A Journey through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern FrontierUniversity of Texas Press, 22. 7. 2010 - Počet stran: 564 Early in the year 1854 Frederick Law Olmsted, a young New England journalist, crossed the Louisiana border and set off on horseback into the teeth of the Texas winter. In A Journey through Texas he recounts his travels along the Old San Antonio Road through East Texas' piney woods, the dry prairies further west, the chaparral of South Texas, the coastal prairies, and the rich bottomlands around Houston and Galveston. Olmsted does not romanticize the discomforts of his trip—the monotonous food, crude housing, wet and dry northers, rough companions—yet his book reflects a sense of limitless possibility for this new and open country. The cultured Easterner remembers in relentless detail the squalor and brutality met with in parts of East Texas, but he writes fondly of the civility and cleanliness of the German settlements around New Braunfels. In his introductory "A Letter to a Southern Friend," omitted in earlier reprints, Olmsted sets forth his views opposing the extension of slavery into the West and promoting free-soil agriculture for frontier states. The remarkably versatile Olmsted is best known as the founder of landscape architecture in America and for works including Central Park and Stanford University. In his Foreword, Larry McMurtry calls A Journey through Texas an "intelligent, lively, readable book, packed with keen observation and lightened by a delicate strain of humor." |
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... dollars — at disposal . Land has been previously pur- chased , a hasty dwelling of logs constructed , and ample crops for sustenance harvested . Each has found communication with his market interrupted during a portion of the year by ...
... dollars . The Iowan , in the same predica- ment , writes to a friend in the East or advertises in the newspapers , that he is ready to pay better wages than carpenters can get in the older settlements ; and a young man , whose only ...
... dollars , to be lent to merchants , mechanics , or manufacturers , who are disposed to establish themselves near him . With the aid of this capital , not only various minor conveniences are brought into the neigh- borhood , but useful ...
... dollar of the nominal capital of the substantial farmers of New York represents an amount of the most truly valuable com- modities of civilization , equal to five dollars in the nominal wealth of Texas planters . And this ...
... dollars a tun , was in the town one dollar and a half ; at the mines , unselected , half a dollar — a difference which , for my own part , I gladly pay . Unattractive as is the town of Cumberland , it is not easily forgotten , from its ...