170 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton 

 bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine 

 sticking up out of the centre. And this is but one item of 

 one branch of the produce business of New Orleans. 



The whole fields of sugar hogsheads, molasses, pork, 

 beef, flour, lard, oil, rice, meal, apples, and whiskey bar- 

 rels, and bags of corn, oats, rye, barley, wheat, beans, 

 peas, bran, potatoes, and cotton seed, bundles of hay, to- 

 gether with every other conceivable thing that ever grew 

 out of the earth, are in such wonderful quantities, that 

 the stranger is overwhelmed in wonder to know from 

 whence cometh all this mighty mass of the products of 

 the earth. It is utterly impossible to remove the daily 

 accumulations as fast as they arrive; and at night, and 

 every night, acres of such things as the weather might 

 damage, are covered over with tarpaulin cloths, and 

 guarded by watchmen. The time is rapidly coming, such 

 is the vast increase of production in the fertile soil of the 

 Mississippi Valley, when the whole river front will be 

 insufficient to accommodate the shipping trade of the city, 

 and slips will have to be cut into the land; and great 

 basins, or docks, like those of Liverpool and London, will 

 have to be made, to give room for the giant of commerce 

 to expand his young limbs. Or, perhaps, a great ship 

 canal, from the river to the lake, will not be thought to be 

 a visionary notion, at some future time; or a canal that 

 shall leave the river at Carrolton, and encircle the present 

 city, and enter the river again below, which would give 

 three times the landing room that there now is, will not 

 be considered half so wild a scheme, as did the idea to 

 some of the ancient inhabitants of New Orleans, of build- 

 ing houses in the swamp where now stands the St. 

 Charles Hotel, and half the business part of the second 

 municipality. 



But let us leave speculation of what New Orleans is 

 to be, for who knoweth, and proceed with facts. I have 

 only given these notes just for the sake of trying to give 

 some who have never seen the elephant, an idea of the 

 immensity of the animal. Solon Robinson. 



New Orleans, Dec. 2Sth, 1848. 



