While descriptions of nature and the physical landscape are an important component of most travel narratives, those descriptions-even those describing the same region-can differ dramatically, depending upon a traveller's politics, interests, or background. Descriptions of the natural environment are particularly prevalent in accounts written by travellers through the American South. However, those travellers whose accounts depict the natural landscape of the South seem less to be describing the landscape than using it in particular, highly politicized, ways. What I would like to do in this paper is look at three of the most widely-read narratives written by travellers through the American South-William Bartram, Frederick Law Olmsted, and John Muir-and investigate the ways in which each of these representative writers uses his descriptions of nature for a particular end.
William Bartram, whose Travels was published in 1791, was primarily interested in collecting botanical samples and shipping them to his benefactor. For Bartram, the natural environment of the South was a huge, largely unexplored, collection of raw materials or resources to be discovered, labeled, and utilized; Bartram was looking for "rare and useful productions of nature." The South in Bartram's view was an area ripe for exploitation, and his descriptions of the southern landscape reflect this interest.
Frederick Olmsted, travelling sixty years later, was also interested in putting nature to use, but the wilder areas he travelled through proved to him that the economic system of the South-namely, slavery-was inefficient compared to the yeoman tradition of his native New England. Many of the descriptions of the physical landscape in Olmsted's accounts are of land that has been abused or neglected by slave-owners. For Olmsted, the natural environment of the American South served primarily as physical evidence of an inefficient economic system.
Although John Muir travelled through the South only a few years after Olmsted, his account, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf was not published until 1916, two years after his death. The untamed and dangerous physical environment that Muir described, however, serves as testament to the need to preserve areas from exploitation. The beauty of the uncultivated areas through which Muir walked proved for him that society should not exploit the natural environment. While Bartram found beauty in the possibility of productive use, and Olmsted described the ugliness of land used inefficiently, Muir represented the South's nature as beautiful because of its lack of development. For Muir, the southern landscape served as proof that nature should be left alone or developed as little as possible.
While each writer is supposedly describing the same physical landscape, the natural environment of the American South serves in each account as evidence of very different propositions, so much so that it seems less the Southern environment which is described than the writers' ideology.
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