Across America on an Emigrant Train blends text with illustrations, and Murphy includes numerous photographs, drawings, and engravings from the 1870s. The illustrations help to show what he is talking about, and such photographs as those depicting the slaughter caused by sports hunters offer concrete evidence for Murphy's descriptions—in this case piles of dead animals.

The illustrations are bound to captivate people who like reading about railroads, because there are many pictures of engines and cars, with numerous interior views.

Other illustrations offer visions of social history; particularly interesting are the huge snow sheds in which families lived and children played, their parents charged with watching for fires that could be caused by sparks flying out of the stacks of trains that ran through the sheds.

The text itself is a combination of several written accounts of the experience of emigrating across the United...