Manuscripts
The set consists of seven letters sent from Murland de Grasse Evans to his father while he was traveling throughout the United States in 1899, and one letter to shipping company president Bernard Baker in Baltimore in 1900. In the letters Evans describes his travels through Oregon, Washington, Quebec, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Colorado. He occasionally writes of the steamship business, noting that he was being looked after by "local bigwigs" and had received a large number of invitations to social functions. In an April 15 letter sent from Chicago he also discussed local dissatisfaction with the management of ships in London, growing steamboat markets in the southern United States, and of a pending Steamship Subsidy Bill before Congress. Most of his letters are devoted to describing the cities he visits and his observations about the American way of life. He praises transportation around the Great Lakes as the "secret of their thriving & growing industry," and after a stay in Detroit marvels that American cities "are so utterly unlike anything I have seen before - Large open avenues asphalted, lit by immense electric lights...it makes one feel as though our ordinary street lamps...were relics of the Middle Ages!" In the same letter he describes the "pulse of intrepid & ceaseless energy that beats in the hearts of this young American life," and that while many of the people he encountered made him "shudder at their frightful want of good breeding & good manners," they provided a "powerful stimulant" to those used to a more rigid class structure. "Here you are nobody no matter what your name is, and yet you are at the same time everybody," he concluded (Nov.4, 1899). He was not impressed by Chicago, which he believed was filled with corrupt government and police officials and "ruffians" with revolvers, and he summed up his experience there by writing that he had "never felt so unsafe anywhere" before (Nov.25, 1899). Other letters describe the scenery of Puget Sound, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Colorado; Evans's first experience in an American sleeping car while traveling to Quebec (he lamented of the lake of privacy and the fact that "we are all treated...like schoolboys by the conductor!"); compare gold mines in Colorado to those he had seen in South Africa; and touch briefly on his observations of the Boer War of 1899-1902. In the letter to Baker, who was president of the Atlantic Transport Company, Evans writes from Oregon that after traveling through the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia he has found a "promising attitude of these newer markets...and of the good openings for a steamship enterprise in the Pacific Ocean." He writes of establishing Portland as a major port for ships going to the Alaskan gold rush, as well as for more expanded trade in China, Japan, and Russia (Jan.12, 1900).
