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276 Suggestions for Further Reading

large part a travel epic. This first group also includes such later American classics as the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (ed. Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, 2 vols., 1814); John Lloyd Stephens, lncidenls of Travel in Central America (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843); Francis Parkman, Oregon Trail (1849); Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies (2 vo!s., 1844); Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883); and Charles Warren Stoddard, South-Sea Idyls (1873), The Lepers of Molokai (1885), Hawaiian Life (1894), and The Island of Tranąuil Delights (1904), which, like many of the pseudo-classics of day-before-yesterday, become the staple of secondhand fumiture Stores.

Books of the second class, the travel surveys, sometimes over-lap with those of the first. They offer us fewer accounts of derring-do, of exciting action, and risky encounter, and are primarily compilations of outlandish or useful information. Much of the writing by Europeans about America in the colonial period had this character. Such works were in demand because of the helpful information (or interesting misinformation) they offered about the New World. The rise of natural history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries produced such works as Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Sóil, etc. . . . madę by John Bartram in his travels from Pensihania to .. . Lakę Ontario (1751), and by his son William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, etc. (1791); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Yirginia (1784); John James Audubon, Birds of America (1827-1838), and his joumals, selected as Delineations of American Scenery and Character (1926). For an excellent selection of writings by Americans about their experiences abroad (most of which take the form of social survey or encounters with famous men and women), see Philip Rahv (ed.), Discovery of Europę (Anchor paperback, 1960).

The rise of the social Sciences further encouraged such collec-tion and classification of information from faraway places. Exam-ples of such works are: again, Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Yirginia (1784), which was prepared expressly for a European reader, the Marquis de Barbois, secretary of the French Iegation in Philadelphia, whose twenty-odd Baedeker-like questions formed the frame of the book; AIexis de Tocque-ville, Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835; first American edition, 1838), which grew out of a stay of less than a year (May, 1831-Feb., 1832) in the United States; and George

Catlin, whose illustrated Manners and Customs of the North American Indians (2 vols., 1841) was the product of eight years of travels and observations from the Yellowstone to Florida. Some of the most delightful books to come out of eighteenth-century America are the too-little-read travel surveys by William Byrd, who retails facts and fictions of natural history, geography, and social customs with a rare wit. His works include History of the Dividing Linę (1728), Progress to the Mines (1732), and Journey to the Land of Eden (1733), all of which were first published only in 1841.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the approach-ing confiict between North and South incited an additional large number of remarkable social-survey travel volumes. Important examples are the influential books by Frederick Law Olmsted: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country, abridged and revised as The Cotton Kingdom (2 vols., 1861; ed. by Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1953). Admirable analytical bibli-ographies are Thomas D. Clark, Travels in the Old South (3 vols., 1956-1959) and E. Merton Coulter, Travels in the Con-federate States (1948). Many of the best travel surveys of the American West are collected by Reuben G. Thwaites in his multivolumed Early Western Travels, 1748-1846 (32 vols., 1904-1907).

Compared to either of these earlier classes, both of which continue to be exemplified in many excellent works, the third, and distinctively modern, class, the book of travel reactions (or tourist diary), is pretty flimsy stutf. Characteristically, instead of recording action, recounting mortal risks, or surveying the social scene and interesting customs, it records the confusion, amused bewilderment, and disorientation of the tourist himself, or his frustrated search for adventure. The focus is on a puzzled, self-conscious quest for the “interesting,” rather than on inevitable encounters. An example is Tats Blain, Mother-Sirl (1951), “a navy wife’s hilarious hap-hazardous adventures in Japan.” A morę substantial work is Herbert Kubły, American in Italy (1955), which, precisely because it is deftly written and expertly constructed, reveals the limits of this kind of travel literaturę.

We need some good histories of travel as an institution. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680—1715 (1953) is the book I know which best puts old-style travel in the large framework of thought, belief, and feelings. Seymour Dunbar’s copious History of Travel in America (1915; 1937) is Valuable mainly as a read-able chronicie of the forms of transportation, on which it