Eight days in New-Orleans in February, 1847 — Key Ideas to Explore

The Waterworks and the City's Pulse

Pickett devotes considerable attention to the city's water system, describing an iron pipe eighteen inches in diameter placed twelve feet below the river surface, sixty-horsepower force-pumps, and a reservoir built from river sediment. The details are precise: four apartments in the reservoir, each with about five feet of live water, the deposit scraped off every month or two. He notes the cost—$1,490,000—and the revenue—$75,000—and reports that the pumps force up 2,280 gallons per minute. This is not mere civic boosterism. Pickett seems genuinely fascinated by the engineering, and his description of the pavilion in the middle of the reservoir 'affording a pleasant seat' suggests a man who enjoys standing at the center of a system he can comprehend. The waterworks become a figure for the city itself: artificial, costly, and dependent on the river's muddy abundance.

The French Market as Babel

The French Market is the set piece of Pickett's narrative, and he renders it in a style that veers between ethnographic catalogue and comic disgust. He lists the languages—French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Swiss, Italian—and then a 'mongrel mixture' spoken by the lower class. The sentence itself becomes a pile of gerunds: 'cursing, swearing, whooping, hollowing, cavilling, laughing, crying, cheating and stealing.' He compares the market to the Tower of Babel. But the most striking detail is the basket of five fat puppies, about six weeks old, which the owner says are for French gentlemen to eat. Pickett hopes the vendor was 'palming a quiz' on him. The uncertainty is telling: he cannot decide whether the city is a place of genuine strangeness or of performance. The market, like the waterworks, is a system—but one that runs on noise, appetite, and the threat of the inedible.

The Shadow of De Soto

Pickett's historical digression is not merely prefatory. De Soto's expedition—a thousand men, arms, munitions, priests, chains—ends in failure: no gold, no splendid Montezuma, only 'savages breathing out an innocent and monotonous existence.' The language is of its time, but the pattern is revealing. Pickett frames New Orleans as the belated reward for that earlier, disastrous quest. The city is what De Soto did not find: a place where commerce has succeeded where conquest failed. Yet the note of loss persists. Pickett describes the Mississippi before European eyes as rolling 'in native silence and grandeur,' and the phrase carries a hint of regret. The waterworks, the market, the crowds—all are built on a river that was once silent. Pickett does not press the point, but the contrast between the sublime discovery and the noisy, commercial present runs through the book like a submerged current.

Pickett's eight days yield a text that is part travelogue, part historical sketch, part statistical report. The seams show: he apologizes for his inexperience, and the narrative jumps from the waterworks to the market to the Ursulines without much connective tissue. But the very awkwardness is instructive. Pickett is trying to hold together two ways of seeing—the romantic and the practical—and his failure to fully integrate them becomes the book's real subject. Readers should attend to the moments when the observer seems unsure what to make of what he sees; those are where the city resists easy description.

I remember how Pickett’s Eight Days in New-Orleans lingers on the quiet hum of the waterworks, that steady, unglamorous pulse beneath the city’s noise. There is a similar heartbeat in John and Betty's History Visit — A Closer Reading—two children learning that a place’s true character is not in its monuments, but in its daily, dutiful rhythms. A gentle kinship, that.