Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, September 1921 · page 32 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #27 — page 32: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains **text only**—no cartoon or illustration visible. It's a descriptive essay about New Orleans from *Captain Billy's Whiz Bang*, an American satirical magazine known for irreverent humor. The piece discusses New Orleans' transformation from a lawless colonial settlement (populated by deportees, slaves, and soldiers) into a commercial city. It includes period stereotypes: references to "Creole" women as "coquettish damsels" and a crude racist folk saying ("I love you as a little pig loves the mud"). The text also makes a crude commentary on colonial "picture brides"—poor French women sent to the colony as wives—comparing this unfavorably to contemporary American marriage practices, sarcastically suggesting modern men choose wives just as poorly. The overall tone is satirical and vulgar, typical of *Whiz Bang's* style, mixing social commentary with offensive period stereotypes.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
30 Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang girls,” poor girls sent over from Paris by the King as wives. They brought their trousseau in a chest of clothes. This seems very primitive to us now, yet today men pick wives no better than these, and some they choose do not wear clothes enough for a shroud in the coffin. The city was once a sink or swamp filled with deported galley-slaves, trappers, miners, gold hunters and soldiers whose profession was dice, dueling and idleness. Today it is the big, busy, commercial city of the South. Once there was fever, filth and filibusters, but these things are no longer in fashion. New Orleans now buys white rice, cotton and sugar—in early days she bought black slaves from San Domingo and Guinea. Charles Lamb liked old things—he would have enjoyed the old part of town with its bizarre balconies, mountain-peaked roofs, hill- shaped sheds, begrimed, battered stairways, open flowery courts, shady portieres, quaint doorways, and ramshackle, rickety rows of houses marshalled on both sides of the streets like awkward squads of soldiers. In the quiet streets one looks in doorways where the inhabitants, listless lazy lovers of pleasure, are dozing away Life’s afternoon. Here you find the beautiful and bewitching Creoles, coquettish damsels whose baby years were cuddled and cradled in sentimental songs such as “I love you as a little pig loves the mud.” The pleasure-seeker is “stuck” on New