The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram's "Travels" and Legacy

By Kathryn H. Braund, Elizabeth Athens, William Cahill and 11 more

New essays that illuminate and interpret William Bartram’s journey through what would become the southeastern United States
 
William Bartram, author of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulees, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, was colonial America’s first native born naturalist and artist, and the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His book, first published in 1791, was based on his journeys through southern Indian nations and Britain’s southern colonies in the years just prior to the American Revolution and provides descriptions of the natural and cultural environments of what would soon become the American South. Scholars and general readers alike have long appreciated Bartram’s lush, vivid prose, his clarity of observation and evident wonder at the landscapes he traversed, and his engagement with the native nations whose lands he traveled through.
 
The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s “Travels” and Legacy offers an interdisciplinary assessment of Bartram’s influence and evolving legacy, opening new avenues of research concerning the flora, fauna, and people connected to Bartram and his writings. Featuring 13 essays divided into five sections, contributors to the volume weave together scholarly perspectives from geology, art history, literary criticism, geography, and philosophy, alongside the more traditional Bartram-affiliated disciplines of biology and history. The collection concludes with a comprehensive treatment of the book as a material historical artifact.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: May 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394073

Book preview

The ATTENTION of a TRAVELLER

The ATTENTION of a TRAVELLER

Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy

Edited by Kathryn H. Braund

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Jenson Pro

Cover image: Natural History Museum 3162, Franklinia alatamaha; permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Publication of this book was made possible in part with the assistance of the Bartram Trail Conference, bartramtrail.org

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978–0–8173–2129–1

E-ISBN: 978–0–8173–9407–3

In Memory of our Friends and Fellow Travellers

John C. Hall

and

Charles D. Spornick

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1 | TO THE MISSISSIPPI

1. Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings: Economic Transitions in Travels

Taylor McGaughy

2. A Prospect of the Grand Sublime: An Atlantic World Borderland Seen and Unseen by William Bartram

Daniel H. Usner

PART 2 | BARTRAM AND THE NATURAL WORLD

3. Wrestling with Bartram’s Alligators

Kathryn H. Braund

4. The White Cliffs of the Mississippi: Bartram and Deep Time

Dorinda G. Dallmeyer

5. Bartram’s Tree: Franklinia alatamaha

Joel T. Fry

PART 3 | VISUAL BARTRAM

6. To See the Moveing Pensil; Display a Sort of Paper Creation, Which May Endure for Ages: William Bartram as a Natural History Artist

Joel T. Fry

7. Lively Pictures: William Bartram and Drawing ad vivum

Elizabeth Athens

8. Behold!: Visual Mediation in Bartram’s Travels

Andrew B. Ross

PART 4 | ON BARTRAM’S TRAIL

9. How to Blaze a Trail: Lessons from the Pioneers of the Bartram Trail Conference

Katie Lamar Jackson

10. Commemorating Bartram: The Bartram Trail Conference and Interpreting William Bartram

Brad Sanders

11. Signing Nature, Memorializing Plantations: Public Memory along the William Bartram Trail

Thomas Hallock

PART 5 | THE BARTRAM LIBRARY

12. Shelving Knowledge in Philadelphia: John and William Bartram’s Books

Robert McCracken Peck

13. Bartram’s Travels 1791: A Bibliographic Census

William Cahill, Joel T. Fry, Nancy E. Hoffmann, and Alina Josan

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

Figure 1.1.  Map of Bartram’s travels in the South

Figure 2.1.  Detail from Juan Pedro Walker, Baxa Luisiana (1799–1803)

Figure 2.2.  Location of petites nations during the 1770s

Figure 3.1.  William Bartram, View of the Alegator Hole in Istmus Florida

Figure 3.2.  William Bartram, The Alegator of St. Johns

Figure 4.1.  White Cliffs of the Mississippi River, near Port Hudson, Louisiana

Figure 4.2.  Carpenter’s cross section of the bluff

Figure 4.3.  Philip Juras, White Cliffs

Figure 5.1.  Fort Barrington and Franklinia habitat

Figure 5.2.  Bartram’s first illustration of the Franklinia, No. I

Figure 5.3.  Bartram illustration of the Franklinia, ca. 1786, engraved by James Trenchard

Figure 5.4.  Illustration of Franklinia alatamaha published by Castiglioni

Figure 5.5.  P. J. Redouté illustration of Franklinia as Gordonia pubescens

Figure 6.1.  Bartram’s watercolor of the blue or purple-flowered ixia, Calydorea caelestina

Figure 6.2.  Bartram’s drawing of the silver leafed river maple and early night fly

Figure 6.3.  Bartram’s drawing of the marsh hawk

Figure 6.4.  Bartram’s 1796 composite illustration of two native orchids

Figure 6.5.  Bartram’s illustration of Xanthorhiza tinctoria (shrub yellowroot)

Figure 6.6.  Bartram’s sketch of a catfish

Figure 7.1.  Bartram’s inscription in his personal copy of Carl Linnaeus, Genera plantarum

Figure 7.2.  Bartram’s drawing of a coach whip snake

Figure 7.3.  William Bartram, Andromeda, or Kalmea

Figure 7.4  Plate II from Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753)

Figure 7.5.  Bartram’s drawing of a species of Momordica

Figure 8.1  Bartram’s Canna indica L., or Indian shot

Figure 8.2  Bartram’s drawing of the Colocasia or American lotus

Figure 9.1.  Representatives attending the Bartram Trail Southeastern Conference (1975)

Figure 9.2.  Jerome Anderson, Martha McInnis, and Bob Peck

Figure 10.1. Members of the Georgia Bartram Trail Conference delegation

Figure 10.2. Martha McInnis and Verda Horne

Figure 11.1. Slave deed, consigning the sale of a Certain Negro Woman Named Jenny

Figure 12.1. Bartram bookplate

Figure 13.1. Title page, standard subscription version, with frontispiece of Travels (Philadelphia, 1791)

Figure 13.2. Detail of spine and title label for the tulip binding of Travels 1791

Figure 13.3. Engraving of fevertree by William Bartram for Travels

TABLE

Table 13.1. Summary: Census Data

Acknowledgments

I very much appreciate the work of the contributors and their support of the Bartram Trail Conference. I would also thank the Bartram Trail Conference for its continued and energetic support of Bartram scholars. The BTC supports public symposia and scholarly research, and provided a grant to assist in the publication of the current work. Five of the individual contributors were recipients of the organization’s Fothergill Award to support research on any topic related to William Bartram. I would like to thank the hosts and sponsors where some of our contributors presented early stages of their work, including the East Baton Rouge Library, the LSU Hilltop Arboretum, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Special thanks to the many friends of William Bartram, whose generosity, time, and enthusiasm help keep Bartram scholars on the road and in front of audiences; they include Peggy Davis Coates, Randy Harelson, Michele Deshotels, Steve Murray, Rosa Hall, Monica Newman, Jacob Lowrey, Philip Juras, T. R. Henderson, and Sam Carr, as well as the other devoted members and supporters of the Bartram Trail Conference who welcome scholars into their midst and work to preserve Bartram’s legacy both on the page and in special places across the Southeast.

Special thanks to Brad Sanders, who prepared three maps for the volume, and to Sarah Mattics, of the University of South Alabama’s Center for Archaeological Studies, who provided the comprehensive map of Bartram’s route.

We collectively owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many repositories whose papers and books related to William Bartram made our research possible. The following repositories provided illustrations from their collections: the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; the American Philosophical Society; Arader Galleries; Bartram’s Garden Library; the National History Museum, London; the Historic New Orleans Collection; the John Bartram Association; the John Carter Brown Library; the Library Company of Philadelphia; Martha McInnis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society; and Philip Juras.

Introduction

In March 1773 Pennsylvania native William Bartram set off from home, headed south. The self-taught botanical artist, funded by wealthy London patron Dr. John Fothergill, was in search of rare and useful productions of nature.¹ The long and difficult journey ultimately amounted to a trek of roughly 2,400 miles through the Gulf South, including five British colonies and the territories of the three largest Indian tribes in the region. Penned by arguably the most famous colonial traveler of our day, Bartram’s account of his four-year journey finally found its way into print in 1791. Bartram was not only a botanist and an artist but a writer of unparalleled merit. His sheer delight in discovery and breathtaking descriptions of the beauty as well as the danger he encountered were energetically transmitted to his readers—then and now—in prose that Thomas Carlyle characterized as possessing a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence.²

William Bartram’s Travels is, as literary scholar John Livingston Lowes once noted, one of the most delightful books . . . anybody ever read. And, as Lowes aptly observed, the amplitude of the title—Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws—is prophetic of the book’s own leisured pace.³ It is also indicative of the wide-ranging geographic scope of the work but only hints at the digression, discursion, and discussion on a seemingly endless variety of topics that caught the peripatetic naturalist’s roving eye. Bartram’s descriptions of the early South encompassed territory that became eight modern states.⁴ In addition to descriptions of flora and fauna and natural wonders, Bartram described the myriad people he met along the way: British administrators, settlers and those they enslaved, deerskin traders, and Indians. The book’s rambling mix of descriptions, meditations, and musing, delivered in luxuriant and evocative prose, captured the attention of readers upon publication in 1791 and continues to do so into the present day. Justly christened the most astounding verbal artifact of the early republic, the book and its author have been embraced by people from all walks of life and every scholarly discipline as a source of inestimable value.⁵

Travels largely faded from public memory in the late nineteenth century, aside from interest by botanists and biologists. Its republication in 1928 under the editorship of Mark Van Doren as part of a series of little-known early American books reintroduced Bartram’s Travels to a wider public.⁶ A seismic shift in Bartram awareness came with the efforts of Francis Harper, who not only located and edited the manuscript journals of William and his father, John, but produced what remains the standard edition of Travels, the Naturalist’s Edition, a heavily annotated version published by Yale University Press in 1958. Harper, with the assistance of numerous citizens across Bartram country, worked to establish Bartram’s chronology and route, which was not always evident from Bartram’s poetic descriptions, his carelessness with dates, and the fact that he took literary license in the published version of his account.

The enduring appeal of Bartram’s work for southerners manifests itself spectacularly during the lead-up to the bicentennial of the American Revolution. In Bartram, people across the South found his journey a touchstone connecting their region to the colonial and revolutionary era. Bartram’s appeal was nearly universal, delighting historic preservationists, members of the nascent environmental movement, conservationists, those interested in promoting recreational activities and tourism, and, of course, gardeners. As a result, disparate citizen groups and organizations across the South coalesced in the mid-1970s to form the Bartram Trail Conference (BTC). The purpose of the eclectic movement was to raise awareness of Bartram’s trip across the South, to identify historic and natural landscapes associated with him worthy of preservation and promotion, and, ultimately, to secure recognition from the Department of the Interior as a National Recreation Trail and to develop hiking and canoe trails as well as botanic gardens and to showcase existing publicly accessible places that Bartram visited. The conference failed to achieve the coveted trail designation, since the string of pearls represented by far-flung Bartram sites did not fit the early, restrictive criteria of the National Park Service’s national trail model. Ironically, such destination trails are now the norm, even as the BTC continues to seek support and recognition in order to more effectively link the successful efforts undertaken by numerous private, state, and federal sites that tout their relationship to the eighteenth-century naturalist and writer.

Though the formal trail designation foundered, preservation and interpretation of Bartram sites did not. And scholarship relying on and relating to Bartram’s Travels has continued to flow as constantly as crystal waters from a Florida spring. In no small measure, the action of the BTC helped propel Bartram scholarship, especially with the establishment of the annual Fothergill Award, a competitive award that funds serious scholarship on any topic relating to William Bartram.⁷ This volume represents the third compilation of papers generated by scholars and writers associated with the Bartram Trail Conference, including the work of four Fothergill scholars. The first publication, the BTC’s Bartram Heritage, represents the initial work of a national team of Bartram promoters and scholars who undertook the initial trail study for the US Department of the Interior in 1977.⁸ Prominent in that work’s generation were Martha McInnis, then the chairman of the Bartram Trail Conference, and Dr. Robert M. Peck, who compiled the report. The second volume of collection papers by BTC-affiliated scholars, Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram, appeared in 2010 and represented scholarly works presented at BTC events.⁹ The current work continues to highlight work presented at biennial meetings of the BTC and seeks to make scholarship available to a wide public as well as a scholarly audience. The core of this collection includes papers presented at the 2017 biennial meeting of the BTC in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Other papers, prepared by conference members and friends, round out the eclectic selection. The essays presented here are not designed to be a comprehensive overview of Bartram’s work or significance. Rather, they bring together and highlight some of the latest and most engaging work on Bartram and efforts to commemorate his journey.

Part 1, To the Mississippi, highlights Bartram’s trip to the Mississippi River. His relatively brief account of Louisiana often takes a backseat to his more ebullient discussion of his time in Florida. Taylor McGaughy puts Bartram’s western route in context, following Bartram from Georgia through the Creek Nation to the Mississippi. McGaughy points not only to Bartram’s interest in native plants and peoples but to his observations on the changing economies of the region. Daniel H. Usner places Bartram’s observations into yet wider context, as part of the Atlantic World borderland. Noting how the Lower Mississippi Valley was being reordered and reimagined during and after Bartram’s visit, Usner points not simply to imperial schemes as a dominant force but to the ordinary people—settlers and Native alike—whose political and economic realities were often at odds.

In Part 2, Bartram and the Natural World, scholars focus on three iconic discussions and discoveries by Bartram that have continued to drive scientific discovery into the modern period. Kathryn H. Braund tackles Bartram’s famous alligator observations, situating them in historic context. Dorinda G. Dallmeyer points to the importance of Bartram’s discussion of the White Cliffs of the Mississippi—known as Browne’s Cliffs in Bartram’s day—and reminds us of the timeless quality of his work as well as its lasting influence. Joel Fry narrates the discovery and lasting mystique of the Franklinia alatamaha, a flowering tree of breathtaking beauty discovered by John and William Bartram on their joint 1765 excursion to Georgia and Florida. Now extinct in its original southern habitat, the tree—one of America’s most celebrated plants—continues to engender scientific debate. Most recently, BTC Fothergill scholar Heather Gladfelter worked to map the genotype of various surviving Franklinia specimens across the world.¹⁰ Fortunately, what some dubbed America’s Bicentennial Tree continues to thrive in Bartram’s Garden.

Part 3, Visual Bartram, focuses on Bartram’s art and way of seeing and rendering the world around him. Elizabeth Athens analyzes influences on Bartram’s work and examines how he brought living energy to his depictions of nature. Andrew B. Ross contributes an essay on Bartram’s way of seeing and visualizing nature in both his art and written word. Joel Fry provides a summation of Bartram’s artistic contribution, seeking to locate and identify his numerous natural history illustrations.

Part 4, On Bartram’s Trail, focuses on the work of the Bartram Trail Conference. Katie Lamar Jackson investigates the origins of the organization, via primary research as well as oral interviews of early BTC members, including Martha McInnis. Brad Sanders provides an overview of the BTC’s history and analyzes the various approaches to BTC commemoration. Thomas Hallock explores public memory and commemoration of Bartram’s route in regard to the silences regarding enslavement and William Bartram as a slaveholder.

Part 5, The Bartram Library, concludes the collection with two doses of bibliophilia. Robert M. Peck presents an updated reconstruction of Bartram family library, providing insights to the works that shaped their thinking and writing. William Cahill, Joel T. Fry, Nancy E. Hoffmann, and Alina Josan present a comprehensive census of extant copies of the first edition of Travels, noting the significance of such an effort and the benefits of considering Travels not simply as a source but as an artifact. Travels is a rare book indeed.

PART 1

To the Mississippi

CHAPTER 1

Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings

Economic Transitions in Travels

Taylor McGaughy

In June 1775, after two months of observing plant life in southern Appalachia and delighting in panoramic vistas and crisp mountain air, Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram decided to abort his relatively brief visit to Cherokee country. Bartram sensed a palpable tension there, and after he descended from the Blue Ridge Mountains, he and a group of traders returned to the Lower Cherokee town of Seneca in the South Carolina piedmont, where he discovered the commissary and the Indian chiefs convened in counsel. His premonition that something was amiss amongst the Cherokee was not misplaced; three months before, headmen Attakullakulla (whom Bartram met while in the Blue Ridge Mountains) and Oconostota had agreed to cede twenty-seven thousand square miles of Cherokee land in the infamous Sycamore Shoals Treaty, and the controversial decision had riven that nation into two factions: one that conceded to the land swap and another advocating reclamation of the territory through conquest.¹ Prominent headmen that had wielded significant influence in tribal politics for a generation formed the accommodationist set, while an irate coterie of young Cherokee gunmen ardently opposed to the cession coalesced around the warrior Dragging Canoe; the latter faction’s view of the relinquished territory as inalienable hunting ground would soon result in settlement raids within the cession and escalate into full-scale warfare between the Cherokees and the colonists of South Carolina and Virginia.² This acrimonious milieu and the looming prospect of violence drove Bartram from the region. Though abandoning the project of visiting the regions beyond the Cherokee mountains surely disappointed Bartram, the indefatigable Quaker seized the opportunity to redirect his botanical excursion towards the riverine, biologically diverse province of West Florida, which Britain had added to its colonial cache after the Seven Years’ War, and its western border, the Mississippi River. Visiting the Mississippi River would allow William to realize an aspiration of his father, John, who expressed in his correspondence a fervent desire to view the great sire of the waters.³

This change in course redirected Bartram’s trajectory in a southwestwardly direction and commenced the lengthiest leg of his famed journey. He trekked and sailed some eight hundred miles from Seneca down the Great Trading Path through Creek Country, to Mobile, Pensacola, Lake Pontchartrain, and finally Pointe Coupée, on the western shore of the Mississippi River in Spanish Louisiana. Pointe Coupée represented the westernmost terminus of Bartram’s encroachment into the Lower Mississippi Valley, and from there he retraced his path and returned east.⁴ Very little research focuses exclusively upon Bartram’s western journey, though the leg is often incorporated into general histories of the botanical excursion.⁵ Perhaps this is because, as with his Cherokee country tour, Bartram cut this portion of his trip short and refrained from engaging in much commentary on specific specimens during it; in West Florida both the brief duration and the paucity of botanical observation were attributable to a lingering eye malady that he contracted in the vicinity of Mobile and which negatively affected his vision and very nearly killed him. This segment of Bartram’s Travels, however, chronicles his passage through an area undergoing a radical economic transition and contains numerous explicit and implicit references to the region’s potential for agricultural improvement. Somewhat disconcertingly, much of the land subject to Bartram’s commentary on cultivation potential lay within Indian territory. Bartram’s prose as he passed through Creek country en route to Mobile and as he canoed north from that gulf port to the Tombigbee River, the very descriptions of the natural bounty he encountered, seem to evoke the specter of an economic system already well established closer to the Atlantic seaboard; during the early nineteenth century, this commercial order, driven by European market dynamics, cash-crop monoculture, and chattel bondage, would engulf the lands that Bartram traveled through on this portion of his trip. Moreover, his experiences in West Florida present a microcosm of the regional shift from an economy based on informal, face-to-face bartering and commodity exchange to the heavily capitalized plantation system and market-oriented economy soon to develop in the American South.

Much has been written about the subtext of Bartram’s Travels; historians revel in speculating on what Bartram omitted from his narrative and why. Though Edward Cashin contends that Bartram viewed the American Revolution as a providential turn of events propelling the colonies towards a more just form of government, he repeatedly accentuates how the botanist remained friendly with partisans on both sides of the schism rending his world asunder.⁶ Cashin also demonstrates how Bartram consistently eschewed political commentary and conflict in Travels, to the point where he seems almost oblivious to their existence; he had to hold such distasteful realities in abeyance to prevent them from marring the pristine natural environment that he sought to encapsulate.⁷ Daniel Schafer also stresses Bartram’s willful ignorance of present reality, but he argues that the Philadelphian neglected to mention the enclosures, plantations, and indigo fields of East Florida that he observed as he descended the St. Johns River in 1774 because of his catastrophic attempt at starting his own cash-crop plantation in the vicinity in 1765. Schafer thinks that Bartram deliberately omitted evidence of economic development to preserve an imaginary paradise through nature writing.⁸ Schafer does stress that in his correspondence with Dr. John Fothergill, the London naturalist who subsidized his botanical survey, Bartram intimated the agricultural potential of land in East Florida, but that these insights were not apparent in his narrative on the colony in Travels.⁹ Other historians have discussed his occasional explicit analysis of cultivation potential, though they tend to downplay any economic calculus in his conceptualization of nature. While emphasizing Bartram’s capacity for commentary on developmental prospects, Thomas Slaughter highlights his subject’s intense ardor for unaltered, pristine natural settings and an associated discomfort with operating in a human society in which he felt he had no place.¹⁰ Conversely, William’s father, John, is presented as a devotee of agricultural improvement literature, a masterful assessor of tract dimensions and quality, and possessed of an acute comprehension of nature’s practical and aesthetic utility; John combined his immense knowledge of plant properties with shrewd business acumen and correspondents in the European botanical community to spearhead a profitable transatlantic seed-and-specimen shipping venture, an endeavor that netted him recognition as a man of science.¹¹ Scholarly work on the Bartrams has thus construed John as a pragmatic commodifier of flora and William as spellbound by nature’s majesty to the point of deliberately omitting mention of the plantation economy in his narrative. While this depiction is not wholly inaccurate, it obfuscates William’s frequent interspersal of developmental analysis amongst the binomial nomenclature and romantic prose for which Travels is better known. Such language predominates Bartram’s descriptions of Creek country as he wound his way toward West Florida, demonstrating Bartram’s proclivity to imagine resource extraction when he passed through uncultivated terrain.

On June 22, 1775, Bartram and his entourage, a caravan manned by a company of adventurers and headed by Capt. George Whitfield, departed from Fort Charlotte on the west side of the Savannah River and made its way toward the Lower Creek towns. Bartram commenced his southwestern passage in an area he had previously traversed—the vicinity of Augusta and the lands between the Ogeechee and Oconee Rivers ceded to the colony of Georgia two years earlier. The botanist’s account of the Augusta summit that produced this territorial transfer, known as the New Purchase, is the most prominent written source of the treaty’s proceedings. Because of a lengthy description of this region earlier in his narrative, Bartram demurred to comment on these lands again, claiming it would produce but little more than a recapitulation of that journey.¹² The tone of settler-Native interactions within these ceded lands and other backcountry borderlands on the periphery of Georgia and Creek society, however, had dramatically worsened during the two-year interlude between Bartram’s visits. In a pattern reminiscent of the generational conflict over Sycamore Shoals among the Cherokee, the New Purchase drove a wedge between established Creek headmen who supported the cession and the accompanying debt absolution and youthful warriors eager to preserve irreplaceable hunting tracts.¹³ A leading scholar on southern territorial concessions in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War declared the New Purchase the most divisive cession in the postwar period for the Creek people, and bitter reprisals ensued in its wake. Creeks murdered colonists and colonists killed Creeks in a series of retaliatory episodes in late 1773 and early 1774, as the long-established face-to-face dynamics of frontier exchange degenerated into cross-cultural violence.¹⁴ A moratorium on selling gunpowder to the Creeks followed these episodes, and the Georgia Provincial Congress implemented another powder stoppage in July 1775 in light of rumors that British Indian superintendent John Stuart urged the Creeks to raid Georgia’s frontier settlements.¹⁵ This latter embargo began as Bartram and the caravan moved through Creek country. Bartram entered a tense borderland that summer, a territory where long-simmering hostilities between indigenous and European communities had recently boiled over, and where an overly scrutinous white man could easily be misconstrued as a land agent or speculator aiming to alienate more tribal hunting grounds. The Lower Creeks, however, craved the European goods recently denied them by the ban on exchange that followed the New Purchase. Accordingly, Bartram sought to travel with a caravan.

FIGURE 1.1. Map of Bartram’s travels in the South. Map courtesy of Sarah Mattics.

Security for safe specimen collection and sketching in Britain’s colonial empire earlier on the survey came via direct sanction by local political authorities or letters of introduction written by Bartram’s associates. Sir James Wright, Georgia’s colonial governor, provided the wandering scholar with such sanction in an official missive in April 1773, and Charlestown physician and botanist Lionel Chalmers wrote to East Florida lieutenant governor John Moultrie on Bartram’s behalf later that year.¹⁶ While inventorying and artistically rendering the flora and fauna of the Florida peninsula’s interior, Bartram received explicit authorization for his survey from The Cowkeeper, the headman of Cuscowilla, and the White King of Tallahasotche.¹⁷ These imperial and indigenous aegises offered Bartram slight security as he traveled through the Georgia backcountry. Bartram met some of the Lower Creek headmen over a decade earlier at the Congress of Picolata, and these chiefs were aware of the purely inquisitive nature of the botanist’s endeavor and probably accepted it, but twelve years had passed since this introduction, and not every Lower Creek warrior knew the reason for his presence on their land. Though Bartram had a letter of introduction to James Germany, principal trader of the Upper Creek town of Coolome, Upper Creek territory was hundreds of miles from the Oconee and Ogeechee watersheds. Successful scientific expeditions in the New World necessitated either white sovereignty over the locale surveyed or indigenous complicity in the endeavor; rivalries between European empires and uncooperative natives jeopardized the collection of specimens.¹⁸ Furthermore, during Bartram’s survey, the beginnings of a colonial insurgency and a war between the Creek and Choctaw Indians made the route potentially hazardous. Traveling with a group of well-provisioned and well-armed traders was necessary for Bartram’s presence in Creek territory. The trade caravan, consisting of twenty armed traders, cut a formidable appearance aimed at deterring sabotage by any predatory bands along the route south of the Creek towns toward Mobile.¹⁹ Moreover, the traders knew the paths and could point out sites of interest, provide instructions to important headmen, and serve as protection from hostile Choctaw warriors along the southern portion of the trade path.

Were the Creeks privy to the contents of Bartram’s journal and field notes as he traveled southwest from Fort Charlotte, they might have felt opposition to his survey warranted. Though Bartram’s mission was assuredly one fueled by a quest for knowledge and natural sublimation, undeniable assessments of land’s suitability for market agriculture peppered his commentary. The Quaker botanist’s musings frequently veered toward the commercial when surveying the territory through which the trading caravan passed. While traveling through the Ogeechee River watershed, Bartram noted very good land on the gradual descents of the ridges and their bottoms bordering on creeks, and very extensive grassy savannas and cane meadows always in view on one hand or the other. These gentle slopes contained rivulets that ran down into fertile meadows that housed a beautiful creek, a branch of Great Ogeche, called Rocky Comfort, where we found excellent accommodations.²⁰ Such descriptions would make land speculators and squatters alike salivate. Bartram’s account of gently sloping lands and ready water sources likely conjured images of cash crop plantations and self-sustaining homesteads in the minds of Euro-Americans reading Travels in the 1790s, men who fervently desired to harness nature’s bounty from lands that were not yet theirs.

Bartram’s caravan then crossed several branches of the Oconee, land he denoted a level district he reckoned of a good quality for agriculture, primarily attributable to its loamy topsoil, which sported a dark, loose, rich mould. Fields long abandoned by Indians past the Oconee’s creeks pointed to more arable land. Forty miles farther down the trading path, the naturalist and his entourage moved through the abandoned famous Oakmulge fields, in which he noted the conspicuous very wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients of this part of America, in the ruins of a capital town and settlement. His description of the cultivation site of the defunct chieftaincy again reads like promotional literature. Twenty miles later, near a large beautiful brook called Sweet Water, Bartram reflected that all of the lands between the banks of the Ocmulgee and his current location were certain to become a happy, fruitful and salubrious region, when cultivated by industrious inhabitants. This tract of pastoral abundance contained generally ridges of low swelling hills and plains supporting grand forests, vast Cane meadows, savannas and verdant lawns.²¹ In stark contrast to his descriptions of East Florida, in which Schafer noted a conscious omission on Bartram’s part of the plantations he observed as he sailed down the St. Johns River, here Bartram explicitly describes the prospective output of lands not yet subject to cash crop monoculture.²² Bartram likely saw the Lower Creek lands as more suitable for agriculture than the sandy barrens of East Florida.

Moving farther west, the botanist describes optimal pastureland on the backside of the Flint River, where the adjacent low grounds and Cane swamp afforded excellent food and range for our horses.²³ This bottomland lay upon a tributary creek of the Flint, and the space between it and the river, present every appearance of a delightful and fruitful region in some future day, it being rich soil, and exceedingly well situated for every branch of agriculture and grazing. In a rhetorical flourish at the end of his description, Bartram stressed that the yield of this seemingly isolated patch of land was in actuality easily accessible to the global marketplace and the flow of goods it offered. The rivulets on this tract ran into the Flint, itself an arm of the great Chata Uche or Apalachucla [which] offers an uninterrupted navigation to the bay of Mexico and the Atlantic ocean, and thence to the West India islands and over the whole world.²⁴ This enticing description of the cash crop cultivation and animal husbandry possible in the Flint River region and its links to the Atlantic World are worthy of the most venal colonial promoter. While land speculators and investors in colonization schemes certainly had fiduciary motivations for penning such prose, Bartram presumably did not—his commission was expressly for the purpose of sketching and describing botanical specimens and shipping them to Britain.

The commercial gloss of Bartram’s nature writing in the account of the journey to West Florida not only encompassed agricultural improvement and livestock management but also extended to mining prospects. After passing the Pintchlucco, a large branch of the Chata Uche river, he entered an uneven hilly country, but the soil generally fertile and of a quality and situation favorable to agriculture and grazing, the summits of the ridges rough with ferruginous rocks. The appearance of these stony outcroppings inspired Bartram to elaborate on the motherload he reckoned was below the surface. He noted high cliffs of stiff reddish brown clay, with veins or strata of ferruginous stones, either in detached masses or conglomerated nodules or hematites with veins or masses of ochre.²⁵ The presence of these iron oxide–laden rocks would certainly arouse the attention of mining interests, whose profits hinged on locating ore to extract and refine. Bartram’s language in this passage thus would appeal not only to commercial agricultural interests but also to the captains of nascent industrial capitalism.

On July 13 Bartram’s caravan arrived in Upper Creek territory, staying in Talasse, a town on the Tallapoose river. After reaching the town, the party descended a path along the Tallapoosa toward Mobile, continually in sight of Indian plantations and commons adjacent to their towns. After a brief stop in Coolome to meet James Germany, to consult with him in matters relative to my affairs and future proceedings, Bartram resumed his southbound trajectory, eager to reach the Gulf Coast region. Although he did not visit the site until his return through the Creek nation in 1775, Bartram commented on the abandoned site of the French Fort Toulouse at the confluence of the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Rivers and declared it one of the most eligible situations for a city in the world. This imagined population hub, situated at the convergence of major waterways, could be sustained by these riverine highways, which connected it to boundless farmland via navigation on vessels and perriauguas at least five hundred miles above it. Bartram’s name is hardly synonymous with urban growth, but his conjuration of a metropolis in present-day Alabama dovetails neatly with the assessments of economic prospects characteristic of this section of Travels. After crossing out of Creek territory and into West Florida, the party approached the hinterlands of Mobile, while gently ascending a hilly district, being the highest forest adjoining the extensive rich low lands of the river. This land was currently uninhabited, and Bartram again noted the presence of mineral resources, as the highland was somewhat encumbered with pebbles, fragments and cliffs of rusty ferruginous rocks; the stones were ponderous and indicated very rich iron ore: here was a small district of good land. Not only was this plot favored with deposits, it was also watered by a fine creek, running into the Mobile River, indicating a clear avenue to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the global economy beyond.²⁶

Associating the genre of botanical writing generally and Bartram’s Travels particularly with the exploitation of nature attendant to capitalistic monoculture, animal husbandry, mining, and even urban development may seem counterintuitive, for the natural world and rendering it artistically were Billy’s darling delight.²⁷ On other legs of his journey, he obfuscated development in favor of rhapsodizing natural beauty. This commentary’s prevalence throughout the section of Travels recounting Bartram’s trip to the Gulf Coast presents the reader with a quandary. As discussed above, Bartram was intimately familiar with the pressure Euro-American colonists were placing on Indian lands; he frequently commented on the poor treatment of Indians by whites and included commentary in Travels and other writings that stressed the commonalities between whites and Indians.²⁸ Bartram did not condone Native dispossession, and he roundly condemned the ravenous land grab afoot in the late eighteenth century, claiming that his countrymen’s injustice & avarice, in pressing upon their Borders, & dispossessing them of their Lands, together with the outrage committed against their Persons, & encroachments made on their hunting Grounds by the Frontiers, provoke them to retaliation.²⁹ How could Bartram reconcile his descriptions of the road to West Florida in Travels, which was couched in language that could initiate a bum-rush into Creek country, with his progressive, humanitarian views on nature and Native Americans?

Perhaps the answers to Bartram’s perplexing tone lie in the timing of the publication of Travels and his attempt to influence federal Indian policy. Bartram’s publication effort famously was delayed over a decade after the culmination of his botanical tour, and by that time, he had advised the Washington administration on the development of what he regarded as an effective solution to the new nation’s problem with westward expansion. Bartram became a proponent of what is now known as the civilization program—a plan to transform the Eastern Woodland Indians from people who occupied vast tracts of land and relied on regular hunting, forage, and light agricultural cultivation for subsistence into people who inhabited much smaller tracts, abandoned subsistence hunting, and exclusively tilled the land for their sustenance. The civilization plan involved a major overhaul of Native culture, subsistence patterns, and gender roles, and Kathryn Braund argues that Bartram desired a comprehensive solution to the conflict over land between white and Native Americans so much that he neglected to consider the flaws inherent in the belief that Native peoples would willingly abandon their basic cultural tenets.³⁰ Bartram was preparing Travels for publication at roughly the same time he wrote his advocacy for the civilization program Some Hints & Observations. In his essay the botanist explicitly references his rapport with Creeks during his lengthy sojourn, assuring Secretary of War Henry Knox and other administration officials of his intimate familiarity with the disposition of their Minds; these interactions convinced Bartram of the Creeks’ strong inclination toward our modes of civilization. Moreover, Bartram again touted the developmental prospects of Creek territory, envisioning Creeks practicing sheep husbandry on the commons encircling their towns, cattle and horse husbandry on "a natural Range for inumerable [sic] Stocks, and even cultivating Cotton enough to clothe themselves, to satisfy the demands of the United States, & to supply foreign Markets.³¹ When considering his vehement refutation of Native displacement alongside both his support of the civilization program and his description of the abundance of cultivable resources on the road to West Florida, it seems quite plausible that Bartram consciously included the description of resources because he envisioned the Creeks already living there extracting and utilizing them to enrich themselves as yeoman farmers, or even plantation magnates. Bartram’s unsolicited commentary on the agricultural potential of Native lands could be read as promotional literature designed to inspire white settlement of Creek lands, until one considers the gentle Quaker’s deep-seated convictions regarding indigenous rights of occupation. It seems likely that the industrious inhabitants" Bartram foresaw cultivating the Okmulgee, Flint, and Chattahoochee River regions were the Creeks themselves.

In late July the merchant’s column passed out of Creek territory and into British West Florida. After reaching Tensaw Bluff and camping for the evening, Bartram separated from his caravan retinue and proceeded by boat for Mobile. The river islands he passed were all well cultivated having on them extensive farms and some good habitations, chiefly the property of French gentlemen, who reside in the city, which was more pleasant and healthy than the islands themselves.³² Upon arriving in Mobile, Bartram immediately inquired into passage to Manchac, a British settlement and trading post on the Mississippi River, but quick conveyance was not forthcoming. Bartram was eager to bear witness to the Father of the Waters, and his inability to secure a sloop and depart immediately seems ill fated for both the Quaker and his audience. Bartram’s enigmatic ocular illness began afflicting him as he tarried in the vicinity of Mobile, handicapping his ability to see and compose rich imagery of the flora and fauna he encountered in the Mobile watershed, Pensacola, and the Lower Mississippi Valley.

On August 5 he returned upriver to Tensaw Bluff. Tensaw Bluff often functioned as a waystation for trading caravans traveling down the Indian Trading Path en route to the Gulf Coast, which indeed was how Bartram found himself there.³³ The bluff was the seat of Major Farmer, and Bartram went to make good my engagements, in consequence of an invitation from that worthy gentleman, to spend some days with his family.³⁴ Farmer was Major Robert Farmar, the one-time de facto military governor of West Florida who presided over the colony’s affairs until the arrival of its first appointed governor, his bitter rival George Johnstone.³⁵ After enjoying the company of the Farmars for a few days, Bartram borrowed a light canoe from the major and embarked northward on the Tensaw River. Traveling ten miles upstream from the Farmar plantation, Bartram landed at a bluff, where he disembarked and came presently to old fields, where I observed ruins of ancient habitations, there being [an] abundance of Peach and Fig trees, loaded with fruit, which proffered a refreshing dessert and a cool respite from an arduous, hot day of rowing. He marveled at the Canes and Cypress trees of astonishing magnitude on the shores of the Tensaw River, which he considered indicative of an excellent soil.³⁶ Bartram’s penchant for allusions to agricultural improvement and the marvelous edibles bequeathed by the alluvial soils obviously extended below the thirty-first parallel into West Florida.

Somewhat ironically, just before the affliction that would hinder his ability to perceive nature’s splendor set in, Bartram made one of his most celebrated botanical discoveries and roamed through a verdant terrestrial paradise whose description has captivated generations of readers. As he glided across the surface of the Tensaw River, Bartram was dumbstruck by the sudden materialization of a blooming plant, gilded with the richest golden yellow. The naturalist had stumbled upon a new species of Oenothera, or largeflower evening primrose, which he identified as rising erect seven or eight feet and adorned with large flowers of a splendid perfect yellow colour, the contracted buds of which exhibited a reddish flesh color, inclining to vermilion on the petals’ underside. Bartram labeled this aesthetic marvel perhaps the most pompous and brilliant herbaceous plant yet known to exist.³⁷ The current curator of the Bartram Gardens in Philadelphia, Joel T. Fry, has pointed out that despite his glowing characterization of the Oenothera grandiflora and efforts to cultivate the plant in his garden on the banks of the Schuylkill River and market it as fashionable to British gardeners by sending a specimen to Fothergill, the plant never caught on commercially. The vast majority of the world’s population of this stunning flower can be found in the vicinity of Stockton, Alabama, on the riverbanks where Bartram first encountered it.³⁸ The morning after he discovered the new primrose, Bartram passed under a canopy of fragrant magnolias that inspired some of his more grandiose turns of phrase. The sylvan scene he recounted among the pompous Magnolia [which] reigns [as the] sovereign of the forests channels an Arcadian majesty. Reclining on the bank, Bartram stared upward at aromatic Illicium groves, spellbound by the radiated wings of the Magnolia . . . each branch supporting an expanded umbrella, superbly crested with a silver plume, fragrant blossom, or crimson studded strobile and fruits. Balancing grandiose prose with the straightforward economic assessments representative of his western journey, Bartram denoted low land on the bank of the Tombigbee River, which he ascended the day after lounging in the magnolia grove, as the richest I ever saw, citing rivercane grown here thirty or forty feet high, and as thick as a man’s arm, or three or four inches in diameter as evidence of hyperfertility.³⁹ The sublime experience in the magnolia grove and the fecundity of the Tombigbee served as a tragic prologue to the most grueling stretch of Bartram’s journey.

After returning to Tensaw Bluff, Bartram felt symptoms of a fever, which in a few days laid me up and became dangerous.⁴⁰ Though he was able to convalesce slightly through the good care and attendance he received with the Farmars, and an excursion into the hill country thirty miles above the plantation (facilitated directly by an enslaved man to pilot [the vessel] and take care of me) provided him with a certain plant of extraordinary medical virtues, the fever persisted and threatened to befoul the rest of Bartram’s survey. Not to be deterred from his goal of seeing the Mississippi, Bartram hurried to Mobile upon receiving word of an opportunity to Manchac, although my health is not established. The boat to the Pearl River would not be ready to depart for several days after his arrival in Mobile, so he decided to take a brief trip to the river Perdedo, for the purpose of securing the remains of a wreck. Upon viewing the wreck, the captain of Bartram’s vessel apparently insisted on pushing eastward to Pensacola. Bartram claimed that his arrival at West Florida’s seat of government was merely accidental and undesigned. He had left his reference letters in Mobile and wanted to conceal his avocations to avert any delay, but his name was well known to West Florida naturalist and Pensacola garrison physician Dr. John Lorimer, who requested an audience and also pushed to acquaint governor [Peter] Chester of [his] arrival, as the colonial official would also want to meet with Bartram.⁴¹ Bartram was keen to return to Mobile and fearful that he would again miss out on passage to the Mississippi River, so much so that he rejected the governor’s generous offer to bear his expenses and provide him with room and board while extending his botanical survey into the environs of Pensacola. Chester understood Bartram’s strong desire to move on