What is the author's style in the nonfiction book, Across America on an Emigrant Train?

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 text itself is a combination of several written accounts of the experience of emigrating across the United States. The principal account from which Murphy draws is Stevenson's own, but he supplements Stevenson's observations with those of other riders, thus giving a sense of the wide variety of people who traveled westward by railroad. Excerpts from diaries are typical of Murphy's historical writings, but Across America on an Emigrant Train relies more on such literary accounts as Stevenson's Across the Plains (1892) than do The Boys' War and The Great Fire.