It was here, also, that they met several of their old friends. Considerant refers to “our good and old friend Gingembre,” who was living in a small house surrounded with large trees, which had been built in eight days by Gingembre and his two sons. The house was dubbed “Gingembree—Box.” John Allen, another leading socialist, met them and promised to sell everything within eight days after he had received notification of the location of the new colony and with his sons join them immediately.[6]
From Cincinnati their journey led them to Patriot, where they bade farewell to the last friends they were to meet, as they thought, until they returned to New York. Carrying with them only saddles and the barest necessities of a horseback journey to Texas, they embarked on a steamship for Fort Smith. They sailed down the Mississippi river to the mouth of the Arkansas and up the Arkansas to Little Rock, and later continued to Fort Smith, where they purchased horses. Considerant was amazed at the vast spaces of the West. Again and again he breaks his narrative to tell of the seemingly impossible stretches of forest, stream, and mountains. At the frontier, he is charmed by the contrast between society of the fort and that of the surrounding country. He says,
Three social periods could not have been traversed more quickly. At two o’clock that afternoon we were still in the pleasant town which lies beneath Fort Smith.... Less than two hours afterwards, our horses were floundering along in the mire, among dead branches and rotten trunks, through which we traced with great trouble a kind of a road in the primitive forest, whose dense vaults anticipated night upon the swampy bottom lands. It was utterly wild, a deep silent virgin solitude, exhaling rank perfumes, the compact and luxuriant vegetation of arborescent masses, and gigantic vines embracing the large trees in one inextricable network, vegetable generations rising without the interruptions of time and space upon the secular ruins of their dying and dead predecessors.[7]
At the Choctaw Agency he had supper, consisting of “A piece of fish perfectly burnt on one side, but, in compensation uncooked on the other,” onions, and corn. Considerant reported that a negro slave was the instructor of the Indians in the Choctaw country, teaching them the crude elements of agriculture, how to play on the fiddle, and minor industries. Here at the agency he apparently became exhausted by the long rides and was somewhat discouraged over the whole proposition, but Brisbane soon overcame his discouragement and they went on.
Eight days out of Fort Smith the two travellers came to Preston, located on the bluffs of the Red River. On approaching the town, Considerant describes the surrounding country and his personal reactions in the following manner:
The landscape was classic and charming; its character surprised us beyond all expression. In all civilized and cultivated America, I have seen nothing so sweet, so bewitching, so ornate and complete as these solitudes by which we entered the high basin of the Red River. Brisbane and I were struck with the same idea; we seemed to behold, transported into this rich climate and under the splendid firmament of latitude 34, those admirable parks, created and sustained at so great an expense by the high aristocracy of England....
Nature has done all. All is prepared, all is arranged: we have only to raise those buildings which the eye is astonished at not finding; and nothing is appropriated nor separated by the selfish exclusiveness of civilized man; nothing is cramped. What fields of action! What a theatre of manoeuvres for a great colonization operating in the combined and collective mode! What reserves for the cradle of Harmony, and how powerful and prompt would be its developments, if the living and the willing elements of the World of the Future were transported there! A horizon of new ideas, new sentiments and hopes, suddenly opened before me, and I felt baptized in an American faith.[8]
Considerant does not describe the town of Preston and his reaction to frontier life as exhibited there. The town was full of rough and crude fellows, hijackers, murderers, and adventurers of all types. An army officer, passing through the country about the time the above named travelers were there, reported that the town was one of “bad repute.”[9]
From other sources it is learned that Considerant and Brisbane remained in the vicinity of Preston for a few days and then went on toward Clarksville. A letter from Bourland and Manion, a commercial company out from Preston, to a Major de Morse says:
Sir:
Messrs. Albert Brisbane of New York, and Victor Considerant of France, got to our house a few days ago, coming into Texas at Preston, and thence to our bend. They are on their way through northern Texas for the purpose of selecting some several thousand acres of land, with a view to the settlement of a French Colony. They are well pleased with what they have seen. They remained with us a day and night, and we sent a guide with them on their way to Gainesville. They are fine looking, intelligent gentlemen. Their purpose, when they left our house, was, to examine the Cross Timbers country, and on to Fort Worth.[10]
Having reached Texas, Considerant immediately began to write his reactions. “I was expecting something wild and rude, coarse grasses and weeds of enormous height, etc.” However, he was astonished when he found a “superior richness” of the soil, wild oats, numerous tender grasses, large forests, and many prosperous, cultivated fields. Even the land which the Americans rejected as poor, rocky, and of thin soil, which they refused to cultivate, was exactly what the French needed to grow their vines. Grapevines grown on such soil were of “lower growth and much less run to wood and leaf, than the kind which overspreads the bottoms. The latter reaches forth on all sides its gigantic branches and climbs to the summit of the largest trees, balancing between them its clusters of black grapes.”[11] Near Dallas, at the junction of the forks of the Trinity river, Considerant and Brisbane met M. Gouhenans, chief of the first Icarian vanguard, who gathered these wild grapes and made wine out of them, which he sold for a dollar a bottle.[12]