Early in the year 1854 Frederick Law Olmsted, a young New England journalist, crossed the Louisiana border and set off on horseback into the teeth of the Texas winter. In A Journey through Texas he recounts his travels along the Old San Antonio Road through East Texas' piney woods, the dry prairies further west, the chaparral of South Texas, the coastal prairies, and the rich bottomlands around Houston and Galveston.

Olmsted does not romanticize the discomforts of his trip--the monotonous food, crude housing, wet and dry northers, rough companions--yet his book reflects...