# Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History/Chapter 10

Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History by Henry John Elwes was first published in London in 1930, and edited by Edward G. Hawke
CHAPTER X
NORTH AMERICA, 1888
In the autumn of 1887 Godman went to spend the winter in Mexico, where he was then employing collectors of birds and insects, to increase his knowledge of the natural history of Central America on which, in company with his lifelong friend Osbert Salvin, he was then preparing the great work of his life. He invited me and Mrs. Elwes to join him, which we very willingly did, as I had never visited America before and as we were able to leave our children in the best of charge. We started on February 4th, 1888, in the Cunard's.s. Etruria for New York, and landed after a calm winter passage on February 12th. New York was full of half-melted snow, but the bright sunshine and clear air free from smoke made our short stay there not disagreeable.
After some arguing I arranged at Messrs. Cook's office what was then known as a round trip ticket, covering something like 8,000 miles of railway at a cost of about forty-five pounds for each ticket, to which had to be added the extra cost of Pullman cars averaging about five dollars each for every twenty-four hours' journey. Sleeping cars were then as good and as comfortable as they are now, but in the south and west there were no dining cars and we provided ourselves with a well-stocked tea-basket which proved of the greatest use, not only to ourselves but to our fellow passengers. We stopped a day at Reading, Pennsylvania, where I visited Mr. Herman Strecker, whose large collection of butterflies was very interesting. In those days the American system was universal in all hotels, and as the cost of rooms and the choice of anything you liked to order from a most varied and excellent bill of fare was from three to five dollars a day in the best hotels, we did not find travelling nearly so costly as it has now become. We then went on to Philadelphia, where we visited Wanamaker's great store, which had all the counters arranged in concentric circles connected by tubes with the cashiers of the different departments, above whom sat the manager in a central office from which he could see all over the whole of the vast store, in which every kind of goods were sold at what now seem fabulously low prices.
We then went on to Pittsburgh, where we visited the Rev. Mr. Holland, who was then forming a great collection for the University. In the hotel everything was heated by natural gas, and the hotel manager showed us the most interesting kitchen where this gas was the only source of heat.
From Pittsburgh we took the Sunset Express train to New Orleans and were able to secure what is called the Parlour, where by paying for three tickets two passengers can have a room all to themselves.
After passing through Cincinnati we crossed the Kentucky river by a bridge then said to be the highest railway bridge but one in the United States, and in the afternoon were stopped in a wild forest covered country at a small station called Glen Mary, Tennessee, where there had been a fall of roof in the tunnel, which had to be repaired before the train could pass. Whilst waiting here a shooting affray took place in a saloon close ​by where we were sitting, and a dead negro, who was a notorious ruffian, was dragged out into the street, where the body lay. No one seemed to think much of this, as we were told that seven men had been shot in this little place during the last year or so. A Northern judge who was in the cars told us the history of the Morehead County family feuds, which had developed to such an extent that after thousands had been killed the State Militia were called out to put an end to the desperate faction fight by abolishing Morehead County altogether, as there were no people to be found who were not implicated on one side or the other. When I read Huckleberry Finn, I hardly believed that the story of the fights described by Mark Twain in that wonderful book was really based on facts, but what I saw now, and in a later visit to the Alleghany Mountains, convinced me.
Late that night the tunnel was made passable and we got through safely to Chattanooga, where, having missed connections to New Orleans, we had to stay a day in that muddy and rowdy town. We passed the time by a visit to the top of Lookout Mountain, whence we had a wonderful view over a vast extent of forest-covered mountain country in which parts of five different States are included, and which was the scene of much hard fighting in the American Civil War. Though spring had not yet clothed these beautiful forests in green, yet the weather was quite mild and balmy as compared with the frost and snow we had left in New England, and when we got to New Orleans the change of scenery and climate was very marked indeed.
Before reaching New Orleans we had to pass on a trestle bridge twentythree miles long which crosses the inland sea of Lake Pontchartrain, and through gloomy marshy forests of deciduous cypress covered with masses of the Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) which covers the trees in many parts of Louisiana.
We found good quarters in the old St. Charles Hotel, then celebrated as the best hotel in the Southern States, and Mrs. Elwes was much annoyed by finding a notice in our bedroom, "Beware of hotel thieves, coloured laundresses and bugs." When we sat down to lunch, our first leisurely meal since leaving Pittsburgh, the coloured waiter was inclined to be cheeky, seeing that we were Britishers and new to the country, and said that we must hurry up with our meal as he wanted the table for others. I had previously made the acquaintance of the proprietor, an oldtime Southern "Colonel," and went to ask him whether his guests were usually so treated by the waiters. He was very angry and at once came back to the dining-room with me and called for the head-waiter. When the culprit was pointed out he told the head-waiter: "Fire that fellow at once, and if you bring any more like him into my house I will fire the lot of you."
Though I came to know the ways of coloured waiters later, I never liked their attitude, which among the younger generation at least is usually a mixture of servility and bumptiousness, the former when they think their tip depends on it, the latter when they think you are a stranger who is not acquainted with their position, I have been served by many coloured races in Asia and America and prefer them all to the American negro. Chinamen are, in my judgment, by far the best servants in the United ​States, and if properly treated become honest and faithful servants, though their ways are difficult to understand. What will be the future of the coloured races in the United States is a very difficult and thorny problem. But it seemed to me both on my first and subsequent visits that in many parts of the Mississippi valley the climate is much better suited to negroes than to white men, and that the mixture of the two races is bad for both.
We stayed only a short time in New Orleans, which, in 1888, was a very different town to what I found in 1919, and on February 23rd set off on our long railway journey to Mexico. The part of Texas which we passed through seemed better settled, by a better class of people—many of them Germans—than Louisiana, and San Antonio was quite a superior town with a very cosmopolitan population of thirty thousand. The streets were full of smart buggies and good stores and the hotel very comfortable. When we left the next day, the tram was delayed for some time by a terrible railway accident caused by the breaking down of one of the light iron bridges over a deep river gorge. When we got to the place we had to leave the train and walk past the wreck of a tram, which had preceded us by a very short time, in which most of the passengers had been killed or seriously injured; we saw the bodies lying by the track and a pile of dead horses not far off. The number of wrecks, as they are called, on the American railways, especially in the South and West, was at that time and for years afterwards very great, partly owing to the carelessness of the railway employees, and partly to the number of wooden bridges, which soon become rotten or are washed out by sudden floods.
Whilst waiting for the train which came to meet us on the other side of the river, I gathered the bulbs of a pretty little white-flowered Amaryllis Cooperia which I keep to this day; but the vegetation of the great plains and of the Canyon of the Rio Grande river, which we passed through in the night by bright moonlight, was at this season very poor. The next day we picked up the coffin of a man who had been shot at a little store close to one of the stations, so that I saw more dead men on this journey than I have ever seen before or since. At El Paso we reached the junction of the Mexican railway and transferred our baggage to another train after passing the Mexican custom house on the other side of the Rio Grande.
Next morning we breakfasted in an old railway-car in the station at Chihuahua, where three weeks before the train had been held up by brigands, who then, as now, were very numerous in the wild country to the west of the line.
The country is rocky and desolate for a long distance, and we were not tempted to accept the invitation of an English ranch owner to stay at his ranch near Santa Rosalia. On the next day we reached the summit of the line at about 8,000 feet near Zacatecas, where there are great silver mines, and on the fourth day from El Paso arrived at the city of Mexico. We found tolerable quarters in the Café Anglais, as there was no good modern hotel in the town at that time. I need not say much about this place, which we left on March 7th in order to meet Godman at Orizaba. It has often been described by better pens than mine, and though in a temperate climate at 6,000 feet above sea-level, it was at that time, owing ​mainly to bad drainage, a most unhealthy city. The old Mexican railway to Vera Cruz, constructed and managed by an English company, after passing through the great plantations of Agave which supply Mexico with its favourite—but to me very unpleasant drink, known as Pulque, descends beyond Esperanza to the "Tierra templada," where we escaped from the aridity and dust of the "Tierra fria" in which the city of Mexico stands. Here we stopped in the town of Orizaba at a clean hotel kept by a civil young German lady who did her best for us, and here we enjoyed for a few days the charming sub-tropical climate with its wealth of flowers, fruits, birds and insects. Godman, however, had been detained in another part of the country and could not meet us so soon as we expected.
At Orizaba I first had an idea of the extremely rich flora of sub-tropical America, which was quite new and strange to me. Flowering shrubs, orchids, Tillandsias and other epiphytes were very numerous, and I collected quite a number of butterflies, most of which belonged to the great family of Hesperidæ or skippers. There were some fine coffee plantations, mostly belonging to English and German planters, who were thriving and hospitable, and if there was only a fairly civilised Government in Mexico this part of the country would no doubt attract many foreigners to settle in it. But the Mexicans of the well-to-do landowning class as a rule are but half civilised themselves, and the labouring classes are Indians or half-castes and are badly treated in many parts of the country by the governing race. Americans have invested largely in the country in mines, but were not at all popular with the Mexicans; and though Godman was a man who ought to have been exceptionally well received and treated, and who spoke Spanish fairly well, we never received, either when with him or alone, any real hospitality from the Mexicans.
On market days at Orizaba a great many Indians came in to sell their produce, and much fruit including good oranges, fair pineapples, bad bananas, and that excellent fruit the avocado, which is now becoming popular in California and Florida. Food, as a rule, in Mexico was very poor and little varied. Flat maize cakes called tortillas are the staple bread of the country and occupy a great deal of the women's time in making. Omelettes with tomatoes, and black beans cooked in lard, are also universal articles of diet; whilst coffee, chocolate and pulque are the usual beverages. Sheep are almost unknown, and dried beef and salt fish are about the only other articles of food commonly found in the country towns.
We stayed at Orizaba collecting plants and butterflies until March 21st, and then, hearing that Godman had arrived at Jalapa, went down by rail to Vera Cruz, a most untempting seaport, from which we were glad to escape before daylight next morning. There was a railway as far as Paso de San Juan, and there we went on by a tramcar drawn by four mules to Jalapa, an ascent of nearly 4,000 feet from Vera Cruz, which took eleven hours. Though the vegetation showed that the country was quite tropical in climate, it became quite cold when we ascended into the mist, which turned later into heavy rain, and this extreme variation of elevation and climate is very characteristic of the country.
At Jalapa we found Godman in a very fair hotel, and enjoyed two or ​three charming days in the lovely environs of this town, which is not far from the snow-capped peak of the volcano Orizaba, 17,000 feet in height. The country round Jalapa is a mixture of luxuriant open pasture-land and beautiful woods in which the oaks and liquidambar trees were the most conspicuous and beautiful. We visited an Englishman named Brooks who had a large and very thriving coffee plantation at Cuantepec, about two hours' ride from Jalapa, and we could not help contrasting the cleanliness and comfort of Mrs. Brooks' house with the dirty and slovenly state in which most Mexicans, even of the wealthy class, habitually live and seem to be quite contented, though noxious insects of many kinds are common and in some parts of the country very numerous. From Jalapa we arranged to ride by a very beautiful hilly route to Orizaba, our baggage being carried by three Indian porters.
The first night we had an introduction to a hacienda belonging to a wealthy Mexican at Tusamapam, where we expected hospitality but found none. If it had not been for the German manager of the sugar factory we might have had to sleep in an Indian hut, as the major domo in the absence of the proprietor was very surly. Eventually, however, we got a bare unfurnished room with a bedstead, and Godman slept in another whence the fighting-cocks of the establishment were turned out for his reception, and where he was able to sling the hammock in which he usually slept in Mexico. After some delay we got a table and an Indian woman cooked us a chicken with rice, an omelette and some frigoles, or black beans cooked in lard, without which no Mexican repast is complete.
Next morning, after inspecting the very extensive sugar factory, where a coarse brown sugar is made, we started in the rain and descended into the barranca of the Rio Grande, where the vegetation was especially beautiful. After crossing the river on a balsa or raft and swimming the horses over, we ascended to some Indian huts, and breakfasted in a shed, after crossing a tributary of the Rio Grande in the same fashion. The scenery and vegetation during the whole day were very beautiful. In the afternoon we reached another Indian village called Pincos, where we expected to get lodged by the proprietor of the village shop, which was little better than a drinking place. As the man could not read the letter we brought to him, we waited till his wife came home, and eventually got a shelter for the night in a newly built hut fourteen feet square, where we managed to pass the night under very different conditions to what one would expect on a well-travelled road in a long settled country.
The scenery of the next day's journey, however, repaid us for all discomfort and the flowers and ferns were very varied and beautiful. The snowy peak of Orizaba, constantly visible out of these deep semi-tropical valleys, reminded me somewhat of the Tista valley in Sikkim, though the latter is far more striking and stupendous. At midday we arrived at the much cleaner and pleasanter village of San Bartolo, where, in the village shop or inn, usually combined in one in Mexico, we got an unusually good meal of omelette with green peas and chillies, with chicken and rice to follow, and topped up with rice stewed in milk and sugar. Tortillas made of a black variety of maize, though not pleasant to look at, are good to eat when fresh and hot.
​Both Godman and I agreed in thinking that San Bartolo would be an excellent centre for a naturalist to make a long stay at. Though many collectors have visited this part of Mexico, the variety and number of different birds, plants and insects seem so great that novelties are. even now constantly discovered, almost always by foreigners, as Mexicans, like the Spaniards, very rarely have any taste for or interest in natural history.
Returning to El Paso in the beginning of May we passed again through a wide tract of desert country covered with sage-brush, cactus and other desert types of vegetation, which continue until the San Gorgonio Pass in Southern California is crossed. Here at an elevation of 2,000 to 3,000 feet, overlooked on one side by the snowy San Jacinto mountains, and on the other by the still loftier and more wooded San Bernardino range, we came on the first large tract of cultivation I had seen since leaving Central Mexico in the shape of immense fields of barley, grown without water and now nearly ripe. Much of this is cut for hay, which seems to be a more profitable way of using it than for grain. When we got to Beaumont, the first of the new settlements for which Southern California is remarkable in the history of American progress was reached.
Town lots here, as in many other Californian settlements, run back from the railway right to the foothills, and are held by land speculators at a price which seemed to me ridiculous in comparison with their real agricultural value. For though a great deal of land is capable of growing much more barley, alfalfa and fruit than a stranger would suppose possible, yet it is mostly of such a light and sandy nature that water is indispensable in average seasons, and water is so costly that I do not see how it can pay to bring it to much of this land. The climate of South California is charming in winter, and enables men to live in a way that would be impossible in the Northern and Eastern States, yet even climate may be purchased at too dear a price, as I believe some of the settlers and speculators have already discovered. The story goes that a real estate man, when trying to sell to a New Englander a tract of this country, expatiated on its many virtues and finally declared that the only things necessary to make it a terrestrial paradise were good society and water. "Is that all you want?" said the Eastern man, "Why, that is all they want in hell!"—a saying which is about as expressive as General Sherman's well-known opinion about Texas.
Here in San Bernardino county, where I stayed ten or twelve days, we had our first rambles among the Californian flowers, many of which were already so familiar to me in English gardens. Among the crowd of annuals, herbaceous plants and shrubs which we gathered in and about San Bernardino, I should select the following as most conspicuous and beautiful; and though we can grow some of them better in England than in the Eastern States, yet we cannot have them in anything like their native beauty. Yucca Whipplei is quite a superb plant, by far the finest of its genus as far as I know. It comes to perfection on the plains and foothills, attaining an elevation of at least 4,000 feet, and producing in some cases, a flower stem twelve to fifteen feet high, of which at least two-thirds is covered with dense branches of creamy-white or sometimes ​greenish-white flowers. These vary much in size, in the length, breadth and shape of the perianth segments, but in all cases form a pyramid of surpassing beauty. The plant is well worthy of greenhouse culture where it cannot be grown to perfection out of doors; it seems to grow finest on dry sunny hillsides where perfect drainage carries off all moisture from its thick wiry roots. Calochortus splendens was extremely abundant in some parts of the San Bernardino valley, especially about Beaumont, where it is a common weed in the sandy barley fields. The only other species we saw in South California was Calochortus Kennedyi, a handsome orange-coloured species very distinct from any other I know, but this is much more rare and local and grows on the borders of the Mohave desert in much dryer and hotter places than Calochortus splendens. Of the herbaceous perennials common about San Bernardino at the season I thought Pentstemon speciosus the most beautiful; and a Decentra and an Anemonopsis the most curious. Sage-brush and greasewood cover the lower hills, forming a dense and almost impenetrable scrub. Pines are now only found below 4,000 feet in sparse and stunted groups on steep rocky places or in deep ravines, though I should suppose that the hills had once been covered with coniferous forest to a much lower level than at present. We made one excursion to the pine forest above San Bernardino which is accessible by a waggon-road in two places at least, and found two shrubs of great beauty in flower: Styrax Californicum, which grows in shady banks in ravines at 2,000 to 4,000 feet, and Cornus Nuttalli at 4,000 to 5,000 feet, but the latter was here not so large, floriferous or abundant as in the higher, moister and cooler forests of the Yosemite region. The Cornus should succeed well in England though I have never seen it in flower there.
The main object of our excursion to these forests was to see the Snow Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) in flower, and we were fortunate enough to procure splendid specimens of this very remarkable plant. It does not flower, as its name would imply, in or immediately after the melting snow, as this had been off the ground at least six weeks before we saw it in May, and even then most of the plants were not in full flower. I took some pains to examine the root to see if it was, as reported, really parasitic on the roots of the yellow and sugar pines, P. ponderosa and P. Lambertiana, under which it always grows, I could, however, trace no connection. The root-stock of the plant is a thick fleshy mass of closely packed roots and clayey soil, often as big as a child's head, but though I dug deeply round the mass and washed out the soil as much as possible after lifting it, I could trace no direct connection with the pine-roots, though I believe that decaying pine-roots may act as a host or nidus on which the seed germinates. I usually found the plant growing in small but scattered groups, but never numerous in one place and having the appearance of having grown from seeds. Sometimes two or three stems, but generally only one stem, were produced by each root, and the length of these stems was from ten to twenty inches, of which one-half or less was underground, the subterranean portion being of a rather paler colour than the inflorescence, which was six or eight inches long and two or three inches in diameter. The colour is a very bright flesh or cherry colour, the edges of the bracts, ​which at first envelop and afterwards twist round the pedicel of each flower, being paler than the rest. We made drawings and photographs of the plant and preserved specimens in spirit, to enable a good coloured figure of the plant to be published. I doubt the possibility of cultivating this fine plant, but I think that roots dug up and transported with care two or three weeks before the flowering season would produce perfect flowers if kept moist and cool. It was too early to form any idea of the herbaceous flora of these fine forests, as the vegetation was backward in comparison with that at similar elevations farther north, but it appeared to be rich and varied.
Lilium Humboldti was already in bud in the gorges at 2,000 to 3,000 feet, but I saw no form of Washingtonianum so far south, and though I searched carefully for Lilium Parryi in the original place where it was discovered near the San Gorgonio Pass, I could find no plants large enough to be identified, as they have been mostly dug up by bulb collectors. The only place, however, where it was known to occur in abundance is a bit of marshy ground in deep black peaty soil, and as this has been partially drained the plant may have suffered in consequence. It is a rarity, and I hope the bulb gatherers and potato growers will not exterminate it.
I was a little disappointed with the variety and beauty of the annuals in California of which I had heard and at home seen so much. But we did not visit the coast, where, perhap's, they are more abundant, and the season for some of them was rather gone by. Of the orange groves, vineyards, peach and apricot orchards of California I need say nothing. Are they not known to everyone by their produce if not in reality? One thing I would, however, urge upon Californian fruit-growers, and that is, to make their delicious dried apricots and peaches known in England, where they are never seen and would be thoroughly appreciated; and to turn their attention rather to making fine light wines than sherry and port, which are not so much drunk or liked as formerly. The country which can succeed in imitating the wines of Bordeaux and the Rhine in bouquet and flavour, and which can produce light table wines as wholesome, as digestible and as nourishing as those are, when natural and unadulterated, is certain to have an unlimited demand at a good price; whilst the heavier, stronger and sweeter wines such as are produced by Portugal, Spain and Australia can probably be grown cheaper and better in other countries than California.