the gray Spanish moss, which trails and swings 
 to and fro in the air. In the sunless shadow of the forest big black 
 pools of water, about which stand, in contorted shape, the hairy 
 trunks of the palmetto, bearing fronds of stiff and fan-like foliage. 
 'Far away, beyond the railroad clearing, the swamp is filled with a 
 .'ghostly gloom, through which the crooked trunks and leaf stems 
 of the latania appear as if they were the bodies and outstretched 
 .;arms of a petrified race of goblins, standing a mute protest against 
 'their perpetual i i prisonment. 
 
 ' Betore the solitude of the swamp can become oppressive the 
 train gradually emerges into light, and the traveler beholds before 
 ■him the broad, limitless sweep of the sea-marsh of Louisiana. 
 •' It is all a sea of verdure, reaching from the forest as from a 
 ; shore, and stretching away to the edge of the descending blue sky 
 'at the distant horizon. It is a Sahara without its sand, and an 
 ■ocean without a sail; an endless growth of waving green, with 
 
 • its billows of mangrove bushes, its reefs of reedy brakes, and its 
 ' islets of bay trees or laurie groves. 
 
 This sea-marsh is intersected by many bayous, and dotted with 
 
 numerous lakes, where green vegetable rafts of lotus leaves and 
 
 lily pads turn slowly with the tide, or float lazilj^ about, blown by 
 
 ■ the breath of the salt breeze which comes constantly sweeping in 
 
 from the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 • A long blast sounds from the locomotive whistle • the train is 
 I checked near the bank of a wide and winding bayou, and the 
 
 brakeman opening the coach-door shouts. Chef Menteur. 
 
 1 The Americans have wisely failed to Anglicize the name of 
 
 ' this broad pass connecting Lake Borgne, or the " One-Eyed Lake," 
 
 with the waters of Lake Pontchartrain, or " Bridge of the Coach 
 
 •Train." Chef Menteur has a pretty sound in French. In Eng- 
 
 . lish it simply means " Biggest Liar." 
 
 7 
 
• One of the Louisiana historians, we believe, says that tliis bayou 
 was so called because a noted old Indian chief, of an unapproach- 
 able talent for mendacity, during the colonial clays pitched his 
 wigwams on its banks. Another more plausible reason for its 
 singular title exists in the fact that in the days of Louisiana ex- 
 plorers it was mistaken for the main entrance from the Gulf or 
 Lake Borgne into Lake Pontchnrtrain, having a deep entrance into 
 the former lake, through a very narrow channel near the latter. 
 It is supposed that some irascible French navigator, after having 
 vainly tried that short and apparently practicable route from the 
 seacoast colonies to the Island of Orleans, and having had his ves- 
 sel turned back by the shoals, impatiently baptized the deceptive 
 strait permanently with this opprobrious epithet. Some chroniclers 
 state that it also sadly misled Admiral Cochrane and Sir Edward 
 Packenham in their fruitless etforts to capture New Orleans during 
 the war of 1812. They endeavored to transport troops to the rear 
 of the city through the Bayou Chef Menteur in a flotilla of boats 
 and barges, but were foiled by the shallow mudplats which blocked 
 its channel, and were compelled to put back into Lake Borgne, 
 whence Packenham sought the Mississippi river banks, the battle- 
 field of Chalmette, and his own Philipp through the Ba^-ou Bien- 
 venu, or " Welcome Creek," as it will probably be called a hun- 
 dred years hence. 
 
 On the right bank of Chef Menteur, and immediately to the 
 left of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, near the supposed 
 turning point of the British flotilla, there is an old brick fort called 
 Fort M'Comb. It is punctured by many embrasures for light guns, 
 surmounted by a pile of brown barracks rising above the crest of 
 its low walls, and partially surrounded by a glaces thickly over- 
 grown with grass, reeds, and briars. The only garrison the scribe 
 and the artist saw in possession was a great gray heron, which at 
 the sound of the whistle arose from the verge of the moat, with 
 slowly-flapping pinions and harsh croaks of displeasure at the 
 temerity of the locomotive in disturbing the solitude of his hermit- 
 age; then, settling back, perched upon the parapet, drew one leg 
 up to his stomach, sunk his long serpentine neck into his breast- 
 feathers, and looked as lonely as if he might have been, in trans- 
 migrated sJir.pe, the ghost of old Chef Menteur himself, returned 
 to mourn over the graves of his departed tribe. 
 
 8 
 
Soon "The Chef," as the wordily-ecoiiomical railroad men call 
 it, is crossed on a magnificent iron bridge, and the train spfi'ds 
 along the solid and firm embankment of stone and shells and earth, 
 a great viaduct that modern engineering has built through the 
 Louisiana marshes. The rushing cars wake up a few hui dred 
 sleepy alligators, basking in the lakes and baj^ous, into stupiii, 
 wide-eyed curiosity; scare the little blue herons, or Creole ''c;iii- 
 caps," from tiic t.>ps of the mangrove bushes into hurried flight; 
 or flush occasionally a purple, red-crowned water rail from his 
 i^tately and royal promenade over the floating lily and lotus rafl> ; 
 or send clouds of chattering blackbirds off into the bending i-ecd 
 brakes. 
 
 Another loud whistle denotes that we are approaching the 
 Rigolets, where a few residences of a humbler class, club-houses, 
 government light towers, and other architectural surprises, rising 
 on gb treacherous a foundation, betoken the fiict that man has here 
 gained a firm foothold on the marshes, and can live perfectly free 
 from malaria, as the region is well pui-ified by periodic tidal over- 
 flow from the Gulf. 
 
 Tiie Eigolets form the main navigable channel from the Gulf 
 ot Mexico to Lake Pontch:irtrain. These passes were thus named 
 by the knightly Bienville, who, after nuich searching, had found 
 in them a means of quick communication between his colony at 
 Biloxi and the Mississippi river, near the present site of Baton 
 iiouge. Bienville's route to the Mississippi river was along the 
 sound, through the Eigolet«, across Pontchartrain through Pass 
 Manchac, across Lake Maurepas, through the Baj'ou Manchac and 
 into the Mississippi river near the village of the Bayagoula Indians. 
 This water route to the Mississippi from Mobile and the seacoast 
 was used bj- the French colonists in trading with the Chetimachas, 
 Bayagoulas, Natchez, Tunica,, and Yazoo Indian tribes. It prob- 
 ably would have been open now, but General Jackson, to blockade 
 the British out of the Mississippi, in 1814, felled a whole forest 
 into Bayou Manchac ; the Mississippi covered that forest with mud, 
 and now the bed of the Bayou Manchac is a sugar plantation. 
 
 Bienville was so delighted at the discovery of this entrance that, 
 in his profound gratitude to Providence, lie named it " Les Eigo- 
 lets de Bon Dieu," which in English, means " Straits of the Good 
 God." Understanding this, one is prone to believe that Bienville 
 
- '- ' ■ 111 I Ml II . a. It I II III .xj L L. J. <mmm^ 
 
 himself was the distinguished French gentleman who, in the bit- 
 terness of his disappointment, called the false passage Chef Men- 
 teur. Fortunately, Louisiana has another French geographical 
 name, which must be retained, because it can not be translated 
 ' without frequent injury to the decalogue. 
 
 Stopping awhile at the station to discharge a few pquads of 
 
 : amateur anglers, the train started again, crossing the Kigolets on 
 
 vthe steel bridge, that has for its foundation grouped creosoted piles. 
 
 ;' These piles are driven to a depth of seventy and eighty feet in 
 
 : groupsof eight and ten, and banded together with immense wrought- 
 
 iron bands. On these substantial foundations eight spans of steel 
 
 ' furnish a safe crossing of this wonderful stream. Leaving Rigolets, 
 
 . and running along a narrow neck of land, with Lake Borgne to 
 
 the <'ast and Pontchartrain to the west, we soon arrive at English * 
 
 Lookout, which is now one of the most noted fishing and hunting 
 
 \ resorts in the South or in the entire country, and is within sight 
 
 of the bravest and bloodiest naval battle ever fought in the Gulf 
 
 i of Mexico. 
 
 t*'^ 
 
 10 
 
LOUISVILL& & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 English Lookout, La^ 1886. 
 
 V^EW of the tourists or travelers, whose journeyinga northward 
 '.tni or southward happen to lead them over the sea marsh of 
 ; §i|;j^ Louisiana, lying along the railroad route from New Orleans 
 , % to Muhile, Would imagine that this region had an interest- 
 ing history. 
 
 One seeing the white sails of lumber schooners and little fish- 
 ing smacks dreamily drifting about the waters of Lakes Pontchar- 
 train and Burgne would scarcely realize the fact that the tapering 
 tall masts and swelling canvas of war fleets were once seen far 
 aw»y in the outer offing ; and that the grass-grown wastes and 
 winding bayous ever trembled with the roar and rumble of can- 
 non. 
 
 The averaare hunter from other sections would think, too, that 
 the region was wholly given up to the alligators, the herons, and the 
 marsh-hens, and would scout the idea that it was one of the favor- 
 ite winter haunts and homes of the lordly canvas-back, the lus- 
 cious mallard, the swift-flying, green-winged teal, and every other 
 variety of migratory duck. He would scarcely believe the great 
 Audubon himself, if he read that eminent naturalist's words say- 
 ing that the fleet American deer frequented such pastures, and 
 that every fall the gallant Cervus Virginianus rubbed the summer 
 velvet off his horns against the boughs and stems of the man- 
 grove bushes; or he would laugh at the statement that the banks 
 of its bayous and the brinks of its lotus-fringed ponds were the 
 home of the rich-furred otter. 
 
 Yet both the local historian and the Louisiana hunter know 
 that the above statements are strictly true. English Lookout is 
 now a celebrated field headquarters for Southern sportsmen, and 
 more particularly for the devotees of the rod and reel. Seventy- 
 two years ago it was the headquarters for the commanders of an 
 English force of invasion, and then obtained the name it owns to 
 the present day. 
 
 The old Lookout point was in a cluster of pines, which grew 
 11 
 
on a large mound a few yards, cast of the present Louisville & 
 Nashvilh; Railroad track. The pines and most of the mound are 
 now giine. The old settlers say that some of the troes were blown 
 down in the " Last Island storm," August 10, 1856, and that the 
 others and most of the material of the mound were used in rail- 
 road construction in more recent years. The place is in sight of 
 the scenes of the first serious conflict in the fierce struggle for the 
 Ciipture (if New Orleans in the war of 1812. 
 
 Oa the mirning of November 14, 1814, a flotilla of Admiral 
 C )c^irane's fleet, which, only a short time before, had aided in the 
 oipturo and burning of Washington, left Malhoureux Island 
 (our American Grass Island), near the mouth of the Rigolets, to 
 attack the little American squadron that, under the command of 
 Lieutenants Jones and Parker, was placed for the defense of the 
 straits and the channel into Lake Pontchartrain. 
 
 American history says tbat the British fleet consisted of forty- 
 three barges, mounting forty-three cannons, and manned by 
 twelve hundred men, and the Americans had only five barges, 
 with as many cannons, and one hundred and eighty-five men. 
 After a terrific conflict the American Commander was severely 
 wounded and all his boats were destroyed or capture^, the assail- 
 ants losing over three hundred men before they achieved their 
 Phyrran victory; of our forces but ten were killed and thirty-five 
 wounded. These figures might be altered after access to the 
 archives of the British war office, but as these are at present in- 
 accessible, a reliance must be placed upon our own government's 
 return of the comparative lists of casualties. 
 
 After the bloody battle the English buried their dead on the 
 cast bank of Pearl river, where one sees the live-oak sheltered 
 mounds to the right of the railroad track going northward. The 
 old natives say that they have another cemetery behind the 
 breastworks on Pearl river, at Jackson's Landing, near the 
 mouth of Mulatto Baj'ou. During recent j'ears mouldy skulls 
 and rusty musket barrels have been brought, by native fishers and 
 hunters, to the club-houses of the Lookout, as grim relics of our 
 last war with England. 
 
 The English then established a lookout in the noted clump of 
 pines, between Pearl river and the Rigolets, to watch the maneu- 
 vers of their distant fleet out in the Gulf, and to get warning of 
 
 13 
 
any approach of another American floLiUa from Luke Poiit- 
 cb art rain. 
 
 English Lookout at the present day bears the appearance of 
 quite a little village, with a comfortable railway station, an ex- 
 press and telegraph office, one or two refreshment hou-es and 
 siloons, several club-houses, an extensive custom-house buildinr, 
 with the cross-barred ensign floating from its flagstaff, and the 
 Pearl river mail steamer lying at its wharf. 
 
 The celebrity of the place, however, rests upon its fame a> a 
 tishiMi: and hunting resort. More on the former, as Lake Cath- 
 erine, with its shooting boxes, is nearer the most frequented du^'k 
 ponds and feeding grounds. 
 
 Thj shooting in all this region is confined to the colder weather 
 of fall and winter; and the hunting fields and flats are mostly 
 south of the •■ Lookout," along the branches of the Rigolels, L-dve 
 Ccitlterine, the " Seven Ponds and Chef Menteur, and nearer the 
 huntsman's headquarters of Miller's, Steiteiger's," and others. 
 Nearer English Lookout five deer, run by hounds, have been 
 killed in a single hunt. The best snipe grounds are said to be in 
 tha vicinity of the Chef Menteur and Pearl river, but the flats 
 about Lake Catherine are par excellence the duck-shooters' p;ira- 
 d\se, and are consequently subjected to heavy raids by the skilled 
 amateur sportsmen of many of the Southern cities. The "blind" 
 and point shooting over the decoys furnishes the most enjoya- 
 ble of a''l the sport; by flood and field. The brisk norther of No- 
 vember or December, with its frosty breath, invigorates the true 
 sportsmen with tingling ozone, until his nerves become steel and 
 liis muscles tireless. In the light canoe, or hunting pirogue of the 
 professional, at early dawn he repairs to his favorite shooting 
 point and awaits the coming of good shooting light and the com- 
 mencement of the morning flight. The first flock goes whistling 
 by in the semi-darkness, showing an indistinct line against the 
 dark-gray sky. It evokes a flash of burning powder and the 
 resounding boom of the ten-gauge breech-loader, folio v^'ed by a 
 welcome sounding thud or splash in the grass or the water. The 
 shrill whirr of another fl 'ck, the sweetest music to a sportsman's 
 ear, is lieard overhead, calling up a double report from the marsh 
 grass ; an apparent echo responds from a distant point, and before 
 sunrise on 3 would imao;ine that a small war had broken out in the 
 
marshes. By noon the flight is over, and the satisfied sportsmen 
 return to the club-houses laden with specimens of mallards, teal, 
 pintail, canvas back, black duck, and other varieties in quantity be- 
 yond the most sanguine hopes of the best hunters of Chesapeake 
 Buy and Long Island Sound. 
 
 Eng'ish Lookout is considered one of the best fishing localities 
 along or near the coast of the Gulf. Its surrounding waters— the 
 KlLTolets, Pearl river, and Lake Bor^'ne — are liberally patronized 
 by four limited clubs, composed chiefly of Waltonians from the 
 Crescent City, who have, each, separate, and commodious club- 
 houses around the railroad station. These organizations are 
 known under the names of the " Lookout," " Pearl river," 
 "Ballojo," and "Bush" clubs. Beside these, hundreds of the 
 citizens of New Orleans and other Southern cities and towns visit 
 ihe place, and avail themselves of its splendid fishing facilities. 
 
 The more numerous varieties of fish abounding in the adjacent 
 waters are the Southern "green trout," or the black bass, accord- 
 ing to Commissioner Seth Green ; croackers and sea trout, which 
 count for nothing in those fishing grounds; sheephead, redfish, 
 the carancke, cavalle, or jackfish, and the justly-celebrated silver- 
 fish, tarpon, or grande ecaile, the gamest fish in the Mexican Gulf, 
 or any other part of the ocean for that matter. 
 
 Tbe green trout, better adapted to fresh or slightly brackish 
 water than all the other varieties, requires the most alluring bait 
 and the most subtle piscatorial art to capture him. He prefers to 
 kill his own game ; hence, the angler who wishes to be successful 
 in getting him out of his element must employ live bait, sea 
 slirinip, cacahao, or salt-water minnows, revolving metal spoons, 
 which simulate frog or fish life, or feather and hair " bobs " that 
 are made to skip above the surface of the water, as if they were 
 water moths or dragon flies dipping for a bath. 
 
 The president of one uf the Lookout fishing clubs captured one 
 hundred and thirty-nine green trout in one morning by cautiously 
 working along the fl^g roots and the lily pods of the bayous. The- 
 green trout in this vicinity run from owe pound to seven pounds 
 in weight. Tbe striped bass, a much rarer variety of fish than 
 the last named, is frequently caught. The largest landed with 
 rod and reel, with a record furnished, was forty inches in length 
 and nineteen pounds in weight. 
 
The slieephead, one of the finest li^h in tlio Gulf of Mexico, 
 seems to be a reliable and voracious biter in the Lookout fishing 
 region; catches of fifty or sixty a day, by a single flshermnn, are 
 matters of such common occurrence as to be considered unworthy 
 of comment. He will rise to the veriest tyro's hand, induced by 
 no greater attractions than pieces of sea or river shrimp, or frag- 
 ments of broken crab. 
 
 The redfish is one of the most beautiful members of the whole 
 piscine tribe. When forced at last to leave his congenial element to; 
 take his place in the bottom of the fishing boat, he comes up gasping. 
 and flashing with crimson and gold, absolutely dazzling in his 
 brilliancy of coloring. Game and gallant is the fight he makes 
 for his life, straining rod, line, and reel, and exercising all the 
 angler's nerve and skill to land him safely, unless he be hung by 
 some pot-fisher with a clothes-line and a hook forged in a black- 
 smith's shop. The redfish vary in weight from two to forty 
 pounds, and are voracious biters and most valiant fighters. 
 
 The caraucke, or cavallo, furnishes an immense amount of fun 
 in the catching, and none in the eating. 
 
 The magnificent silverfish is the king of the Gulf and the lakes. 
 Away over off the Florida coast they call him the tarpon ; and 
 many long legions of his prowess have been printed in the North- 
 ern press. Down in the westward Louisiana bays the Creole 
 and Dago fishermen rail him the " grande ecaile," or '• big scule," 
 and pull for the shore when they hook him, filled with the firm 
 conviction, which has become traditional among them, that the 
 grande ecaile leaps against his enemy in desperation wheri ne 
 feels that he has no chance of escaping the cruel hold of the hook. 
 
 The writer has yet to see a Louisianian who has landed his 
 first silverfish with the rod and reel. He would gladly make 
 honorable mention of any candidates for such distinction in the 
 art piscatorial. A noted disciple of Walton, last season, hooked 
 no less than eleven in the Kigolets ; others were towed a mile or 
 two backward and forward by these wild horses of the sea. Nearly 
 all of the specimens were between six and seven feet in length, 
 but not one of them was accurately measured ashore. Silverfish 
 tackle is now being conspicuously displayed in the show windows 
 of the New Orleans fishing emporiums, and silverfish are now 
 biting in and about the Eigolets, and some ambitious angler has a 
 
briUiiint chance of covering himself with glory by conquering one 
 (if these flying, leaping, fl^ishing racers of the Mexican main. 
 
 The fishing around English Lookout is now at its best, and all 
 people who may be on piscatorial pleasure bent can find no better 
 field for the play of their diversions than is aflforded in the locality 
 described. It is strange, when one comes to consider how access- 
 ible this spot is to the sportsmen of the country, that compara- 
 tively so few care to avail themselves of the finest sport to be had 
 in the country. 
 
 The fall and winter fishing near the Lookout is excellent, and 
 at that season nearly all of the fish of the Gulf are in their 
 best condition, and ready for the dexterous line-casters of the 
 Northern lakes, who might come down and teach their Southern 
 brethren of the rod and reel how to tackle the tarpon. 
 
 16 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 
 Bay St. Louis, Miss., I88G. 
 
 N the 10th instant the chronicler of this narnitivo, riftei- a 
 parting salutation with its sun-browned citizens and sports- 
 men, and a regretful glance at the glistening bunches of 
 green trout, sheepshead, and redfisli that were being trans- 
 ported to the north-bound train, left Louisiana and English Look- 
 out and landed in Mississippi, on the east bank of Pearl river. 
 
 Pearl river, flowing from its head of navigation, three hundred 
 miles distant, at Carthage, in Leake county, Miss., passes through 
 Jackson, the capital of this flourishing and rapidly-growing State, 
 afftft-ds a navigable waterway for a fertile cotton country, and 
 intersects the great Southern pine belt in its very center. It pen- 
 etrates the finest lumber region in America, which, comparatively 
 undeveloped, is even now receiving the earnest attention of Mich- 
 igan and Minnesota capitalists and lumbermen, who, anticipating 
 the early exhaustion of the Northern pine forests, are looking 
 southward with a view of transferring the lumber industry of the 
 country t<^ a wider and more prosperous field. The river is already 
 bordered by many saw-mills, thriving lumber settlements, and 
 prosperous towns; and large numbers of sea-going vessels are an- 
 nually loaded, in the ofiing in front of its mouth, with yellow pine 
 for the Mexican, South American, and European markets. 
 
 The mouth of the Pearl into the Gulf of Mexico, or, more 
 directly, Mississippi sound, is surrounded by the sea marsh. Near 
 the Louisville & Nashville Railroad crossing, and higher up at the 
 confluence of Mulatto bayou, huge shell mounds, covered with 
 live-oak groves and forests, rise above the marshes. Seventy odd 
 years agathey were used as cemeteries by the English and Amer- 
 icans for the interment of slain soldiers and sailors. In prehis- 
 toric ages they were apparently employed for the same purpose, 
 as skeletons, fragments of pottery, stone hatchets, and arrow-heads 
 are frequently excavated from their depths by the shell dealers, 
 who boat them away to be sold for paving the streets and drives 
 of Southern cities. The constant appearance of oak groves upon 
 
 17 
 
their crests might induce the belief that they were mounds built 
 and planted with trees for the performance of some mysterious 
 Druidical rites. But these mounds, according to the testimony of 
 archaeologists and conchologists, were there before the alleged T^l- 
 tee occupation of Mississippi, thirteen centuries ago, and before 
 Noah left the stranded ark high and dry on Mount Ararat. Some 
 men of scientific attainments maintain that they were not used as 
 places of interment, but that some migbty mundane convulsion, 
 which hurled the shells into heaps from the sands of the sea, over- 
 whelmed men and beasts that dwelt near the margin of the deep, 
 and piled their bodies and carcasses promiscuously with the shells 
 into the thousands and thousands of acres of mounds that rise 
 above the marshes of Mississippi and lower Louisiana. In these 
 modern times men do not stop to inquire whether they were a 
 result of one of the freaks of the fabled Deucalion deluge, or of 
 Noah's more authentically recorded flood. They pave their road- 
 ways with them, and ride smoothly over them in rough coster- 
 monger carts or luxurious coaches, and that is enough for all 
 purposes of life. They would prove to be of wonderful interest 
 to sight-seers from other climes. 
 
 To the eastward of Pearl river broad sweeps of grassy savan- 
 nas stretch from the distant pinelands to the sea, down between 
 intervening islands and peninsulas of forests. Here are thousands 
 and tens of tliousands of acres of magnificent grazing lands, wat- 
 ered by hundreds of meandering rivulets and creeks; meadows, 
 clad with rich and luxui'iant perennial herbage; dry tablelands, 
 sheltered and shaded by clumps and clusters of oak and pine ; and 
 undulating swells, v,?hich roll away like the weald of Surrey with- 
 out its cuuntless flocks. In Bienville's time it was the natural 
 home of the buflaio — the "Terro aux Boeufs," or "Land of 
 Beeves." 
 
 For two years after the landing of Iberville, at Ship island, the 
 French colonists of this seacost considered buflaio wool and pearls 
 the staple commodities of the country. Crozat, the great Parisian 
 monopolist, obtained a charter for the exclusive enjoyment of this 
 trade. The colonists procured quantities of buttMlo wool, and 
 tried to domesticale the buftliloes in pens built of pine po.--ts. 
 They never got any pearls worth mentioning, though they scoured 
 the Coast in quest of them. It is not improbable that a lew pearl- 
 
 18 
 
bearing oysters, found by them near its moulb, gave its name to 
 Pearl river. 
 
 Some of the ante-bellum residents still call Hancock and Har- 
 rison, the seacoast counties of the State, the " cow counties of Mis- 
 sissipl." The title is more likely to have descended from the 
 presence of great buffalo droves in the region than from the quan- 
 tity of domestic cattle once reared here. In Texas and Colorado 
 the departed droves of the bison have long since given pi- ee to 
 far more numerous and valuable herds of cattle ; and the } ell of 
 the Comanche, glutted with the savage butchery of the flying 
 beasts, has been hushed by the festive whoop of the cow-boy, 
 rounding up the immense herds of fatted beeves for the long cast- 
 ward drive. On the Mississippi seacoast the vanished bison has 
 not been followed by the fattening beef. The great waste of 
 cheap and valuable pasture lands, lying in a long stretch, green 
 wi!h herbage and abundantly watered, east of Pearl liver, is not 
 utilized. It does not contain one animal, where a thousand might 
 roam and grow fat. 
 
 Journeying from Pearl river, and passing the pine-clad plains 
 and shores of Gulf View and Toulme, with occasional sweeps of 
 sparkling sea seen through the car window, we arrived next and 
 stopped at Waveland, one of the many popular pleasure resorts 
 of the Gulf Coast. 
 
 • The railroad station at Waveland, a few hundred yards in the 
 rear of the center of the beautiful village, is about forty-five miles 
 distant from New Orleans. Our party was conveyed to the beach 
 and the residence of one of its characteristically hospitable citi- 
 zens in his private carriage, and subsequently, in the same vehicle, 
 along the entire front of the town. 
 
 This delightful reseirt is well named. The waves of the Gulf, 
 with crystal limpidity and white crests, come rippling in from the 
 broad summer sea beytmd, leaving the white saniis of the sloping 
 beach, and breaking into sparkling foam at the end of their long 
 voyage from the distant, unseen southward islands. With bold 
 and curving sweep the forest-covered points and headlinds of the 
 coast line put out into the waters of the soui'd, as if the bending 
 pines and the swaying live-oaks had marched f^rth in troops to 
 meet the salt sea-breeze that comes rustling and singing through 
 
 their evergreen foliairc. The shining belt of white sand which 
 
lies just beyond the foot of the forest, dwindling away in perspec- 
 tive to a silvery hair, where the faint purple haze of distance mel- 
 lows the woodland to a tint merging into the hue of the sky, is 
 hut a dividing line separating the soft shades of coloring in the 
 landscape, the pale, cool sea-green of the waves and the deeper 
 verdure of the woods. 
 
 The suniiTier villas and winter residences of the inhabitants are 
 in harmony with the natural scene. Cottages, whose porch col- 
 umns and balcony railings are covered by clambering roses and 
 sweet-scented, clinging vines; shadowy, wide-roofed mansions, 
 with broad verandas and airy halls, resting at a respectable dis- 
 tance back from the beach to give the dignity of great extent to 
 the verdant lawns in the foreground; and light structures, built 
 by luxury to court the delicious languor that comes stealing in 
 \yith the winds from the far-away tropic seas. 
 
 The village extends along the coast in a succession of such hab- 
 itations for several miles — milesof sparkling waves, shining sands, 
 velvety green banks, and forest-clad headlands. The rude North- 
 ern winter never gains a foothold in such a locality ; there might 
 be a slow transformation from the vernal brightness of the South- 
 ern summer, and the subdued softness of a golden, rich-leaved 
 autumn, but here one could never find the skeleton nakedness of 
 leafless forests, the fair earth resting under a funeral winding-sheet 
 of snow, and the voice of babbling rills and laughing streams 
 hushed into frozen silence. 
 
 This is Waveland. Its people have done well to call it so; but 
 it is a pity they can not fasten to it a double appellation, denoting 
 that it is also the land of the summer breeze. 
 
 When Dr. Kane, the gallant Arctic explorer, spent his two long 
 winters, imprisoned in the wreck of the Advance, among the 
 stranded ice-floes of the frozen zone, he was often wont to visit 
 a certain headland where he could gaze far away southward, to- 
 ward home. The Esquimaux called the rocky eminence " Anoa- 
 tok," or "the wind-loved spot." If there be an " Anoatok " on 
 this coast it must be near "Waveland ; or the name is deserved by 
 the entire Mississippi seacoast, where the almost perpetual south 
 wind robs the summer solstice of its fervid heat, and the short 
 winter of its frosty rigors. 
 
 Waveland has very rapidly increased in the number of its 
 20 
 
houses and its inhabitants within the past few years. There is yet 
 a large extent of coast in its vicinity, and less within its limits, 
 which could be profitably or advantageously devoted to summer 
 residences, winter homes or hotels for Northern tourists. It wiU 
 only be a question of time when its growth, as a practical suburb 
 of New Orleans, ceases to depend upon the increase of population 
 in the Crescent City, though it has advanced rapidly under that 
 active stimulus. Its bright future lies not alone in its excellence as 
 a summer resort, but in its advantages as a winter abiding place for 
 the denizens of a colder clime. 
 
 After a most enjoyable visit to Waveland, our party, honored 
 by the accompanying presence of their host and charming host- 
 esses, were whirled away over the smooth shell drive bordering 
 the beach, seven miles, to the town of Bay St. Louis. 
 
 t. . « ■• 
 
 i^' 
 
 y^'^ 
 
 L^'- '^: 
 
 
 s K^W 
 
 21 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R 
 
 Bay St. Louis, Miss , I8S6. 
 
 AY ST. LOUIS was entered by Iberville, and its banks 
 settled upon by a small French colony one hundred and 
 
 ; eighty-five years ago. 
 
 The explorers found a beautiful sheet of water, two 
 miles wide at its mouth, and expanding, as it stretched toward the 
 interior, between its forest-clad borders. It receives the tributary 
 waters of three streams, the Boisdore, Portage, and Wolf river, 
 of our day, from the seat, and Jourdan river on its westward 
 side. 
 
 The French were fond of sainting their great Bourbon sov- 
 ereign in his New World dominions. The grandest river in the 
 unexplored continent, the old Indian Mississippi, was called the 
 Biver St. Louis. The forest-engirdled bay on this seacost was 
 named the Bay of St. Louis, and all the way from Northern 
 Acadia to the straggling colonies along the Gulf of Mexico there 
 were enough St. Louises to offset the mortal misdemeanors of the 
 puissant monarch at home. 
 
 In all this region, strange to say, there appear to be no land- 
 marks to perpetuate the names of the knightly men who brought 
 the Old World's civilization and arts to a barbaric land — no town, 
 village, plain, hill, river, or bay that bears such names as Iber- 
 ville, Bienville, Sauvolle, St. Denys, Hubert, Boisbriant, Chat- 
 eaugne, Bernard de la Harpe, and other captains and chevaliers 
 who won and ruled the country. ^ 
 
 There is a comparatively elevated plateau of an area of ap- 
 proximately thirty square miles, that juts out as a peninsula into 
 the western side of Bay St. Louis. " It is separated from the main- 
 land on the north by Jourdan river, a large, deep stream, washed 
 on the south by the waters of Mississippi sound, and fronts east- 
 ward on Bay St. Louis. The land of this peninsula is from ten to 
 twenty feet above the sea level. As far back as tradition goes this 
 immediate section was used by the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Ali- 
 bamons, and pther Indian tribes as a summer health resort, and it 
 
 22 
 
was even visited by the remote Natchez tribe. In the territorial 
 days of Mississippi it was frequented by the planters of Adams, 
 Jefferson, and Claiborne counties, who visited it by overland road- 
 way's and bridle paths. 
 
 The first important settlement was located at the extremity of 
 the }»oint, between the waters of the bay and those of the sound, 
 the present site of the tov/n. 
 
 In 1814 th-e village was threatened by Cochrane's British flotilla. 
 
 The lamented and learned historian, Claiborne, of Mississippi, 
 when here a few years ago, related an amusing incident of this 
 attack. Tiie place was defended by three small cannon (at least 
 small for these days) and a weak garrison, who were for beating a 
 hasty retreat when they saw the overwhelming force of men in 
 bouts approaching the shore. An aunt of Colonel Claiborne, then 
 residing here, had visited the shore to watch the coming of the 
 distiVnt British ; when she heard that the garrison had determined to 
 evacuate the place she snatched a lighted cigar from the hands of 
 an ofBcer and touched off one of the guns. Finding the place de- 
 fended by respectable-sized cannon, the British retired. The 
 American schooner, Seahorse, was sent to defend the settlement 
 until the military stores collected there could be brought off. The 
 British flotilla attempted twice to capture this vessel but failed. 
 Returning a third time in great force they would have succeeded, 
 but the commander of the Seahorse blew up his vessel, burned the 
 stores, and spiked the guns, which were bored out after the war of 
 1812. During the civil war the Federal forces threw two of the 
 cannon into the sound. The more famous piece was hidden away 
 in the back part of the town. Mr. Ulman, a prominent citizen 
 of the town, says the last salute it fired was lighted four years ago, 
 on the Fourth of July, by the hand of Colonel J. F. H. Claiborne, 
 who begged the honor of firing a gun with which a woman had 
 scared a British fleet. The gun, with broken carriage and rusted 
 barrel, is now lying near the railroad track. 
 
 When the little settlement grew into a town it was called, after 
 an ofBcer in the old United States army, Shieldsboro, a name 
 which it bore until recent years, when it was rechartered under 
 the name of Bay St. Louis. It was an appropriate step to get back 
 to a French name; though, to save the necessity of such awkward 
 conversational distinctions as the town of Bay St. Louis and the 
 
 23 
 
bay of Bay St. Louis, it might have been more convenient, at least, 
 to have honored some of the men who made history here nearly 
 two centuries ago in naming it. 
 
 The presant town of Bay St. Louis is practically a city. It 
 has, with its modern suburb of Ulmanville, a summer population 
 of between seven and eight thousand; and its winter inhabitants 
 number between three and four thousand. It is provided with a 
 tine depot and railroad office by the Louisville & Nashville Eail- 
 road Company, over whose line it is only fift\' miles from New 
 Orleans, and ninety from Mobile. 
 
 The refined Creole population of the Crescent City regard Bay 
 St. Louis with great favor, and respond to the exceptional compli- 
 ment paid to one of the greatest of their illustrious line of princes 
 in its naming by liberally patronizing the resort. Many of the 
 families residing there themselves bear the historic names of men 
 who have figured conspicuously in the colonization of this portion 
 of Mississippi and all of Louisiana. It is here that one can find 
 citizens as polished and polite as those that frequent the fashion- 
 able boulevards and clubs of Paris; and women as beautiful only 
 as Creole women are. 
 
 Bay St. Louis, in the summer, is a little Paris within itself, or 
 a fashionable suburb of that lesser American Paris, the French 
 part of New Orleans. Even in winter it has a comparatively large 
 Creole population. Yet the Saxon race has several thousand rep- 
 resentatives in town. 
 
 "The Bay," as the Anglo-Saxon denizens are wont to call it, 
 has streets along its water frontage eight or ten miles long, and 
 magnificent shell drives extending 'throughout this distance. It 
 is a compactly-built little city — as compactly as a partiality for 
 shade trees, shrubbery, flower gardens, and grassy lawns around 
 its beautiful villas and cool cottages will permit. Its streets near 
 the sound and the Bay St. Louis contain large numbers of hand- 
 some private residences, and many extensive boarding-houses. 
 The largest hotel in the town was burned to the ground seven 
 years ago.' There is talk of replacing it by a much larger and 
 more handsome edifice, to meet the demands of Northern winter 
 travelers and tourists. 
 
 Quite a number of Northerners spent a large portion of last 
 winter in the tov/n, and expressed high opinions of the attractions 
 
 21 
 
of tljis locality as a winter resort. JMany of the fine summer 
 boarding-houses are kept open in the winter to accommodate the 
 hundred of Northern people who have found this such a pleasant 
 winter home. If all the vacant rooms and residences, utilized 
 in the accommodation of a surplus population of several thousand 
 during the summer, were available during the winter, the number 
 of the inhabitants of Bay St. Louis might be kept permanently 
 between seven and eight thousand. They might be easily made 
 available, as both summer and winter visitors could frequent the 
 place, and live at a very low cost for rents, rooms, and board, 
 which would result from residences, boarding-houses, and hotels 
 being occupied and enjoying a full business during twelve months 
 of the year. The times of the two classes of visitors would har- 
 monize exactly. The excess of summer population resides here 
 from the beginning of June to the middle of October. The 
 Northern tourists usually remain in the South from November 
 to May. Thus, it is easily seen that Bay St. Louis, with only 
 iti present a ^commodations (and they are certainly most excellent), 
 can accommodate, every winter, from two to three thousand 
 Northern tourists. The day must come when it will find itself 
 subjected to the demand of entertaining even a much more 
 numerous throng from the North than that; and it seems that the 
 people have it in their power to make the date of that day early. 
 The long pierheads projecting out into the bay and sound, 
 built on pine posts, and ending in ornamental kiosks, pagodas, or 
 plain bath-rooms, indicate the fact that sea-bathing is one of the 
 most popular of summer luxuries indulged in by the population, 
 and groups of big-hatted urchins, with bare legs, faces as solemn 
 as if they thought life was but a serious business at best, and, as 
 they deemed. that the price of both hard and soft-shelled crabs was 
 at a figure that would justify an immediate strike, carrying bas- 
 kets of loaded crabs on their arms, inform the stranger that crus- 
 tacean delicacies are a perfect drug in the market. Fish-dealers, 
 oyster-men, vegetable-venders, and butchers' men, the figurative 
 edible-bearing mountains that the hungry Mahomets must seek, or 
 go to, in other localities and cities, here come to tho homes and 
 hotels of the people. Living is so cheap, or its means are, that one 
 need not bow down to his butcher and his baker as to his lord and 
 master. 
 
 25 
 
The aquatic diversions of yachting and rowing are participated 
 in by both sexes, though the young ladies seem to prefer to row, or 
 be rowed, in Bay St. Louis rather than in the more open sound, as 
 in the former sheet the water is smoother. 
 
 It is probably beyond the province of an article like this to 
 discuss the municipal government, the chartered associations, 
 churches, convents, schools, social organizations, etc., of the town. 
 It is sufficient to say that it is one of the best-governed and most 
 orderly little cities in the country, the preponderance of its popula- 
 tion being refined and highly cultivated. Eeligion and education 
 are held at a premium within its limits, disorderly revels are dis- 
 countenanced, and the fascinating pleasures of fashionable society 
 allowed full sway. 
 
 In the Bay St. Louis suburb of Ulmanville, Mr. A. A. Ulman, 
 a leading citizen of the place, has developed a novel industry. On 
 a branch of the Severn river, one of the Maryland Senators — pos- 
 sibly Mr. Gorman — has a terrapin farm, or a twenty-acre shoal 
 staked off from the shore and devoted to the rearing of " diamond- 
 back terraphis." Diamond-back terrapins and champagne are 
 expected concomitants to any respectable feast in the country 
 around about Washington, though they be costly, gout-engi;ndcr- 
 ing luxuries. The Maryland Senator has a small fortune in his 
 terrapin pasture, and the Mississippi speculator has a limited pat- 
 tern of the ftxrm. The celebrated Gulf Island terrapins are ju.^t as 
 good as Maryland diamond backs, tasteful Creole gastronomists 
 and bon vivants generally well know. In this seacoast terrapin- 
 rearing establishment, the proprietor procures his parent stock 
 from the sand islands, southward, from terrapin-hunting men and 
 dogs. In a large enclosed pond, well palisaded, there are nearly 
 one thousand grown terrapins nursing little terrapins, which, on 
 reaching maturity, will be shipped to Baltimore, New York, 
 Washington, and other cities, and sold for one dollar a head, or 
 tail, whichsoever end may be emerging from the shell at the time 
 they meet the purchaser's eye. In the same cities, there is an 
 eager market for a thousand times the number atinually shipped 
 from the Mississippi seacoast. It might be well to suggest that 
 this appears to be a promising business, and, as the gentleman said 
 to his speculative friend who proposed to send over to Italy for a 
 lot of gondolas for the lake in Central Park, " It would be just as, 
 
 2G 
 
well to got a pair and let theiu breed," as terrapins (not gondolas) 
 a:e very prolific. 
 
 Tliere is an extensive woolen factory in the rear of the suburb, 
 which is owned and operated by Mr. Ulman. This is dependent 
 upon the sheep-raising business in the vicinity of Bay St. Louis, 
 which is about the most important of all the stock-growing in- 
 dustries pursued along the seacoast. There are several large sheep 
 farms, or ranges, conducted on the banks of Jordan river, several 
 miles from the Gulf. In that locality, four or five stockmen own 
 considerable-sized flocks, the largest numbering about three thou- 
 sand head of sheep and the smallest at least a thousand. The 
 business is carried on by numbers of smaller herdsmen, who own 
 each from a hundred to two or three hundred sheep. The 
 " Lake " wool, as the wool from this part of the country is known, 
 is considered by Southern buyers and Northern n'ianufacturers to 
 be of the finest quality in the country, and always commands the 
 highest prices in the market. 
 
 According to the information furnished the writer, this busi- 
 ness is carried on without the least care or attention to the flocks. 
 They are lett to roam at will without the protection of the herder, 
 and generally, for the entire year, without shelter from the 
 weather. They may be better for this neglect, and may, conse- 
 quently, acquire the hardiness of constitution common to their 
 distant cousins, the cervine race, for there is not an epidemic 
 sheep disease known in the region. But they are sheared in 
 season and out ot season, and oftener left to shed their own valua- 
 ble wool. They thrive and grow fat without an enemy, except 
 that foe to mankind and friend to the plantation field hand, the 
 omnivorous and carnivorous cur dog. But little advantage is 
 taken either of their wool-bearing or mutton-producing capacity. 
 The time chosen for sheep-shearing is, according to the statement 
 of citizens of Ulmanville, when the farmers need a little ready 
 money, and the time for converting them into mutton when they 
 need meat. This course is pursued within three miles of a rail- 
 road, that, within two hours, can carry the wool into a great mar- 
 ket, where it is worth twenty-two cents a pound, and where 
 mutton can be sold by the carload. If the owners of the big 
 shtep ranches of Texas or the wool-growers of Ohio were thor- 
 oughly acquainted with the advantages of this region in the pur- 
 
 27 
 
suit of tb<^ir business, sheep-raising would certainly become a great 
 industry along this coast, or, if the class of farming population 
 hero were possessed with the vim of the visitors, whom they even 
 fail to feed with home-grown products, this part of Mississippi 
 might be made the most prosperous portion of the South. It 
 seems so easy for the rural population to live here that thej' have, 
 apparently, no desire to grow rich or as progressive as the agri- 
 cultural populaticm of less-favored sections. 
 
 Bay St. Louis has a bright future before it. It is one of the 
 most favorably-located tewns in Mississippi, with a fine region of 
 country around about it, a beautiful sheet of water on either side, a 
 salubrious site, and one of the most delightful summer and winter 
 climates in the world, and, above all, it is inhabited by a popula- 
 tion possessing refinement and elegance to a high degree, which 
 would be a sufBcient attraction to draw to it much of the refine- 
 ment and wealth of other sections and cities. 
 
 • 28 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. Ft. 
 Pass Christian, Miss., 1886. 
 
 UR party left the charming and beautiful town of Bay St. 
 Louis in a northward-bc>und mail train of the Louisville & 
 
 fj Nashville Railrpad. Immediately after the train leaves 
 Bay St. Louis depot, it runs across Bay St. Louis on a long 
 bridge, built upon concrete caissons and square creosoted timber. 
 The wood is creosoted for its preservation, and to protect it from 
 the boring of the teredo, a singular worm of the tropic seas, which 
 is prone to penetrate every drift-log and ship's bottom floating 
 in the waters of the southern parts of the ocean. In a year these 
 marine augers perforate any unprotected timber found in salt 
 water into a perfect honeycomb form. Timbers treated by the 
 creosoting process are unmolested by these pests, and are as dur- 
 able as iron. The bridge contains a wide iron draw to permit 
 the very considerable navigation of the Bay St. Louis and its 
 four affluent rivers and bayous. To the right of the bridge, near 
 the east bank of the bay, is the barnacle-covered wreck of a brig, 
 a relic of the Mexican war, an old prize of our navy converted 
 into a light ship, and lost in a storm. 
 
 One crossing the Bay St. Louis northward is struck with the 
 beauty of the headland extending out into the sound to the south- 
 ward. It is a bold curving cape, standing out in clear-cut relief 
 against the green water below and the blue sky above. It is cov- 
 ered with the grand growth of the primeval forest, tall towering 
 pines, giant live-oaks, and the glistening foliage and great white 
 blooms of the magnolia grandiflora. At the foot of the forest 
 and beneath the bluff banks upon which it stands, a broad, glitter- 
 ing slope of white sand reaches down to the edge of the green 
 water of rippling bay and undulating sound. 
 
 They call this miniature combination of Cape Verde and Point 
 au Sable Henderson's Point. And this is the western lii^.it of 
 Pass Christian. 
 
 Fifty-seven miles out from the Crescent City, the train stops at 
 a large passenger and freight depot, and we debark at one of the 
 
 29 
 
most famous and fashionable summer and winter watering-places 
 on all the Southern seacoast, the very ancient colonial village, and 
 the handsome, prosperous modern town of Pass Christian. 
 
 The first natural curiosity that meets the traveler's sight at 
 this celebrated place is a class of hackraen, who cherish moderate 
 views as to the individual appointment of finances on this earth. 
 At some watering-places, the hack-drivers seem to bo dissatisfied 
 with anything less than the earth itself. But here one may bo 
 whirled smoothly and swiftly in a comfortable vehicle along shell- 
 paved avenues two and three miles for twenty-five cents. It is a 
 sign that life is easily sustained in a country where money has 
 such purchnsing power. It could be hardly otherwise here, where 
 the soil may laugh its harvests of luscious fruits and delicious veg- 
 etables to " the tickling of the hoe," and the sea gives up its mir- 
 aculous Gallilean profusion of fishes. 
 
 Pass Christian, like the town of Bay St. Louis, is located on a 
 long peninsula. The length of the town along this peninsula is 
 about six miles. The peninsula is formed by the ^Mississippi 
 Sound in front, or southward, Bay St. Louis on its western side, 
 and Bayous Bois d'Ore and Portage on the north. The beautiful 
 name of the Bois d'Ore was given by the French explorers to one 
 of these streams because they discovered it in the autumn, when 
 the foliage of its bordering forests was richly tinted with red and 
 gold. The French title means "gilded woods," or forests. The 
 humbler classes of natives long ago rechristened it the " Birdery." 
 The corruption is spreading, and Mississippi is liable to lose, be- 
 fore long, one of her prettiest geographical French names. The 
 Bayou Portage was so called because, eight or ten miles above its 
 mouth, it approaches to uithin nearly a mile of the sea, on the 
 shore of which the colonists resided. 
 
 Tlie Indians and settlers transported their canoe-loads of furs, 
 peltries, and food products they gathered from the interior, beyond 
 this bayou, to the ancient villages on the coast, across this narrow 
 neck by overland "portage," rather than carry them down the 
 bayou, out of the bay, and up the sound, for twenty miles, by wa- 
 ter. The farmers living along the banks of the old "Portage" 
 already generally call the clear winding stream the " Potash." In 
 future years the Americans will say it was named from the number 
 of charcoal-burning kilns along its banks. 
 
This question is dealt upon largely in these articles because it 
 certainly is a fact that the name of a region, or of a resort, has 
 much to do with its patronage and its popularity. Imagine Sara- 
 toga with such an accurate title as " Healthy Water Holes," and 
 how much less wealth and fashion would the fancy picture visiting 
 that famous place. 
 
 Pass Christian has a good enough name,though it is an anom- 
 aly, and neither correct English nor French. It was probably 
 called " Passe Chretiennc," because some of those priests, who were 
 the courageous pioneers everywhere in America in French explo--^ 
 ration and settlements, preached to a gathering of savages at this 
 point, converting them to Christianity. 
 
 Some of the authorities say the name was derived f roin the fact 
 that a Norwegian navigator first discovered the comparatively deep 
 channel that passes near this part of the shore, and that the French 
 named the land near it "Passe a Christian." As ten to one the 
 JSorseman would have been named Christiansen, that does not ap- 
 pear plausible. 
 
 Whatever may be the origin of its name, the fact of its exist- 
 ence as a great watering-place is a reality; a town grown from the 
 few huts of visiting members of the Cat Island Colony to one of the 
 most beautiful and popular watering-places on the Southern coast. 
 The land level of the sea front, whereupon the town is located, 
 varies in height from three to lifteen feet above that of the sea, 
 and that of the northern side of the peninsula is as much as twenty 
 or thirty feet above tide-water. 
 
 " The Pass,"' as Southern visitors and residents term it, h;is a 
 water frontagi; on the Mississippi Sound of six miles, including its 
 villa-ornamented wings of West End and East End. Along this 
 entire front is a broad shell-paved avenue, lying under the shade of 
 magnificent live-oaks and lofty magnolias. Its groves of oal-s and 
 magnolia and its surrounding forests of pine are covered with 
 perennial verdure. Their evergreen foliage produces the impres- 
 sion that one is in the midst of a region of perpetual summer; and 
 this impression is not f;ir wrong, as the climate is so mild that roses 
 and violets I'loorn through the short winter, and this is at all times 
 a land of flowers. The meteorological statistics show that its aver- 
 age range of winter temperature is about sixty degrees Fahrenheit. 
 The fro^t-bearing winds of this region blow from the northward. 
 
 31 
 
The seacoast is sheltered, in that direction, from its Borean breath 
 by the great southern pine belt more than a hundred miles wide, 
 which follows the coast line of the Gulf States. The prevailing 
 winter breezes are from the southward, across the Gulf of Mexico, 
 the mighty thermal manufactory that sends its mild sea currents 
 over three thousand leagues of ocean to temper the distant winter 
 climes of Norway, Britain, France, and Spain. It is under the 
 genial influence of the neighboring Gulf waters and the perpetual 
 Gulf breezes that blow from the tropic islands, that the forests of 
 the Mississippi seacoast are clad in perpetual verdure, and its flow- 
 ers kept in constant bloom. 
 
 In the drive along the sea front of Pass Christian, from one 
 end of the town to the other, the tourist sees a long succes- 
 sion of luxurious residences located in spacious park-like grounds, 
 where the shadows of forest-growa oaks, elms, and magnolia 
 float over velvety lawns in patches of shade and patincs ot 
 sunlight; extensive boarding-houses, witli rustic benches scat- 
 tered along the flower-bordered and shrubbery-shaded walks 
 about them ; and hundreds of pretty cottages, with hammocks 
 swinging lazily abnut in the breeze that visits their broad veran- 
 das. In summer it is a scene of perfect lest, langourous, delicious, 
 siesta-inviting rest; lulled by the tuneful rhythm of ripples break- 
 ing on the sandy beach, and sweetened by the soft Seabreeze that 
 comes stealing over the soothed senses, fresh and pregnant, as if it 
 were breathed from the amorous mouth of Aphrodite, the sea-born. 
 In winter it is a picture of blue skies, green groves, bending and 
 waving in the south wind, grassy plats, bright with the presence 
 and sweet with the perfume of violets and roses, and mellow sun- 
 shine, welcome as the new, life-giving warmth of the Northern 
 May. 
 
 The largest hostelry in the town of Pass Christian is the Mexi- 
 can Gulf Hotel. Tiiis is a handsome, extensive, and ornate build- 
 ing, with a few tasteful outlying cottages around it, situated near 
 the beach, in a fine oak-shaded park. The hotel, several stories in 
 height, containing elegant, well-furnished rooms, is as fine a house 
 of the kind as any on the Gulf or Southern Atlantic coast. The 
 building will accommodate about three hund-red guests. This splen- 
 did structure was erected with a special view to the entertainment 
 of Northern visitors during the winter. During the last season it 
 
 32 
 
was occupied by several hundred health and pleasure-seekers from 
 colder climes, residents from every part of the North, citizens of 
 the remote North-western Territories, and the inhabitants of the 
 shores of the Maine harbors. Every great city in the North had 
 its representatives here from November, 1885, to June, 188G, when 
 they left, but to give place to the large throngs of Southern visit- 
 ors being entertained or living in its limits. During several 
 weeks' sojourn at " the Pass," the writer had the honor of meeting 
 many of the pleasant gentlemen and charming ladies who had 
 come to seek the benefits and pleasures of the Southern clime. 
 With one voice this goodly company were loud in their praises of 
 the locality, and many who were experienced Florida tourists ex- 
 pressed a great preference over this for the noted Floridian resorts. 
 Not the least of the stated attractions of this place and coast was 
 its easy acce'=sibility to the large cities of New Orleans and Mobile, 
 permitting the full enjoyment of the social, dramatic, operatic, and 
 all other urban pleasures, as well as the well-.-ippreciuted delights 
 of a rural retreat, or, more properly speaking, of a large suburban 
 town. 
 
 The summer population of Pass Christian numbers about four 
 thousand. Lust winter a large influx of Northern visitors increased 
 considerably the average of the winter population, whieh had been 
 for a few preceding years between fifteen hundred and two thou- 
 sand. The indications are tnat the number of Northern visitors 
 will be largely increased here next season. With all its hotel and 
 residence room made available. Pass Christian might afford lodging 
 and entertainment to at least fifteen hundred winter visitors. 
 
 A project has been suggested, and seriously considered in New 
 Orleans, of erecting a mammoth Southern summer and winter 
 hotel on Henderson's Point in the west end of the town. This 
 year the State secured a large park at that locality as a permanent 
 place of encampment for its enrolled militia. The point now con- 
 tains about two square miles of magnificent forest, growing on a 
 high and level piece of land sloping downward from the sea and 
 bay front to the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in its 
 rear. The wood and timber would more than pay for the clear- 
 ing of the forest, leaving a suflicient number of groves for shade 
 and ornamental purposes. The company who undertakes this 
 work will have one of the finest located sites for a watering-place 
 
 33 
 
hotel in the United States ; with a thousand acres of level park 
 land around it, a grand trunk railroad line as its rear boundary, 
 and a beautiful sheet of water on either side of its front, Bay St. 
 Louis and Mississippi Sound. 
 
 The railroad connections of this resort are one of its greatest 
 advantages. It is within reach of New Orleans by a smooth and 
 splendid steel railroad in a journey of an hour and a half; in New 
 Oi'leans this road receives the passenger travel of the Illinois Cen- 
 tral, the Mississippi Valley, the Texas & Pacific, and Morgan's 
 Louisiana & Texas, reaching, like its own northward connections, 
 from Maine to Minnesota, and from Minnesota to California. 
 
 Among the more modern attractive features of Pass Christian 
 are a large number of artesian fountains recently opened in the 
 town. The artesian augers strike an illimitable subterranean wa- 
 ter supply at a depth of from five hundred to six hundred feet. 
 The tubed openings spout up into the air solid streams of wonder- 
 fully pure water several inches in diameter, which attain a head of 
 forty feet above the surface of the fountains. Such crystal show- 
 ers are constantly playing above the lawns of many fine residences 
 and boarding-houses here, making the inhabitants utterly indepen- 
 dent of rain or drouth, if they ever happen to be subjected to such 
 meteorological variations, wliichhave not occurred during the past 
 century, at least. 
 
 The numerous fishing and promenade piers, pagoda-ornamented, 
 projecting into the sound, along the six-mile frontage of Pass 
 Christian, are manifestations mute in themselves, but by no means 
 silent in those who use them, of the practice of the favorite water- 
 ing-place pastimes of fishing "or moonlight flirting, according to the 
 bait used. The fisning is devoted to the capture of the same varie- 
 ties of fish as those frequenting the Kigolets, which were fully de- 
 scribed in a previous article written from English Lookout. The 
 waters in this vicinity are, however, more frequented by Spanish 
 mackerel, the famous pompano of Florida, and the shoal-loving 
 flounder, whose flat "ray" shape is frequently speared by members 
 of pleasure parties, formed of young ladies and gentlemen, who 
 deem flounder-spearing a diversion, which it is not considered by 
 the skillful wielders of the bending rod and the singing reel. 
 
 The shapely hulls and the slim, polished masts of numerous 
 little vessels lying at anchorage off the pier-heads, and the glisten- 
 s' 
 
ing white sails that iioat between the coast and the faint purple line 
 of the distant islands, serve to show that boating and yachting are 
 among the liberally-patronized amusements of the place. Both the 
 summer and winter population are much given to social, Thespian, 
 and Terpsichorean pleasures, and the calliope has loosed many a 
 Calypso beneath the groves of this sea-swept plain. The residents 
 and the visitors have several social, dramatic, and musical organi- 
 zations, to cultivate the art of making life seem the shorter for its 
 happiness. These have ample halls, salons, club-rooms, and even 
 a little theater, with first-class stage and scenic paraphernalia. 
 Sailing excursions out to the lighthouses, the islands, and around 
 through Bay St. Louis into Wolf river, are the most popular 
 amusements indulged in by the young ladies and gentlemen; 
 and the pretty girls seem devoted to such aquatic diversions, de- 
 spite their attendant drawbacks of blistered hands and sunburned 
 faces. 
 
 One of the favorite excursion points visited by sailing parties 
 of residents and strangers is a great shell mound on the banks of 
 Wolf river, lying in the shadow of a live-oak forest. A few 
 months ago a party of shell diggers excavated five prehistoric 
 skeletons, from a great depth, in one of these mounds. The writer 
 has a skull and several of the larger bones of one of these relics of 
 an epoch long departed, which ruins are open to the inspection of 
 any learned anatomist, geologist, conchologist, or archaeologist who 
 cares to examine them. They are rejected or used by the shell 
 diggers; they are not particular as to whether their material be 
 lime phosphates or lime carbonates, the stuff is so much per barrel, 
 and it all goes. « 
 
 Immediately in front of Pass Christian, in the sound, is one of 
 the largest oyster beds in this portion of the Gulf. It varies in 
 width from a mile to two miles, and extends from the shore, in one 
 direction to the Pass Marian, or Merritt Shoals Light-house, and 
 thence in another to the western end of Cat Island, through a 
 length of ten miles. This is the great oyster bank which supplies 
 the several canning factories of the Mississippi seacoast, and fur- 
 nishes a large proportion of its bivalves to the consumers of the 
 more distant Crescent City. In the fishing season a fleet of forty 
 or fifty sail is busy on the banks collecting these inexhaustible 
 stores of sea food. Projects and schemes looking to the further 
 
 35 
 
development of the oyster and fish canning business hy the estab- 
 lishment of factories at this and other points are now being incu- 
 bated. The prepared products are altogether shipped northward 
 by rail, and sold at good prices in the large interior cities. 
 
 The sea shooting on the nearest Gulf islands is fine during the 
 winter months of the, year, ducks, geese, curlew, and snipe being 
 found in abundance among and upon them. Quail shooting, about 
 the environs of the town, is fair, and would be fine if the wise 
 game laws of Mississippi were as rigidly enforced here as they are 
 in other portions of the State. Splendid deer and turkey shooting 
 is enjoyed by camping parties, v/ho ascend some distance up "Wolf 
 river. "Wolf river, the Bois d'Or^, and the Portage are excellent 
 fishing streams for the famous Southern green trout, the best and 
 gamest fresh-water fish found in this section 
 
 The peninsula strip whereupon Pass Christian is located con- 
 tains a superficial area often or twelve square miles, or six thousand 
 or seven thousand acres. 
 
 In this district there are one or two extensive grape grow- 
 ers and wine producers. Their product is considered a superior 
 article by connoisseurs of New Orleans, who profess to be familiar 
 with foreign wines. Smaller wine men find it more profitable to 
 sell their grapes, as the vineyards are remarkably prolific. The 
 small stock growers of this immediate vicinity raise enough good 
 beef and mutton to feed the four thousand summer population and 
 to keep the wolf some distance away from their own doors as well. 
 The possibilities of skilled gardening and scientific farming have 
 not been reached here, as the agricultural interest is not generally 
 conducted by a highly educated or an ambitious class. With skill, 
 judgment, and a little guano applied to the farms, fields, gardens, 
 and fruit groves of the contiguous region, the owners of the soil 
 might carry on an exceedingly profitable business, shipping early 
 fruits and vegetables to the Northern markets, following the ex- 
 ample of their prospering fellow-citizens near Mobile. When 
 pleasure and health-seekers from Northern climes are thoroughly 
 acquainted with its great attractions, Pass Christian will become 
 a gay little winter capital. 
 
 36 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 Mississippi City, 1886. 
 
 ,N the years of our Lord, 1835 or 183G, or little more than half 
 a century ago, when the boom of modern railroad building 
 had not yet struck the South, and men traveled from the 
 "3 interior 'to the sea in wide lumbering family coaches or in 
 creaking mule wagons covered with white canvas awnings, a few 
 capitalists of Mississippi incubated a great scheme. They were 
 correct in the ideas they cherished, but they were ahead of their 
 time fifty years; and their children may yet see their great project 
 an accomplished fact. 
 
 About the time designated three directors of an organization 
 called the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad Company, Dr. Samuel 
 Puckett, Mr. Alsbury, and Colin McRea, Esq., a brother of one 
 of the Mississippi governors, visited this seacoast, selected the 
 present site of Mississippi City as the terminus of their projected 
 road, had a large city laid off in lots, and spent $40,000 in laying 
 the brick foundations of a hotel of mammoth dimensions, the 
 material of whose basement was subsequently removed and used 
 for other purposes than that originally contemplated. 
 
 The celebrated Brandon Bank furnished the funds for all these 
 expenditures, and was to put up the bonds for building the road. 
 Mississippians who have read of Law and the Mississippi scheme, 
 or of the South Sea Bubble, are more interested in the era of 
 "Shocka Jones" and of the famous Brandon Bank, in which 
 there were millions on paper. 
 
 The boost of the enterprising speculators failed to make the 
 pine forest along the shore disappear immediately and an immense 
 commercial port rise in its place, built by the magic of money ; 
 but it brought the spot into notice as a fine sight for a summer 
 watering-place, and soon a beautiful village grew where the great 
 city was to be. 
 
 Our party, boarding the morning mail train of the Louisville 
 & Nashville Eailroad at Pass Christian, after a quick flight of 
 thirteen miles, descended at the railroad station of Mississippi 
 
 37 
 
City, near which the black figures on a white mile-post inform one 
 that it is planted seventy miles from Mobile and seventy-one from 
 New Orleans, From the railroad depot a ride of about one-third 
 of a mile brings one out to the sea front under the shady parks of 
 Gulf View — a name ergoyed by one of the sections of the four- 
 mile frontage of ' Mississippi City. The name is appropriate. 
 There is a broad, unbroken, and blue stretch of the gulf lying off 
 to the south-eastward, and to the southward the long line of Cat 
 Island, with the land lying "hull down" below the ten miles of 
 intervening water, the dim tracery of its pine forest seeming like 
 a distant bank of blue smoke resting upon the waves, and its great 
 white sand dune, like a snowy peak, looming above the trees. 
 
 The island seems so old, so full of the dreamy sleep of another 
 epoch in history, slumbering upon the couch of the far-away blue 
 waves, and canopied by its Indian summery curtain of dim purple 
 mist, that one instinctively reaches for a marine glass to look for 
 the great white banner of the Bourbons, like a tiny speck, floating 
 above the crest of the sand dune, and the faint outline of the masts 
 and spars of Iberville's fleet rising from the surface of the deep 
 ofRng to the eastward. The sand dune rises like a monument to 
 mark the neighboring site of the first European colony planted on 
 or near the Mississippi seacoast. Ship Island, where Iberville's 
 expedition first landed, is to the south-east of Mississippi City. 
 Between Ship Island and Cat Island there is a deep and wide 
 channel or pass entering the Mississippi Sound from the Gulf. 
 Between the islands and the mainland that channel is shown by 
 careful examination of the minute maps of the United States 
 Coast Survey to lead to two deep harbors, or anchorages, One of 
 these, aflxirding from eighteen to twenty-two feet of water, is 
 about half way between the town of Pass Christian and Cat Island. 
 This is now used by the largest class of sea-going lumber vessels, 
 who there receive their loads from the lumber depots of the coast 
 by ligliters. The other harbor is more remote from tlie shore of 
 the mainland in the immediate rear of Ship Island. Both these 
 deep "roads" or anchorages is safely sheltered from the storms 
 and waves of the Gulf by the protection of the islands under 
 whose lee they are placed. 
 
 To reach these pine harbors by railroad communication with 
 the interior is an object that has ardently been desired during the 
 
 28 
 
last fifty years by enterprising Mississippians and capitalists frorri 
 otlier States of our country. The State Legislature has chartered 
 two or three railroad companies who have undertaken to accom- 
 plish this great work. The old companies were hampered by 
 more litigation than was provoked by the celebrated case of 
 " Jarndyce against Jarndyce," the last legal tilt having been be- 
 tween the Vicksburg & Ship Island and the Louisville, New Or- 
 leans & Texas Kailroad Company. The present Gulf & Ship 
 Island Kailroad Company can, apparently, read its title clear to a 
 good terminus at each end of their projected line, and a secured 
 right-of-way to the sea and Ship Island, and the railroad will be 
 completed when the bonds are all satisfactorily located. When 
 the road is finished, Mississippi may have upon her coast a new 
 Pensacola, destined to grow into the prominence held at present 
 by the busy and growing Floridian city. 
 
 The increase of the lumber business of the coast would alone 
 serve to pay the cost of running a railroad from the center of the 
 State through its wide pine belt to a deep harbor near its seacoast, 
 and, in this source, for the first few years of its existence, would, 
 apparently, be found tbe chief profits of the line. 
 
 Mississippi City is now the capital or county-seat of Harrison 
 county. It contains a resident population of from ten hundred to 
 twelve hundred, and a summer population of probably eighteen 
 hundred or two thousand. Like Bay St. Louis and Pass Christi in, 
 it is located on a narrow strip of land, with a navigable stream in 
 its rear and the sound before it. The Bayou Bernard is behind 
 or north of it. This bayou was not called after Bernard de la 
 Harpe, but after a free colored patriarch, whose flocks and herds 
 roamed along its banks. Handsboro, a lively lumber manufactur- 
 ing town, a mile and a half distant, is one of the rear suburbs of 
 Mississippi City. This contains four extensive saw-mills, a num- 
 ber of stores and residences, and a population of about seven 
 hundred. 
 
 There are some fine hotels near the sea-front of Mississippi 
 Citj'. The principal of these are the Gulf View and the Tegarden. 
 The Gulf View contains long wings of extensive and handsome 
 two-story buildings flanking elegant dance and dining halls in 
 their center. It is in the midst of a park or plateau elevated fif- 
 teen feet above the sea level, and several acres in extent, shaded 
 
 89 
 
by groves of live-oak, magnolia, and umbrageous china trees. 
 For several miles along the sea-front the undulating shore is lined 
 by pretty cottages and handsome villas uf the residents or citizens of 
 New Orleans, many of whom own summer homes in this locality. 
 
 The winter and summer climates of this point are moderated 
 and tempered by the causes already fully described in preceding 
 articles of this series. The protection of Northern pine forests 
 and the proximity of the warm Gulf waters prevent the mercury 
 from hunting the bulb in winter, and keep it generally hovering 
 between fifty-five and seventy-five degrees Fahn nheit. The aver- 
 age of the winter-temperature record, kept for a large number of 
 years, is sixty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and the summer heat 
 eighty-three degrees. The town is near the isothermal line of sev- 
 enty degrees, and the latitude is thirty degrees and twenty minutes. 
 It is cooled by constant eddies of the north-east trade-wind during 
 the late summer. The hotels and most houses of public entertain- 
 ment were originally built entirely with a view to rendering them 
 attractive to Southern summer visitors. Some of these mansions 
 have been altered and remodeled with the idea of preparing them 
 for Northern winter residents. In its present shape, that town 
 can probably entertain between seven hundred and eight hundred 
 Northern visitors. It has already had its pioneers who have 
 swung off westward from the southward-bound flock in their an- 
 nual Floridian flight. The strangers who have wintered here 
 during the past two seasons pronounce the locality charniing, its 
 railroad advantages of quick connection with Mobile and the South- 
 ern metropolis of business, pleasure, and fashion — New Orleans — 
 highly desirable, and its climate surpassingly delightful. Proper 
 efibrts are being already made to develop the winter-entertaining 
 facilities of the resort up to a state of perfection. 
 
 One of the pleasantest diversions of the fall and winter to be 
 found at Mississippi City lies in rambling, riding, or driving 
 among the paths and along the roadways of its rich outlying 
 forests, or over the waving hills, rolling away toward the Bayou 
 Bernard. The wielders of the glittering squirrel lifle and of the 
 light split bamboo rod may find plenty of exercise for their art 
 among the nut-bearing groves of th(3 woods, or along the numerous 
 green trout streams that wind at tlie foot of its pines and oaks, 
 or among its tangled copses and thickets. 
 
 40 
 
Out beyond the Bayou Bernard lie the pastures of the sheep- 
 herders, and, still further northward, the great Southern lumber 
 region, -where the logmen's camps have replaced the red men's wig- 
 wams and villages, and where the wild game of hummock and 
 plain still remains in its condition of colonial abundance. 
 
 Down the coast, near the center of the sea-front of the town, 
 may be seen the extensive buildings and wharves of the Gulf Coast 
 Canning Factory Company, where thousands of barrels of oysters 
 and bushels of shrimps are annually hermetically sealed and sold 
 to Northern markets. 
 
 There are several large vineyards within the limits of the 
 town, where a considerable quantity of native wine is manufact- 
 ured. One of the largest of these, the " Gulf View Vineyard," 
 contains thirteen acres of prolific varieties of vine. The fruit- 
 growing capacity of the region is unlimited. Oranges, olives, figs, 
 peaches, peurs, melons, etc., mixed products of the tropic and tem- 
 perate zones, tell of its genial skies and generous soil. Less than 
 one-half of its gardening, farming, fruit-growing, and stock-raising 
 area is utilized, the chief part of the land being cumbered with the 
 second-growth pine thickets, so easy to clear and so useless where 
 they are. The agricultural p ipulation, comparatively small, al- 
 ready has as much land as it can tend. Here thousands of acres 
 of land can be purchased for nominal prices, cleared at an actual 
 profit to the purchasers by selling the wood, and converted to 
 some of the most valuable fields, farms, and pastures in the South. 
 If these thickets and forests were cleared out to the banks of the 
 streams in its rear, the seacoast country from Pearl river to Pasca- 
 goula would become a continuous city along the shore, populated 
 in summer or winter by representatives of every State in the 
 Union. 
 
 Considerable wool shipments from the country beyond the 
 Bayou Bernard, with its immense, yet poorly-developed, sheep 
 ranges, are made at the stations of the Louisville & Nashville 
 Eailroad. 
 
 Mississippi City has, for many years, been justly famous for 
 the fine mackerel fishing to bo had in the waters of the sound be- 
 fore it. The Spanish mackerel of the Mexican Gulf is a much 
 finer and gamer fish than bis cousin of the colder Northern seas, 
 and is one of the most delicately-flavored of all the piscine species 
 
 41 
 
•jquenting the waters of the American coast. Ichthyological 
 science can not do his personal appearance justice in its descriptive 
 classification. He is rare and radiant, flapping and flashing like 
 hurnished silver in his high sportive leaps above the waves into 
 the air, struggling with swiftly-fading glories as he is relieved 
 from the cruel conquering barb of steel, or steaming and fragrant 
 as he comes to the table fresh from the coals of some wonderful 
 Creole artist iu the culinary line. 
 
 We will introduce the Spanish mackerel to the reader in one 
 of the fish's favorite feeding grounds. 
 
 There is a long wharf reaching from the shore of Gulf View 
 out four thousand feet into the channel of the sound. This ex- 
 tended pier is dotted at various intervals by bath-houses, located 
 at difl'ereut depths for infantile, timid adult, or natatorially-accom- 
 plished bathers. At the end of the pier is a wide platform, built 
 on stout piles, which was once the landing-place for the regular 
 fleet of sound steamers, a fleet that went out of commission when 
 the steel line reduced the time between this point and New 
 Orleans from ten to two hours, and made it accessible by several 
 daily trains. The broad platform at the end of the pier is the 
 mackerel fisher's paradise. 
 
 After dinner, our party, by special invitation, accompanied 
 four young amateurs from the Crescent City, well-known wielders 
 of the rod and reel — Messrs. H — , M — ■, P— , and E— . A sun- 
 browned, bare-footed citizen, looking solemn and mournful enough 
 to have driven a hearse in front of it, brought up the rear of this 
 procession with a basket of mullet for bait upon his arm. When 
 they arrived at the pierhead, the members of the party unlimbered 
 their tackle for action. The mullet were deftly sliced into shin- 
 ing imitations of smaller fish, the hooks were baited, and the mack- 
 erel fishers began their swishing play of the alluring morsels along 
 the water. Soon each had a glittering, flapping mackerel on the 
 planks of the platform, and, later, a score of the shining beauties 
 lay strewn around, fading in the sunlight. The monotony of 
 mackerel fishing was relieved by the occasional capture of a sea- 
 trout, flounder, sheephead, or redfish. Finally, Mr. H — struck a 
 big fish, or rather a big fish struck Mr. H — There was a man on 
 the wharf, posed in the statue-cast of a wrestling Koman gladiator, 
 with the contorted muscles and sinews standing in bold relief on 
 
 42 
 
his biceps and breast, and the beiids of sweat rolling down his anx- 
 iously-furrowed brow. There was a rod in his hands bent to the 
 tension of a bow ready to drive its barbed shaft feather deep into 
 the neck of some hydra or centaur. There was a line, tautened to 
 rigid tension, reaching seaward. There was a reel singing and 
 screaming like the whistle of a recently-awaken'ed policeman to 
 tell the world of a well-guarded beat. Tlicre was a whirlpool of 
 wraith and foam a hundred feet away in the sea, from whose boil- 
 ing vortex a huge marine monster, white and dazzling, and with 
 savagely-shaking head, suddenly leaped, and then line, rod, and 
 angler all simultaneously flew back unstrung, and the submarine 
 steam navigator steered his powerful vessel onward, witli a steel 
 fishhook in his bow and a few fathoms of line in his wake. 
 
 " Holy Moses I what a silverfish ! '' gasped the baffled Mr. H — , 
 who immediately lowered his voice to the tone of a confidential 
 conversation with Beelzebub as to his future frying of all silver- 
 fish, and of this one in particular. 
 
 The party wound up its day's sport with a string of sixty-three 
 mackerel and several other uncounted varieties of sea fish, and no 
 silverfish. 
 
 Mississippi City is certain to be developed, at an early day, in- 
 to a great lumber-shipping port. Its present attractions of a fer- 
 tile soil surrounding it, a fine summer and winter climate existing 
 here, the wonderful healthiness of its site, and its splendid bath- 
 ing, hunting, and fishing facilities are enough to stimulate its 
 steady growth into the favor of thousands who annually, for health 
 or pleasure, seek the benefits of the glorious Southern climate and 
 the diversions aflTorded by a breezy Southern sea. 
 
 This resort is now frequented by many Southern planters, with 
 their families, and by summer residents from the leading Southern 
 cities. Its hotel and boarding-house keepers are in communication, 
 at present, with Northern centers of population with reference to 
 the subject of the number of Northern tourists they can entertain 
 and the quality artd cost of the attractions and the living to be 
 provided. 
 
 43 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 
 BiLOXi, Miss., 1886. 
 
 RIDE of ten minutes or nine miles eastward, in a lightning 
 express train of the Louisville & Nashville llailroad, brought 
 our party from Mississippi City to the ancient and thriving 
 town of Biloxi, the next in the chain of prominent South- 
 ern watering-places along this route. 
 
 From the railroad depot at Biloxi a self-sacrificing and philan- 
 thropic young hack-driver conducted us in his vehicle to the Mon- 
 trose Hotel, located on the sea front of the town. 
 
 After a refreshing dip in tlie tossing salt sea near the mouth of 
 Biloxi Bay, the wielders of crayon, or camera, and of pen, sought 
 out some of the most prominent points of the place, reviewed 
 some of the quaint old colonial records for its history, and inter- 
 viewed a few of the leading citizens on the subject of its modern 
 resources, attractions, and patronage as a pleasure resort. 
 
 Before commencing this descriptive article the writer takes 
 occasion to acknowledge the obligations under which he was 
 placed by the kindness of Major W. T. "Walthall, a gentleman of 
 rare attainments, and an author richly stored with the chronicler's 
 lore; to an enterprising host, Mr. P. J. Montrose, and to Mr. 
 Elmer, Representative in the Mississippi Legislature from Harri- 
 son county. The modern town of Biloxi, like nearly all the noted 
 resorts and towns of the Mississippi seacoast, is situated on a 
 peninsula. That on which this town is placed is from one to two 
 miles in width, and about six in length, lying almost due east and 
 west. The southern side or point of this peninsula is washed by 
 the waves of the Gulf of Mexico, or, the sound, breaking on a 
 sloping sandy beach. Its eastern end on which the town is 
 chiefly located projects into Biloxi Bay, while its northern shores 
 are bounded by the Back Bay of B;loxi, as it is named on the 
 maps, and by the narrow and deep stream. Bayou Bernard. 
 
 The site of the present town covers an area of about two thou- 
 sand five hundred acres on the eastern extremity of this elevated 
 tongue of land, and extends in a long wing along the seacoast, 
 
 44 
 
. I^^TT- 
 
 several miles to the westward. Its resident population is esti- 
 mated at two thousand five hundred ; and this, duriiiL^ the summer, 
 is increased by the influx of summer residents and visitors Irom the 
 Southern cities and States to about four thousand. The town is 
 finely and regularly laid off by wide and shady streets and ave- 
 nues, lying under and lined by the indigenous and omnipresent 
 live-oak and the more-recently planted umbrella china. It has 
 ten miles of shell-paved drives along the sea and bay frontage, 
 wiiich are bordered by the principal hotels and the beautiful sum- 
 mer villas of the place. In the inner harbor, Immediately off the 
 ends of its piers and wharves, a fleet of small vessels, fishing 
 smacks, lumber schooners, pleasure boats, and yachts lie at anchor- 
 age, diminished by departures or increased by accessions, according 
 to the will or needs of those chiefly interested in this interior 
 marine of the sound. Ten miles away 1o the southward the sticks 
 and spars of three-masted schooners or square-rigged vessels show 
 the location of the deep " roads " in rear of Ship Island, while the 
 tops of a long fringe of scrubby pines indicate the location of the 
 Ship Island sands. 
 
 It seems bard to realize the fact that this was once practically 
 the capital of Louisiana, and that New Orleans was one of its 
 dependent colonies. Biloxi was the first colony planted by the 
 French in the south part of their great Louisiana possessions. It 
 was settled in 1699 by Iberville; but this was not the Biloxi of 
 these days (and this question will confuse the future chroniclers). 
 The original colony was east of the bay, and was removed to this 
 point about the year 1719. 
 
 It was chosen as the site of their seat of colonial government 
 by a council of the French captains and commanders. Bienville, 
 the wisest and most far-seeing of all these leaders, wished to 
 remove the seat of government to the new colony at Orleans. 
 Hubert earnestly advocated the elevated blufF-land plateau of 
 Natchez, where Mississippi's second largest city now stands, and 
 he predicted that that spot would become the commercial center of 
 the Mississippi Valley. 
 
 The colony was, nevertheless, removed to this point, and 
 Hubert sailed away to France to induce the home government to 
 make Natchez the capital of their great possessions in the Missis- 
 sippi Yalley. He was prevented from returning by death. 
 
 45 
 
 m,m 
 
The Louisiana historian, Martin, says that one of Crozat's ships, 
 with three hundred settlers Irom France, arrived two years later. 
 Among these were eighty girls from the " Saltpetriere," a noted 
 house of correction in Paris. About this time a vessel arrived 
 from Guinea with a cargo of Africans, to be employed in cultivat- 
 ing the soil. 
 
 This, while it shows an apparent broad construction in the 
 charter with reference to the trade in pearls and wool, proves that 
 Biloxi must have been quite an important village one hundred 
 and sixty-three years ago. 
 
 "When the French moved over to this side of the bay they 
 built Fort Louis, omitting the holy prefix of the title. This was 
 probably a palisaded structure, like the forts of the American pio- 
 neers on the dark and bloody soil of Kentucky and the old North- 
 west Territory beyond tlie Ohio, as no monumental mound remains 
 to mark the site of the ramparts, though a wide willow-bordered 
 ditch is pointed out by some of the inhabitants as probably being 
 the moat at tlie foot of the palisades or of the former breast- works. 
 The fort at Old Biloxi, to which reference will be made in a subse- 
 quent article, was, according to the colonial records, at all events, 
 built of heavy timbers. 
 
 During the first century of its existence New Biloxi fell under 
 the dominion of four governments — French, British, Spanish, and 
 American. It Avas temporarily in the civil war a part of Confed- 
 erate States' territory, defended for a short time by a sham battery 
 of frowning wooden guns. But it fell a prey to the marines of the 
 Federal fleets early in the strife. To-day it is a thriving cosmop- 
 olis, with the imprint of Saxon, Frank, Visigoth, and Latin upon 
 its population, and the best elements of all predominating. 
 
 It possesses to the highest degree all the advantages of climate 
 and the attractions characteristic of the Mississippi seacoast, and is 
 justly one of the most celebrated resorts or watering-places in all 
 this highly-favored region. In summer it enjoys great popularity 
 as an objective point for the long excursion trains that are con- 
 stantly leaving the Crescent City, while a large part of its resident 
 population at this season is drawn from the winter workers of the 
 Southern metropolis. 
 
 The town has several fine hostelries, the chief among which are 
 the Montrose, the Bossel, and the Fairview, besides many board- 
 
 ^6 
 
ing-houses and cottages, where the traveling and visiting public 
 are well entertained. Most of these places, or houses, were orig- 
 inally constructed to meet the demands of summer visitors to a 
 seaside resort. But recently they have been altered, to render 
 them perfectly comfortable for the Northern visitors, who are com- 
 mencing to show a disposition to seek the Mississippi seacoast for 
 a winter home more than any other portion of the South. During 
 the past winter as many as sixteen hundred Northern tourists and 
 travelers visited Biloxi, many of them remaining for months, 
 charmed, as they said, with the cheap living, convenient railroad 
 travel, and balmy atmosphere of this coast. 
 
 The proprietor of one of Biloxi's leading hotels professes the 
 opinion that if a capitalist or a company would erect a hotel in the 
 town capable of accommodating as many as a thousand winter 
 guests at a time, they could keep it full of Northern tourists, and 
 do an extremely profitable business, devoting their efforts exclu- 
 sively to providing for this class, a-:id closing their doors to sum- 
 mer patronage entirely; and that practically every additional large 
 hotel built on the coast would benefit others existing, by bringing 
 the region into greater prominence as a winter resort. On this 
 theory, which appears not only plausible but strictly correct, the 
 mammoth Floridian winter hotels were not the effect of the annual 
 Northern migration in that direction, but they were the cause of 
 it. They were built to attract winter tourists or residents and to 
 increase the visiting throngs, rather than provide for those Avho 
 had already fallen into the habit of coming. This is a fact which 
 seems to be well worthy the consideration of capitalists. 
 
 The Northern visitors who stopped or dwelt at Biloxi last win- 
 ter were chiefly from the extreme Northern and North-western 
 States, whose southward journey to this point is much shorter 
 than that to San Augustine, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, or other 
 resorts of Florida. 
 
 The mere fact of Biloxi's suburban relationship to New Orleans 
 forms one of its chief attractions to such visitors, and in this all 
 the seacoast resorts of Mississippi possess a great advantage. 
 
 One of the most remunerative industries of the town is con- 
 ducted in the four extensive fish, fruit, and oyster canning estab- 
 lishments recently located here. The oyster canneries keep in 
 occupation, for a greater part of the year, a fleet of at least a hun- 
 
 17 
 
dred small vessels, luggers, sloops, and schooners. "When the 
 oysters areout of season, the factory operatives turn their attention 
 to prawn or sea shrimp, or to putting up the iine fruits and vege- 
 tables indigenous to the region. Though this is but comparatively 
 a new industry, it has already grown to important proportions, 
 and supports a large class of the seacoast population. Biloxi Cay, 
 from its mouth opposite Deer Island, extends, with a rounding 
 westward curve, nearly ten miles inland. It receives the waters 
 of Biloxi river and Bayou Bernard, near its head, and those of 
 Fort Bayou, close to its mouth. The bay and all the streams 
 namtd are famous for their fishing, and abound iii immense num- 
 bers of green trout or bass, speckled sea-trout, rcdfish, and sheep- 
 head. The waters of. the sound channels, near the end of its 
 piers and wharves, are frequented by the same varieties of fish, 
 with the exception of the green trout, which is a fresh water or 
 brackish water fish, and at times by the superior Spanish mack- 
 erel, and the finest of all American fish, the pompano. Out in 
 the sound, a few miles away, both amateur anglers and profes- 
 sional fishermen capture quantities of redsnapper and grouper, 
 two of the best varieties of fish common to the Gulf of Mexico. 
 The blue fish, another choice and gamy denizen of the deep, is 
 found in numbers in this part of the Gulf. 
 
 Biloxi enjoys the reputation of being located in the vicinity of 
 one of the finest hunting regions in the South. The best deer 
 hunting in Mississippi is to be had in the wooded country just 
 behind the northern banks of Biloxi river, about ten miles distant 
 from the town. The winter duck and snipe shooting is good in 
 the bay, the streams leading to it, or in some of the flats near its 
 banks. The wild turkey, the noblest game bird of America, still 
 remains in undepleted flocks in the thinly-settled hunting region 
 beyond the northern shores of Biloxi Bay. 
 
 The natural game preserve has not been decimated by the con- 
 stant poachings of pot-hunting mankind, because it is so much 
 easier for them to procure their food from the waters immediately 
 at hand. The pot-hunters' and the professionals' objects are meat 
 and money. It is much easier for them to lift their food out of 
 the sea over the edge of a pier or the side of a vessel than to tramp 
 a few miles into the interior, loaded with rifle or shot-gun, and to 
 lug their games back to their homes or a market. 
 
 48 
 
The charms of camp life in the invigorating clime of the pine 
 lands and oak forests, the beating race of silky-brushed setters, the 
 statuesque pose of the thoroughbred pointer, the whirr ot spring- 
 ing bevies, or the sweet melody of a winding horn, echoing in the 
 woodlands and calling up the responsive music of the deer-hounds' 
 deep baying, are all reserved for the amateur sportsman, who can 
 appreciate these things, as they are to be found in the former 
 famous hunting-grounds of the red man beyond Biloxi Bay, where 
 the lumberman's ax and the hunter's rifle in cheering tones tell 
 the stranger the great American forests are not yet all felled and 
 American game not all gone to the rocky ranges of the Western 
 Sierras, or, like the aboriginal legends, beyond the setting sun to 
 the spirit hunting-grounds of long-departed tribes of hunters and 
 
 49 
 
LOUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 
 Ocean Springs, Miss., 1886. 
 
 11^4 FTEE a short but exceedingly pleasant stay at Biloxi, made 
 pleasanter by the hospitality of its inhabitants, and more 
 interesting by the quaint old records of colonial writers, 
 kindly furnished by Major Walthall, our party again boarded 
 a northward-bound train ot the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and 
 after a ride of four miles, or of about ten minutes' dm'atlou, stepped 
 out on the platform of the Ocean Springs depot. 
 
 Part of the journey, although made by rail, is over water, on 
 a long structure of creosoted timber, concrete, stone, and iron, 
 which spans the mouth of Biloxi Bay. Toward the eastv/ard, 
 holding the rich emerald gem of Deer Island in their curving 
 clasp, and framing it in a setting of glittering silver, two wide 
 channels form the divided entrance from the placid bay to the 
 shining sea beyond. 
 
 And this is the famous old Bay of Biloxi, sleeping in the morn- 
 ing sun, heedless of the two hundred years that have gone by since 
 the rapt eye of the Caucasian rested on its virgin beauty; reckless 
 of the two hundred decades that have departed since the last Toltec 
 trod upon its shores; waked not to the memory of song, story, or 
 legend of the dead warriors that once peopled its banks, or the bar- 
 baric women that tuned their love songs to the low rhythm of its 
 waves, or mingled their wild death-wail for the battle-slain with 
 the hoarse moan of its tempests. 
 
 What a scene to inspire the artist's soul, or to send the fancy 
 reveling in the remotest realms of legendary lore ! To the north- 
 ward and westward, with bold parabola curve, like a bend of our 
 own mighty river, sweeps this shining sheet of blue water. The 
 forests of its far northern shores fade away into the magic mists of 
 the summer morning, until it is hard to tell whether they are hang- 
 ing as a tassoled fringe from the purple curtain of the summer sky, 
 or floating as dim islands of verdure on the unruffled breast of a 
 summer sea. To the southward and westward, with a gleam of 
 glass through the foliage of live-oaks and clustering roofs lying 
 
 50 
 
under their swaying shadows, and with a heavy haze of Indian 
 summer hanging over it, softening the angular lines of its archi- 
 tecture, and toning down the rounded or rugged outlines of its 
 trees, rests the town of Biloxi, whence we have just departed. To 
 the eastward, with bolder banks and more marked undulations of 
 the land beyond them, lies the historic site of the first Caucasian 
 colony ever planted on the Mississippi seacoast, the germ of States 
 and the nucleus of an empire. 
 
 Ponce de Leon's quest, long and arduous, after those fabled 
 fountainaof youth, and health, and eternal life, that sprung dragon- 
 guarded from the gloomy depths of the New World's forests; 
 HernandodeSoto's weary and warring march westward, westward, 
 ever westward, looking for the traditional golden mountains that 
 still lay a thousand miles beyond his journey's end when his worn 
 comrades buried the body of their chieftain beneath the breast of 
 the great river, are more full of thrilling narrative, ringing with 
 tho clash of resounding arms, dramatic with the tragedic slaughter 
 of tribes and nations, but they are utterly insignificant in their 
 eflects and fruits when compared to the planting of this little 
 French colony on the eastern banks of Biloxi Bay by Lemoyne 
 d'Ibervilleand his brother knights and chevaliers of France. 
 
 Here one can imagine the royal banner of the Bourbons rising, 
 as the sun above its cloud banks, over the smoke of the morning 
 gun near the base of its staff. From here one can think of that 
 banner carried and planted on the crescent-shaped banks of the 
 Mississippi river, to float over a young city and a great imperial 
 domain ten times the area of its mother country. From here one 
 has been told of the exploration and colonization of the Lafourche, 
 the Eed, the Ouachita, the Tensas, and the crowning of the great 
 bluff plateau of Natchez with the French fortress that French 
 chivalry named Rosalie, after the beautiful Comptesse de Pont- 
 chartrain. 
 
 Here, in the brains of Iberville and his brother Bienville, was 
 born that great scheme of making a track for the commerce of the 
 new empire upward through the Mississippi, the Illinois, the Great 
 Lakes, and the St. Lawrence to the sea; a scheme which General 
 Washington so dreaded that he frequently mentioned it, and offi- 
 cially proposed to counteract it by connecting the Ohio with the 
 Potomac, and the Kanawha with the James, to divert this trade to 
 
 51 
 
our own Atlantic seaboard ; and a scheme to-day whoso fulfillment 
 is hoped for by the projectors and official supporters of the new 
 Hennepin canal. 
 
 The old Biloxi colony is full of interest to the Americans of the 
 present day. In time it will be regarded as of far more impor- 
 tance and more famous than " Massachusetts Bay," where the pil- 
 grim fathers landed, with the Bible in one hand and the blunder- 
 buss in the other, converting the natives to Christianity or killing 
 them, according to the disposition deemed more convenient in the 
 case. It will become more noted than the James river settlement, 
 where J ohn Smith, thesea rover, and John Rolfe, the mate of the royal 
 maid Pocahontas, gave a tint of carnage and romance to the region. 
 
 The Americans know more about the Northern colonies because 
 their annals are written in the English that they read. The chron- 
 iclers of Louisiana's settlement wrote their records in French. 
 Yet these abound in gallant exploits, instances of devoted heroism, 
 incidents of sublime self-sacrifice, romantic attachments, and the 
 most thrilling episodes of carnage and siege, and cases of knightly 
 courtesy among the chevaliers, recalling the chivalry of the Cru- 
 sades. The journalist has no time to wander in such glorious fields. 
 They fall within the historian's province; and by him they should 
 be cleared and laid open to the world. 
 
 Iberville landed at old Biloxi, our modern "Ocean Springs," 
 late in the winter of 1699. He found this, as it is to-day, a narrow 
 and-elevated peninsula bounded on the south by the sound and the 
 eastern strait separating it from Deer Island, on the west by Biloxi 
 Bay, and on the north by the Fort Bayou of the present day. The 
 surface of the peninsula is undulating and about thirty feet above 
 tide water in its highest part. Its sea front is also more undulating 
 than other portions of the coast. The peninsula was originally 
 clad with a forest of cedar, pine, magnolia, and live-oak, some of 
 which is still remaining. After Iberville had planted his colony 
 he returned to France, leaving his younger brother Bienville in 
 charge, and Sauvolle de la Vilautray in command of the stockade 
 fort, which had been built near the point made by the confluence 
 of Fort Bayou with Biloxi Bay. Bienville was frequently absent 
 from the colony on explorations in Louisiana and Mississippi, when 
 Sauvolle, commandant of the fort, was left as the chief director of 
 its afiairs. 
 
 52 
 
The French settlement was called Biloxi, after the tribe, or 
 rather tribal branch, of Indians found on the peninsula. Their 
 name, according to the ancient chroniclers, signified " Broken 
 Jar." The " El Dorado fountain," a large spring back of Bay St. 
 Louis,and twospringsat old Biloxi, were celebrated resorts, visited 
 by the red men bef jre and during the early colonial days. They 
 were sought by the Natchez and Baya Goulas, living on the banks 
 of the Mississippi river; by the Chickasaws, dwelling on the more 
 distant borders of the Tennessee; by the Choctaws and the Aliba- 
 mons, with their probable tribal families of Biloxis and Maublias 
 on the seacoast. 
 
 The colony was visited by famine and pestilence two years after 
 its founding; the gallant Sauvolle de la Vilautray, commander of 
 the fortress, perished at his post, and the garrison and the settlers 
 were ordered for a time to Dauphin Island and Mobile, which was 
 then another French St. Louis. They subsequently returned and 
 remained at old Biloxi for nearly twenty years, whence they re- 
 moved, after the deliberations of the Council, which have already 
 been described in the article preceding this, to Fort Louis or new 
 Biloxi, where one certainly, and probably many more French res- 
 idents had already settled. 
 
 With the removal of the colony to the western shores of Biloxi 
 Bay, the old settlement of Biloxi passes into oblivion for a great 
 many years, as far as is found by a cursory examination of the 
 chronicles of De la Harpe, Father Anasthase, DuPratz, Dumont, 
 and Charlevoix, and the more modern records of Xavier Martin 
 and Colonel Claiborne. 
 
 The old colonial village now appears on the maps under the 
 American title of Ocean Springs, a name it is said to have received 
 from a New Orleans physician, who, like a majority of those who 
 have tested them, had great faith in the valuable medical waters of 
 the natural springs found on the peninsula. 
 
 Ocean Springs is by no means a bad name ; but when one thinks 
 of the heroism of the gallant French knight, whose post was in 
 the midst of war, famine, and pestilence until death relieved him 
 from a soldier's duty, one is apt to feel it is a pity that the place 
 was not called " Vilautray," as an honor to France and one of her 
 chivalricsons. The place is not on the ocean, and the fine mineral 
 springs are near the banks of Fort Bayou, and not on the seashore. 
 
 63 
 
Out in the sound, in front of Ocean Springs, green with verd- 
 ure, rests Deer Island. One of the old chroniclers states the fact 
 that ancient excavation into the sand drifts of this island exhumed 
 relics which showed that it was resorted to, or inhabited, at one 
 time by a race of anthropophagi. There were human bones 
 strewn around the charred remnants of fire heaps, betokening the 
 holding of cannibal festivals. 
 
 Ocean Springs is now a beautiful village, or town, containing a 
 resident population of nine hundred or one thousand souls, and a 
 total of summer inhabitants numbering about sixteen hundred. 
 The town is on one of the most elevated sites along the Mississippi 
 seacoast. It has a gulf frontage of almost three miles, and rests 
 upon the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad line, about half a mile 
 from the sea, in its rear. It contains three hotels — the Ocean 
 Springs, on the sea front; the Vancleave, near the Louisville & 
 Nashville Kailroad track, and the lUing House. Here, as at the 
 other seacoast resorts, can be found many beautiful villas, used as 
 summer residences by citizens of New Orleans, or elegant homes 
 occupied by the more opulent inhabitants of the place. The uni- 
 versal groves of live-oak, magnolia, pine, and cedar are seen every- 
 where about the town, shading the yards of its houses or its streets 
 and avenues. 
 
 Between the town of Ocean Springs and the southern bank of 
 Fort Bayou are the two principal springs, which give its name to 
 the resort and were sought by hundreds of miles of travel through 
 the pathless forest by thehealth-hunting aborigines. These mineral 
 springs are said to be impregnated with chalybeate properties, or 
 contain a noticeable proportion of sulphuretted hydrogen. Scien- 
 tific analysis has shown them to be among the most valuable of 
 American mineral waters. The springs, protected by cool sheds 
 and overflowing from artificial stone basins, ai-o largely drawn 
 upon by the visiting and resident population. They are generally 
 flanked by a row of demijohns more substantial-looking than the 
 ghosts of the departed spirits which they may have been. The in- 
 habitants, like the scriptural woman at the well with the earthen 
 pitcher, come some distance from their homes to the springs to get 
 these supplies of health-giving drinking water. Ocean Springs 
 entertained last year quite a number of Northern visitors, who 
 were equally as well pleased with this resort as were similar visit- 
 
 54 
 
ors with all other of the watering-places on the Mississippi sea- 
 coast, which they freqaonled during the past winter and spring. 
 Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio were the States most 
 numerously represented at the springs, for the reason, expressed 
 before, That the people of those States found their shortest route 
 to the Southern sea terminating on this coast. 
 
 Theeummer bathing and boating, and the winter shooting and 
 fishing are diversions enjoyed here with as much facility as at 
 most of the watering-places which have been described. The 
 mackerel and pompano fisheries of the sound, the redsnapper and 
 grouper banks among the islands, and the famous hunting region 
 nortbof the Bay of Biloxi, are all conveniently accessible to this 
 point. 
 
 All who try its delights will be amply satisfied, whether they 
 comedown from the Northern snow-fields, seeking the balmy air 
 of a genial winter clime, or whether they come down from the 
 dust and heat of Southern towns and cities, to disport themselves 
 in the cool waves or to breathe the soft salt-scented breezes con- 
 stantly blowing shoreward from the Mexican Gulf. 
 
 65 
 
LdUISVILLE & NASHVILLE R. R. 
 
 Pascagoula. 1886. 
 
 5^4 S one passes beyond Ocean Springs, and on the steel track of 
 ''\ tli(3 Louisville & Nasliville Euilroad traverses the country 
 lying between the historic bays of Biloxi and Pascagoula, the 
 first impression produced is, what a splendid country for 
 railroad-building this is I "With level beds and the long tangei.ts 
 which so delight the surveyor's, the weary rodman's, and the 
 watchful locomotive engineer's heart, here the maximum posjibi.i- 
 ties of railroad speed are attainable ; and with wide throttle, spoke- 
 less wheel, and a trail of smoke streaming behind straight as the 
 tail of Tarn O'Shanter's fleeing mare, a fifty or sixty-ton engine 
 can get up and get along like the phantom fl ght of the Flying 
 Dutchman, or in a way to resurrect the slumbering spirit of 
 George Stephenson. 
 
 The railroad officials, however, do not care about attaining the 
 possibilities. They are satisfied to drive the iron horse along at a 
 comfortable jog-trot of some forty miles an hour, so that the pas- 
 sengers may get a fleeting view of this very beautiful stretch 
 of country through which their route passes. It is a broad, 
 grass-clad piece of tableland. The pine forests and dwarf-pine 
 growth are, fortunately, rapidly disappearing. There are miles 
 and miles of clearings, whose green swards delight and rest the 
 eye. 
 
 In surveying these magnificent parks and verdant pastures, 
 one can not help indulging in dreams of the imagination as to 
 what a region this Mississippi seacoast might bo made if the thick- 
 ets and scrub pine forests were felled, from the shining belt of 
 white sands that fringes the shore with a lace-like frill of foamy 
 ripples and wavelets, to the margins of the winding rivers, which 
 course like silver bands between the rising plateaus of the interior 
 and the sea-swept plains of the gulf frontage. 
 
 One of the artistic effects of this clearing process will be pre- 
 sented, while the subject is held forth in a materialistic point of 
 view. There would be a belt of country, nearly or quite one hun- 
 
 56 
 
dred miles long, and from two to ten miles broad, where the prac- 
 tically ualimitcd vision might always rest upon the crystal-capped 
 waves of a green sea, and the dim stretches of distant islands to 
 tho southward; the misty, undulating outlines of the pine-clad 
 hills, far to the northward; the curving sweeps of placid bays to 
 the eastward or the westward, and a continuous park everywhere 
 around, green with rich grasses, graced here and there by stately 
 groves, and dutteJ ever3'where along its front by beautiful little 
 cities, growing towns, and thousands of elegant summer and win- 
 ter villas. 
 
 The beauty of this country would be so developed by cutt'ng 
 away tho growth, which in many places shuts olf the sea view, 
 checks the sweep of the Gulf breeze, and replaces the natural 
 verdure of the ground by a brown coating of dead leaves, that 
 it would become famous at once as one of tho fairest spots in 
 all our broad land. Soon i'. would become crowded with popula- 
 tion ; and large areas of land, which are now purchasable at almost 
 Government prices, would rise to a comparatively fabulous iigure 
 in values. Apparently, the cost of cleiring the surface would be 
 paid by the cord wo id which this growth would yield. 
 
 Bellefontaine is a lovely part of this district, lying at a point 
 intermediate between the bays of Biloxi and Pascagoula. Here 
 the surrounding country is fortunately being beautified by felling 
 of the pine forests. 
 
 On the western side of Pascagoula Bay lies the little village of 
 West Pascagoula. Here are located the extensive creosote works 
 of the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad Company. The process of 
 creosoting timbers, having been already described frequently and 
 at considerable length in the press, will not be herein repeated. 
 The thorough saturation of the timber by creosote prevents the 
 attacks of the " Icredo navalis " to such posts and piles as are used 
 in railroad bridge building across the salt arms of the sea, and also 
 preserves the wood against the ravages of time, and all the bridges 
 on this division of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad are con- 
 structed out of timber treated by this process. There are some 
 extensive saw-mills in West Pascagoula, one of the cluster of 
 the center of lumber manufactories in Mississippi. 
 
 Leaving West Pascagoula, the course of the train lay along a 
 sort of stone, shell, and sand causeway across the marsh delta of 
 
 57 
 
the Pascagoula river, -which might be likened to a little miniature 
 of the great delta of the Mississippi. The main channel of the 
 Pascagoula river itself was crossed on a fine modern iron railroad 
 bridge, containing a wide draw in the center to admit of the pass- 
 age of a great commerce from the interior. 
 
 Stopping at the station on the east side of the bay our party 
 again found themselves on. historic ground. On this peninsula, in 
 February or March, 1699, the first boat's crew of Iberville's col- 
 onial fleet landed. They chased and captured an old Indian 
 squaw, who, after the usual traditional terrifying and modification, 
 more fortunate than her red-skinned sisters of the Sabine river, 
 in Louisiana, five hundred miles to the westward, was allowed 
 to depart in unmolested joy to show her envious gossips the won- 
 derful trinkets and treasures that had come from the "great white 
 canoes." The French colonists, proceeding a little further, capt- 
 ured an old sick Indian. He was left in a blanket, temporarily, 
 near their camp fire. During the absence of the party the dead 
 pine-straw took fire. The venerable savage was too ill to move, 
 so he went to the happy hunting-grounds in the shape of roast 
 red-skin. 
 
 These Indians were found to be of the tribe Pascagoula, or 
 "bread-eaters." If this general termination signify the same, 
 the savages of this section were somewhat given to gustatorial 
 accomplishments, as wo have not only the Pascagoulas, but the 
 Ponchatoulas, the Bayagoulas, the Tchapitoulas, and other tribal 
 branches of chronically hungry aborigines. 
 
 The French selected Old Biloxi, or modern Ocean Springs, as 
 the site of their colony, though they very soon after their landing 
 established a large colony at Pascagoula. 
 
 Before the day of the railroad and during the era of the Mis- 
 sissippi Sound fleets, the old town of Pascagoula, chartered in the 
 year 1836, was the center of population for this immediate region. 
 When the railroad between New Orleans and Mobile was built, 
 the center of population was drawn around the depot on the east 
 bank of Pascagoula river, a little more than a mile from the sea, 
 and the thriving town of Scranton was founded. 
 
 Scranton, a live, promising, and growing town, now con- 
 tains between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred inhabitants. 
 It has two or three hotels, many fine boarding-houses, one of the 
 
 58 
 
best newspapers in the State of Mississippi, the Pascagoula Demo- 
 crai-Siar, edited by Captain P. K. Mayers, the extensive Mayberry 
 Canning Factory, and several lumber-manufacturing and ship- 
 building establishments. 
 
 The town of rfcranton is the capital or county-seat of Jackson 
 county. The court-house, about two hundred yards south of the 
 railroad depot, is a large and handsome brick edifice, one of the 
 best structures of its kind in the State. Mayor S. E. Thompson 
 and other officials and citizens of the town state that the popula- 
 tion is permanent on account of the industries of the people, and 
 that, if anything, it is a little larger in winter than in summer. 
 There were many Northerners here last winter, enough to fill 
 all of the boarding-houses and hotels. This class of visitors did 
 not leave until May, and most of them professed the intention of 
 returning this fall and winter. Among the visitors were several 
 lumbermen from Minnesota and Michigan. These prospected a 
 good deal among the timber lands, and one of them entered four 
 sections, while others stated that they would endeavor to change 
 their field of operations from the Northern to the Southern forests. 
 
 This is one of the greatest lumber manufacturing districts in 
 the South. In a circle of a diameter of five miles are the saw-mills 
 of West Pascagoula, Scranton, New Venice, and Moss Point, be- 
 sides three shipyards on the banks of the Pascagoula river. The 
 rivers here come down to the sea from the very heart of the great 
 Southern pine belt, from fifty to one hundred and fifty miles in 
 the interior. These are the West river, the Pascagoula, and the 
 Escatawba, in Choctaw, or " Little Dog," in English. Of the 
 lumber towns. Moss Point alone contains nine large saw-mills, one 
 of which is said to have cost a quarter of a million dollars. The 
 products of all the mills are towed out by powerful tugs, drawing 
 schooners and lighters to the harbor off Horn and Ship Islands, 
 where they are loaded into seagoing vessels. The shipments of 
 hmiber from the port of Pascagoula for the fiscal year ending 
 June 30, 1886, were: To foreign ports, 30,383,607 feet; to Ameri- 
 can ports, 11,253,157 feet, or a total of 41,636,764 feet. The above 
 figures are obtained from the official records of the collector of the 
 port. The number of vessels loaded with lumber clearing, during 
 the past fiscal year, was one hundred and sixty-four; foreign, 
 eighty-four ; and coastwise, eighty. 
 
 59 
 
Another very lucrative industry followed in Scranton, besides 
 the lumber business and the canning of oysters, shrimps, vegeta- 
 bles, etc., lies in the large shipments of fish and oysters made 
 every fall, winter, and spring to the Northern markets in refriger- 
 ator cars. Great quantities of red fish, groupers, snappers, mack- 
 erel, trout, and pompano, caught in seines in the sound, or among 
 the neighboring islands, are thus disposed of to profitable custom- 
 ers a thousand miles away. The local prices for fish are simply 
 astonishingly cheap. During a large part of the year, some of the 
 nidst choice kinds of the Gulf fish are sold for a cent a pound, and 
 large sea trout at only a cent and a half a piece. Good-sized Span- 
 ish mackerel command only ton cents apiece, and pompano may 
 be had even at loss figures. 
 
 Amid so much abundance, of course, one can be afforded a sur- 
 feit of sport of line-fishing. The natives express a good deal of 
 disgust that some of the Northern Waltonians, last year, would 
 fiddle and fool with the trout and redfish with a plaguey reel, thus 
 losing lots of time when they might have been "yanking" them 
 out of the water just as fast as they could throw in their hooks. 
 Local anglers state that the best fishing seasons are from August 
 until November, and from thel^eginning of February until May. 
 
 The duck and snipe shooting is so fine in this locality, daring 
 the winter, that the Scrantonians and Pascagoulians contain among 
 them probably a larger proportion of amateur sportsmen than the 
 population of any of the towns of the Mississippi seacoast. They 
 have a strong gun club, and this signifies the fact that, if the game 
 is subjected to a few extra vicissitudes in the shooting season, it 
 hiis the greater counter-advantage of watchful protection at the 
 time when it is most needed. Everywhere in the South the gentle- 
 men's gun club is the terror of poachers and reckless law-breakers. 
 
 Enjoying the pleasant companionship of Captain Mayers, the 
 •writer .visited the seashore town of East Pascagoula. This was once 
 a famous watering-place, in fact one of the most celebrated summer 
 resorts in the South, and there is no reason why it should not go far 
 beyond its ancient repute. 
 
 In the ante-bellum days Pascagoula contained the most exten- 
 sive summer hotel in the South. Fronting the sea it was located 
 in a broad and beautiful park seventy acres in extent. The hotel 
 was sii hundred and twenty-five feet in length, contained more 
 
 60 
 
than three hundred rooms, and could comfortably accommodate, 
 at one time, more than a thousand guests. It was most liberally 
 patronized by wealthy Alabamians or the planting aristocracy of 
 the former banner cotton State. In the era of poverty which fol- 
 lowed the termination of civil strife, the South was unable to 
 patronize its former popular resorts. The great hotel went to 
 ruins, and now nothing but the wreck of crumbling foundations 
 remains to mark the site where pleasure once owned a summer 
 palace in the days of an opulent epoch. In more recent years, 
 since the Gulf States have rebuilt their broken fortunes, it became 
 more fashionable for Southern summer tourists to seek rest and 
 recreation in the more bustling, overcrowded resorts of North- 
 ern climes. Their own pleasant watering-places were treated 
 with neglect by a new generation of youth, fashion, and beauty. 
 Thus, famous old Pascagoula has become a quaint slumbering 
 village by the sea, where the wind sighs through the swaying 
 boughs of its grand old live-oaks like a sad echo of the thou- 
 sand love tales of the long ago breathed under their branches, 
 where the roses bend and bloom as but sweet memories of the 
 beauties of a regal race of women, and where the waves that break 
 on the shore seem to bear the burden of a dirge for a day that is 
 forever dead — as if only these could remember there was ever a 
 land so famed in song and story as the " Old South." 
 
 Pascagoula has a beautiful location on its live-oak shaded 
 shores, with the blue Gulf, dotted with islands, lying before it, and 
 the wide winding river washing its western border. Had it 
 received as a direct increase the growth it gave to its more modern 
 suburbs, or surrounding towns, it would have been quite a city by 
 this time. 
 
 "While these towns increase, with their manufacturing interests, 
 the future growth of Pascagoula must be more dependent upon its 
 popularity as a summer and winter resort, and upon its eligibility 
 as a site for large hotels and fine residences. It is very certain 
 that if a winter hotel were built on the same scale as the cele- 
 brated ancient summer hotel of Pascagoula, it would receive a 
 very liberal patronage from the North. It can now accommodate 
 three or four hundred people. In live years it may be made to 
 accommodate as many thousands. 
 
 The agricultural resources of the region around these towns are 
 61 
 
comparatively well developed. Truck farms are cultivated, whence 
 large shipments of early vegetables are made Northward every 
 sprii]g; and summer vegetables are grown to supply the neighbor- 
 ing canning factories. Some of the enterprising land owners are 
 doing a very wise thing. They are clearing away the pine forests 
 and planting pecan groves- in their places. This whole seacoast 
 seems to be well adapted to the growth of these beautiful and very 
 valuable trees. All thelruits indigenous to this region (v/hichhave 
 been mentioned in preceding articles of this series) thrive well in 
 the country around Pascagoula. 
 
 The writer who described Pascagoula and said nothing about 
 the mysterious music, welling from the depths of its wonderfully 
 melodious burg and river, would be deemed behind the age. Those 
 who have gone before in this business have drawn liberally on 
 their fancy, and one must hesitate before he accepts as final any 
 of these highly-embellished legends about immolated chieftains 
 and immersed maidens. It is wonderful that any man would be 
 willing (o try his hand at that style of literature after Tom Moore's 
 inimitable description of the fate of the fire-worshipers on the 
 headland of Oman and the mermaid-lulled sleep of the maiden 
 Hinda beneath the green wave. This sad music of the sea has 
 been heard by many a race for many an age. It comes in the wild 
 wail of Oceanidce, who, with tossing arms and heaving breast, 
 bemoaned the fate of Prometheus chained to his sea-girt rock, with 
 his vitals torn by vultures because he dared to flinch the intellect- 
 ual fire which illuminated the minds of the very gods and the very 
 goddesses he worshiped only as a vain mortal. It is wafted from 
 the warm, passionately-sighing breath of the Lorelie, as, with 
 shining tresses of gold, white, twining arms, and rich, clinging 
 lips, she draws the sinking mariner down, down, down to a 
 death which those who have been rescued from drowning, after 
 pain and consciousness have fled, have called a glorious, rapturous 
 dream. 
 
 It was heard by Ulysses, who, honoring his loyal mate, stuflTed 
 cotton in his ears to keep out the voices of the syrens, when if he 
 had lived in these modern times he would have found it just as 
 easy to hush their music by trading back the same kind of tafly. 
 
 On many shores and islands are found to-day the strange sing- 
 ing sands, and in many parts of the sea, for two thousand years, 
 
 62 
 
have been heard by men the weird music that rises in the lonely 
 nights of Pascagouhi. 
 
 Amateur naturalists say that the mysterious music of Pasca- 
 goula comes from a vast multitude of fish ot the drum species, to 
 which the croaker, the drum, the redfish, and other varieties of 
 the "gill-grinders" of tlie Gulf belong, whose drumming produces 
 a monotonous hum, which is heard on still nights or when the 
 schools of fish are unusually numerous. At times that same music 
 may bo heard among the islands or from the bays in other parts of 
 the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 From Scranton, the Louisville & Nashville Kailroad takes a 
 direct north-eastern course, leaving the waters of Mississippi 
 Sound, and running through a beautiful pine forest. This forest 
 is gradually disappearing; the immense saw-mills located on the 
 line are reducing it to merchantable lumber in a variety of forms, 
 which are shipped to the principal markets of this country. Grand 
 Bay, St. Elmo, and Venetia, are the principal stations between 
 Scranton and Mobile. Just before reaching Mobile, the road 
 crosses Fowl river, and passes near Frascati, a noted resort for the 
 people of Mobile. Here, the lino tends toward Mobile Bay; a 
 beautiful view of that bay is presented, together with the shipping 
 industries of Mobile. Of this city and its surroundings and attrac- 
 tions, both as a commercial center and health resort for Northern 
 tourists, much could be written, but we have not time to take up 
 an}' further description of this coa^t than already given; it is des- 
 tined to become the winter home of the Northerner. 
 
 -y^ 
 
 63 
 
HOW TO REACH 
 
 THB QULF COAST. 
 
 The Gulf Coast, herein described, lying between Mobile 
 and New Orleans, is on the New Orleans and Mobile Divis- 
 ion of the Louisville & Nashville Eailroad, and is reached 
 only by this line. This great North and South trunk line, 
 with its southern terminal at New Orleans, runs north- 
 eastwardly to Mobile and Montgomery, thence almost di- 
 rectly North through Calcra, Birmingham, Decatur, and 
 Columbia to Nashville, Tenu. From this point it branches, 
 running to the North-east and North-west : through Louis- 
 ville to Cincinnati, and through Evansville to St. Louis. 
 
 At Louisville and Cincinnati connections are made with 
 through-car lines from and to all Northern and Eastern 
 cities. At Evansville and St. Louis connections are made 
 with through-car lines from and to all Northern and West- 
 ern cities. 
 
 Two through Express Trains ar,e run daily its entire length 
 between Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, St. Louis, Mont- 
 gomery, Mobile, Chattahoochee, Pensacola, and New Or- 
 leans, passing this beautiful Gulf Coast en route. Trains are 
 comprised of Pullman's finest Buffet Sleeping Coaches, ele- 
 gant passenger and smoking cars, baggage, express, and mail 
 cars. In addition to this service, the Louisville & Nashville 
 Eailroad runs lines of Pullman Buffet Sleeping Coaches 
 from its northern terminals to Memphis, Knoxville, Thom- 
 asville, Jacksonville, Pensacola, De Funiak Springs, etc. 
 
 You will not regret choosing the old reliable L. & N. 
 when contemplating a trip to any point South. 
 
 C. p. ATMORE, Gen. Pass. Agent, Louisville, Ky. 
 
X' Q jf J, C It ^ 1 
 
 '"nr 
 
/fef. 
 
The Great Through. Car Line bet^veen t Yiq North aod South. 
 
 Unrivaled in Speed, Con^stmction, ai:id Eq^iipnrient. 
 
HBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 !ii