Beautiful Savannah in the Pine Woods of Florida

“Florida is, in a great degree, a dark and sterile wilderness, yet with spots of beauty and of loveliness, with charms that cannot be forgotten. Her swamps and everglades, the dens of alligators, and lurking places of the desperate savage, gloom the thoughts of the wary traveller, whose mind is cheered and lit to admiration, when in the solitary pine woods, where he hears nought but the echoing notes of the sand-hill cranes, or the howling wolf, he suddenly breaks out into the open savannahs, teeming with their myriads of wild flowers, and palmettos.” George Catlin painted this landscape in the winter of 1834-35, during a visit to Florida. (Catlin, Letters and Notes, vol. 2, no. 36, 1841, reprint 1973; Truettner, The Natural Man Observed, 1979)