From New York to San Francisco

<p>Welcome to an America you've never seen. Where anyone can drop by the White House and visit the President between 10 a.m. and noon; where cowcatchers are bloodied daily on train tracks between New York and Boston; where spent bullets are strewn across Civil War battlefields and Indians still roam Yosemite Valley; where pigs rut in the sand-and-clay streets of Washington DC. and the weather-bleached skeletons of oxen and horses line the old mail roads across the West. <br /><br />For three hot summer months in 1869 Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthody the nephew of famed composer Felix Mendelssohn traveled by train across the United States accompanied by his older cousin. His letters back home to Prussia offer fascinating glimpses of a young rapidly growing America. Unceasingly annoyed at the Americans' tendency to spit all the time the Prussian aristocrats seemingly visited everyone and everywhere: meeting President Grant and Brigham Young; touring Niagara Falls Mammoth Cave the Redwoods and Yosemite; taking in New York Boston Philadelphia Chicago Omaha San Francisco and the still war-ravaged city of Richmond; and crossing the continent by rail just two months after the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads had been joined at Promontory Utah.<br /><br />Full of marvelous tales and insightful observations Ernst Mendelssohn-Barthody's letters are a revealing window to a long-ago America.</p>