Description
This is a portrait of frontier Georgia, told in the words of thirteen travellers who came here from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Sweden and New England, between the Revolution and the Civil War. There are stage coach wrecks along the highways and dirty beds and rusty forks at isolated taverns. The book is fresh and alive with personal, exciting, firsthand descriptions of rising raw towns in the wilderness, backwoods settlers and plantations lost in the interminable forest. The most famous travellers are Basil Hall, Tyrone Power, James Silk Buckingham, Charles Lyell, Frederick Law Olmsted, plus eight others. The book is embellished with drawings of Georgia made in 1828 by Basil Hall.
Joe Teisan –
I loved this book. I found a first edition (1973) in a thrift store decades ago and just recovered it from storage. These are fascinating glimpses of the way [things] were, told from the perspective of the European observer. It’s almost an anthropological study — The Europeans coming to observe a primitive country and its people, a democracy yet. A young vigorous, egalitarian and enterprising people always on the go.