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CHAPTER IV
THE JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS
AND THE BACK COUNTRY
1854
The Letters in This Chapter, which Olmsted wrote while traveling in Texas from January through May 1854, deal with the three concerns that were then most immediate for him. One was the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and its implications for the relationship of the South to the rest of the country. Another was his delight with the German settlements near San Antonio and with the friends he made while visiting them. A third was the exciting prospect of the creation of one or more free states in West Texas. The letter from Olmsted’s “The Southerners at Home” series for the New York Daily Tribune presents the one passage from that series that he did not publish in virtually identical form in A Journey in the Back Country. The chapter closes with two of the letters that he and his brother wrote in early October 1854 as they solicited funds with which to aid their new friend Adolf Douai and his antislavery newspaper, the San Antonio Zeitung.
To Anne Charlotte Lynch
| My Dear Friend, | San Antonio de Bexar, March 12th 1854 |
I hear from Brace of your return from your European tour and that you have “evidently enjoyed yourself very much.” I am very glad to know that, and hope that you also gained health and the foundation for a higher enjoyment of your life at home.
You probably know of the long tour I had intended to make and how our plans have been in some degree frustrated, causing our long detention in this region. Our journey through Eastern Texas was disagreeable in the extreme—an unpleasant country and a wretched people—bad supplies and bad weather. With Western Texas, however, we have been greatly pleased. The [272]
First Stage of the Journey through Texas and the Back Country, 1853–1854
]
Olmsted and His Brother, John, Camping in Texas
Meantime we are travelling about, without definite aim, in an original but on the whole, very pleasant fashion. The spring here is very beautiful. The prairies are not mere seas of coarse grass, but are of varied surface with thick wooded borders and many trees and shrubs, standing singly and in small islands. Having been generally burnt over or the rank grass fed closely down, they have very frequently a fine, close, lawn-like turf, making an extremely rich landscape. At this season, moreover, there are a very great variety of [274] pretty, small, modest flowers, such as I send you, growing, often very thickly, in the grass. There is an evergreen shrub, rare, and new to me, which is the finest shrub I have ever seen. Its leaves are Acacia-like, but evergreen, bright and glossy like Laurel, and it bears clusters, like those of the Horse Chestnut, of deep blue and lilac bloom, which have a perfume like that of grapes.
We ride and take along with us a pack-mule which carries our tent, bedding and stores. Always in the evening we search out a pleasant spot by some water-side and take plenty of time to pitch our tent securely & make every thing comfortable about us. So we have had from fifty to a hundred pleasant homes of our own selection, construction & furnishing in the most beautiful spots we could find in this great wilderness. It gives me an entirely new appreciation of the attachment of nomad tribes to their mode of life. I was always however much of a vagabond.
As the spring comes on at New York, I hope you may find it agreeable to visit the island.
Fred. Law Olmsted