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."
General
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