Berlandier's Journey to Mexico During the Years 1828 to 1834 shades in the subtle nuances of the natural & cultural history of the region

By María Eugenia Guerra

If, in the course of a scholarly nod at the City on the occasion of her 250th birthday, you are educating yourself on local and regional history, read through the two-volume set of the French naturalist Jean Louis Berlandier's Journey to Mexico During the Years 1828 to 1834.

Commissioned by Auguste Pyrame de Candolle, who compiled a book on the plants of the world, Berlandier harvested botanical samples across Mexico and Texas from the time he landed at Panuco , Veracruz in 1826 until about 1828, attached to the Mexican Boundary Commission. His observations and writings after 1828, it is reported, were undertaken on his own.

Berlandier, who studied botany in Geneva , was born in 1805 between Fort de l'Ecluse, France and Geneva , Switzerland .

He collected plants extensively around Panuco, Tampico, and Tuxpán and in the Huasteca and Cuernavaca area as he moved on to Mexico City to join the expedition under the command of Manuel de Mier y Terán.

He collected botanical samples around Villa de San Agustín de Laredo in February 1828. The narrative of this naturalist as to the terrain, foliage, seasons, crops, inhabitants, and the river presents a good picture of a yet to be well developed area when the city was but 78 years old. There are also narratives of settlements that have had such bearing on the settling of Laredo , including Revilla (Cd. Guerrero), Palafox, and Candela, and as brief as those narratives are, they offer little morsels of detail, the kind savored by those who are enamored of the history of the settlement of this region. Berlandier, who wrote well before a seed of Buffel Grass made it to Texas , details the invasion of shrubs onto the native prairie grasslands of this region.

He described in wonderful detail the terrain and foliage around Candela and Lampazos, the mining of the nearby sierra, and a brief vignette about how the Lipan Apaches forced the residents of Candela to retreat to the Mesa de los Cartujanos to save themselves.

He wrote of fixing the coordinates of a campsite by one of the moons of Jupiter, the repair of wagons by carpenters, how it was possible to settle the sediment in a tub of river water by throwing a hot, grilled nopal pad into the water. The powder of two ground almonds also worked to make sediment settle to the bottom of the container, Berlandier reported. He wrote of the August winds in Laredo, the prevailing winds from the east, southeast, and south, winds he said were “hotter from four to six o'clock in the afternoon than when the sun passes through the meridian.”

I remind myself now and again as I read Berlandier's two volumes that he made his observations and his travels by horseback and that the original manuscript was written in French.

Berlandier and Rafael Chovell published a subsequent Diario de viaje de la Comisión de Límites (1850). During the Mexican War Berlandier oversaw the hospitals in Matamoros and served as an interpreter. In 1851, he drowned in the San Fernando River near Matamoros.

I was fortunate enough to have been given a re-print of the rare two-volume set as a gift two years ago, copy 115 of 150. The book's colophon is signed by its translators, Sheilah M. Ohlendorf, Josette M. Bigelow, and Mary M. Standifer and the writers of the botanical notes, C.H. and Katherine Muller.

Journey to Mexico During the Years 1828 to 1834 was published by the Texas State Historical Association in cooperation with the Center for Studies in Texas History at UT-Austin. You can read the books at the Laredo Public Library's Historical Collection.