André Michaux's Travels into Kentucky, 1793-96; François André Michaux's…
"André Michaux's Travels into Kentucky, 1793-96; François André Michaux's…" by André Michaux and François André Michaux is a collection of travel journals written in the late 18th and early 19th century. The work chronicles scientific and exploratory journeys across the trans-Appalachian West, weaving meticulous botanical observations with firsthand notes on routes, rivers, settlements, and the realities of frontier travel, occasionally touching on contemporary political aims. The opening of the volume presents a
transcriber’s note and an editor’s preface that sketches the lives of the Michauxs, explains the series’ purpose, and frames the journals’ significance for Western settlement, botany, and travel conditions. It then launches into André Michaux’s 1793 diary, following him from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and down the Ohio toward Kentucky, where he records dense plant lists alongside stops at Gallipolis, Limestone, Washington, Lexington, Danville, and Louisville. In Kentucky he meets figures such as Benjamin Logan, Isaac Shelby, and George Rogers Clark while discreetly advancing a French diplomatic errand, before returning east via the Wilderness Road and the Valley of Virginia. Subsequent early entries cover his 1795 push from the Carolinas into East Tennessee, the hazardous Cumberland crossing to Nashville, and back through Kentucky to Louisville and the salt licks. He then heads toward Vincennes and the Illinois country—Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and Fort Massac—intermixing candid notes on French villages, game, saltworks, and river travel with exhaustive botanical catalogues, concluding this opening portion amid his late-1795 Tennessee and Cumberland river observations. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
André Michaux's Travels into Kentucky, 1793-96; François André Michaux's Travels West of Alleghany Mountains, 1802; Thaddeus Mason Harris's Journal of a Tour Northwest of Alleghany Mountains, 1803.
Original Publication
Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904.
Series Title
Early western travels, 1748-1846, v. 3
Credits
Carol Brown, Greg Bergquist and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Reading Level
Reading ease score: 66.0 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read.
