A Journey Through Texas, Or, A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier

Přední strana obálky
U of Nebraska Press, 1. 1. 2004 - Počet stran: 539
Before he became America's foremost landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822?1903) was by turns a surveyor, merchant seaman, farmer, magazine publisher, and traveling newspaper correspondent. In 1856?57 he took a saddle trip through Texas to see the country and report on its lands and peoples. His description of the Lone Star State on the eve of the Civil War remains one of the best accounts of the American West ever published. Unvarnished by sentiment or myth making, based on firsthand observations, and backed with statistical research, Olmsted's narrative captures the manners, foods, entertainments, and conversations of the Texans, as well as their housing, agriculture, business, exotic animals, changeable weather, and the pervasive influence of slavery.

Back and forth from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, through San Augustine, Nacogdoches, San Marcos, San Antonio, Neu-Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Lavaca, Indianola, Goliad, Castroville, La Grange, Houston, Harrisburg, and Beaumont, Olmsted rode and questioned and listened and reported. Texas was then already a multiethnic and multiracial state, where Americans, Germans, Mexicans, Africans, and Indians of numerous tribes mixed uneasily. Olmsted interviewed planters, scouts, innkeepers, bartenders, housewives, drovers, loafers, Indian chiefs, priests, runaway slaves, and emigrants and refugees from every part of the known world?most of whom had "gone to Texas" looking for a fresh start. He also observed the breathtaking arrival of spring on the prairie and the starry nights that seemed to prove the truth of the German saying ?The sky seems nearer in Texas.?

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Obsah

ROUTE TO TEXAS
1
ROUTE ACROSS EASTERN TEXAS
42
Routes into Texas 43 Red River 44 Our Mount 45 A Red River Planta
55
75 The Country 76 Piety in Negroes Done gone 77 Nacogdoches
78
ROUTE THROUGH WESTERN TEXAS
129
versus Slave Labor 182 Kendalls Sheep Ranch A Night in a German
189
A TRIP TO THE COAST
227
A Mule Spirt 227 A Wet Norther in Camp 228 A Black Life 229
234
A TRIP OVER THE FRONTIER
273
Frontier Trains 273 A Cattle Drove for California 274 Castroville History
281
ALONG THE EASTERN COAST
356
Louisiana 391 Among the Creoles 395 An Exile from Old Virginia 397
397
Historical and Actual Position 408 Surface and Structure 411 Clin ate 412
412
REGIONAL CHARACTERISTICS
418
New States 418 Northeastern Texas 419 Eastern Texas 423 Central Texas
424
the Rio Grande Further Annexation
453

chamber Arrangements and Companions 250 Subsidence of Mr Brown 251
251

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O autorovi (2004)

Witold Rybczynski is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include the J. Anthony Lukas Prize winner A Clearing in The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century and The Perfect House.

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