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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... plantations were annoying , but once they got to the prai- ries they found much to amuse , stimulate , and excite them . It was a new place , a wonderful country , and the sense it gave of freshness and almost limitless possibility is ...
... plantation work - shop . The Iowan is able to contribute liber- ally to aid in the construction of the church , the school - house , the mill , and the railroad . His laborers , appreciating the value of the reputation they may acquire ...
... plantation almost entirely to slaves , corn , ba- con , salt , sugar , molasses , tobacco , clothing , medicine , hoes and plow - iron . Even if he had the same capital to spare , he would live in far less comfort than the Iowan ...
... plantation of " worn - out " fields , with its little village of dwellings , now a home only for wolves and vultures ? This but indicates a large class of observations , * by which I hold myself justified in asserting that the natural ...
... plantations averaging a square mile in size , the present slave population must double in number before each of these plantations will be provided with a laboring force equal to five able - bodied men and women . If the policy of thus ...