ABSTRACT
Travel literature constitutes a literature of public life and the visible landscape. Even though traveling women had greater access to private domestic spaces than did traveling men, in fact most travel books focused on public life in the interior. Travelers' individual motives were of far less moment to their accounts than were their distinctive capabilities as observers. From the earliest encounters with America—whether those of Leif Eriksson, Prince Madoc, or Christopher Columbus—travelers of course bore motives with them to America. Nineteenth-century travelers found the prairie to be a down-in experience of delicate detail. For nineteenth-century travelers, the mounds were invisible from the trains and rarely glimpsed from the steamboats; only to foot and horseback travelers were the mounds a compelling landscape feature. Tourist literature's tangled representation of the tribal populations of the interior is intensified when it turns to the construction of a visitable past, that same past that nineteenth-century travel literature so fully offers.
