Olmsted's Texas Journey: A Nineteenth-Century Survey of the Western Frontier

A reporter’s account of the people, culture, and terrain of Texas in the mid-1800s.

Frederick Olmsted was a journalist when he made his journey through Texas. Tasked with covering the state of slavery during the quiet years before the Civil War, he took copious notes about the people, places, and cultures of the Texas of his day. These notes, in the form of a journal, would become his seminal work, Olmsted’s Texas Journey.

In Olmsted’s Texas Journey, the reader gets to travel back in time and...