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Preface:“Fields of Vision” In 1791, the naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) published a long four-part narrative of a 2,400-mile journey made in 1773 to 1777. Raised as a Quaker, Bartram was a child of plain dress, but the title of his book reads like an elaborate eye chart: Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions,Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. Published in Philadelphia, Bartram’s Travels recounted Native American homelands, new settlements of colonists in Georgia, and two new British colonies: East and West Florida. He devoted entire sections to natural communities, including many floral and faunal wonders. Bartram was not a stranger to the Southeast. He had attempted livelihood as an itinerant merchant along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, and in the winter of 1765–1766, he explored part of the St. Johns River, Florida, with his ailing father, the botanist John Bartram. On his own and in the company of traders, in the 1770s, Bartram traveled the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to the royal province of East Florida, through the southeastern interior to the Mississippi River. As a travelogue , his book described the frontier, the eighteenth-century environment of eight present states: North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. As a form of autobiography, Bartram’s published account is a scientific adventure, in which Bartram the late bloomer matures as an advocate for Indian peoples and the species on which they were dependent. An early example of American nature writing, Bartram’s Travels quickly became a classic, termed in today’s literary criticism as a form of genrefusion . History, science, and prose poetry come together in passages that have defied imitation. xii Preface A weighty book, Bartram’s Travels became an immediate success in Europe. The author’s vision influenced English romantic poets, French novelists, and German armchair travelers who savored his complex descriptions of the exotic Florida karst, Indian peoples, and landscapes of great beauty. Of special importance were Bartram’s accounts of wetlands. To his word pictures, he often added sound tracks—Creek flute music, calling frogs, wind sighing through the trees. Bartram lived a long life, and, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he became the grand old man of American natural history. He advised Thomas Jefferson and mentored the first generation of naturalists eager to follow “Bartram’s track” and explore the natural wealth of the young nation. The Bartram Trail Conference, Inc. (BTC), founded in 1976, seeks to identify and mark the corridor of Bartram’s southern journey and encourages the study, preservation, and interpretation of the William Bartram heritage at both cultural and natural sites in Bartram Trail states. The BTC works to foster scholarship related to Bartram and his legacy, including biennial meetings of members at selected locations along the Bartram Trail corridor. The papers in this volume are products of BTC meetings and related symposiums held in Gainesville, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; Augusta, Georgia; Auburn, Alabama; Cashiers, North Carolina; and Spanish Fort, Alabama. The authors of the essays hail from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including history , literature, archaeology, botany, library science, and education. They represent a variety of approaches to the study of William Bartram’s work and his eighteenth-century world. In keeping with the aims of the BTC, they employ new ways of looking at Bartram’s Travels and disseminate their findings to wider audiences. Chapters in part 1 of this book follow Bartram the traveler throughout Georgia and across the large royal province of West Florida to the Mississippi River. Edward J. Cashin situates Bartram the colonist in 1773 and the political context of the American Revolution. Robert Scott Davis focuses on a Georgia Quaker community of interest to Bartram, who was raised in the Religious Society of Friends. Bartram had much to say on the zoological food chain, but Kathryn E. Holland Braund reminds us of the traveler’s need for repast. Robert J. Malone puts a face and name on scientist William Dunbar, one of the successful planters unidentified in Bartram’s account. Bartram’s Travels is a dense book. Here, part 2 provides tools for readers of that book. Stephanie Volmer discusses Bartram’s expository style with respect to natural history, a...

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