Southwest Louisiana on the Line of the Southern Pacific Company

An appealing pamphlet picturing and detailing Southwest Louisiana for the prospective settler and capitalist.

The text offers a full description of Southwest Louisiana along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad, where some 10,000 Northerners have located homes. Covered here is the production of sugar; fruit growing (several letters concerning fruit growing in the state are reproduced); truck farming; the climate and its "advantages," and the cultivation of rice on the prairies (including a list of rice planters in the area and the number of acres they own). Also detailed are Southwest Louisiana's grasses, machinery, "safe and profitable investments," Lake Charles College, feed for stock ("the problem of cheap feed for stock"), value and price of land, Southern homes, Joseph Jefferson's Orange Island (near New Iberia), the abundant plant Palmetto, cotton, timber, Lake Charles, minerals, topography, roads, water, and insects. A number of Louisiana regions are described, including Welsh, Jennings, Lake Arthur, Shell Beach, Acadia Parish, La Fayette, Vermillion Parish, and Jeanerette. The text concludes with a note on choice lands in Texas by a land commissioner in Houston. 

The illustrations show sugar cane fields, a pear orchard, an orange grove, residences and families, scenes of laborers harvesting, threshing, and shipping rice, a stock farm, a live oak tree, black workers in cotton fields, a tramway transporting lumber, and a rice flume. The map, entitled "Map of Southwestern Louisiana," shows the Southern Louisiana Railroad extending from New Orleans into Texas. Promoted on the verso of the front wrapper is the Southern Pacific Company's "Sunset Route."