The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). rn VOLUME XVII. Later National Literature, Part II.
XIV. Travellers and Explorers, 1846–1900§ 26. Travels in the Older States
Frederick Law Olmsted was specially interested in the South and in 1856 he wrote A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on Their Economy; in 1857, A Journey through Texas; in 1861, The Cotton Kingdom (made up from the two preceding books); and in 1863, A Journey in the Back Country. A very scarce item is a Southerner’s impressions of the North in Sketches on a Tour Through the Northern and Eastern States, the Canadas, and Nova Scotia (1840) by J. C. Meyers, one traveller who was not impelled towards the Golden Gate. Burroughs in the Catskills and Thoreau in his favourite haunts and on his Yankee Trip in Canada (1866) hardly need mention, but there were some other outdoor men along the eastern part of the continent. Lucius L. Hubbard in 1884 wrote Woods and Lakes of Maine, a Trip from Moosehead Lake to New Brunswick in a Birch Canoe; Charles A. J. Farrar in 1886, Down in the West Branch, or Camps and Tramps around Katahdin; and another, From Lake to Lake, or A Trip across the Country, A Narrative of the Wilds of Maine.
Although J. T. Headley wrote Letters from the Backwoods and the Adirondacks in 1850, and others gave accounts of the splendid “wilderness” of Northern New York, it remained for W. H. H. Murray, a clergyman, to stir up sportsmen and travellers on this topic with his enthusiastic book on the region, Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp Life in the Adirondacks (1869), which earned for him the title of “Adirondack” Murray.