WHAT FOLLOWS IS A DESCRIPTION OF THE COUNTRY BY FREDERICK LAW OLMSTEAD IN HIS 1854 JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS AS A CORRESPONDENT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES.

APRIL 1854

"We rode before evening to the Medina, twenty-five miles. Imagine, for the country, a rolling sheet of the finest grass, sprinkled thick with bright, many-hued flowers, with here and there a Liveoak, and an occasional patch of Mesquite trees, which might be pictured as old neglected peach-orchards.

The surface undulates, and the road leads over much elevated ground, offering very extended views. Northward, the hills, a part of the long range which stretches from the Colorado to beyond the Nueces, swell gradually higher, until they end in a blue and mountainous line, sharply cutting the cool northern horizon. In the south, they slope gently downwards, into the lap of the Medina. Beyond, they again rise gently, covered at last with a soft, hazy forest, across which the view faints away into the sky, flushed at sundown by the red smoke of an invisible burning prairie. The Medina is the very idol of purity. The road crosses upon white limestone rocks, which give a peculiar brilliancy to its emerald waters. It runs knee deep and twenty or thirty yards wide, with a rapid descent."

AND ANOTHER DESCRIPTION BY GEORGE W. HUGHES, A TOPOGRAPHICAL ENGINEER IN HIS 1847 REPORT. (Found in The Life and Diary of Reading Black by Ike Moore)

"....There is a richness and beauty of the country embraced between the Rio San Antonio and the Nueces; beyond which it would be no exaggeration to say that 'tis all barren..."

"All the rivers between San Antonio and the Nueces may be characterized as beautiful and noble streams of clear and excellent water, and many of them would afford an almost unlimited amount of water power..... The country may be described as a rolling prairie, pretty well wooded, and after leaving the Medina eminently beautiful and picturesque, covered at most seasons of the year with a luxuriant growth of grass, and abounding with game. At almost every rod we startled up herds of deer, and flocks of partridges and wild turkey. The reverse of the picture is, that it abounds with venomous reptiles, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and tarantulas... It is melancholy, in traversing this rich and beautiful country, so eminently fitted for the support of human life, to find it but one vast solitude, undisturbed save by some wary traveler or trader, who pursues his stealthy course at night, with the hope (often vain) of eluding the crafty savage, who looks out from his mountain home like an eagle from its eyrie, watching for his victim. But it requires only a slight effort of the imagination to fancy it peopled with an industrious and teeming population, its heights crowned with human habitations, its fertile valleys in cultivation, and its plains covered with bleating flocks and lowing herds."

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