By Rob Pavey
Columbia County Bureau Chief
Web-posted June 21, 1996 at 4 p.m.

On a spring afternoon in March 1773, William Bartram left his native Philadelphia to explore the Southeast.

Intent on recording the region's natural history and abundant plant and animal life, he headed south to Georgia and beyond.

His observations, including descriptions of Augusta, the Savannah River and nearby Colonial settlements, yielded what has become one of the most detailed accounts of the region's early history.

The Quaker naturalist, for whom Georgia's Bartram Trail is named, offers some of the earliest glimpses of Colonial Augusta, as detailed in Travels, his meticulous record of his journey through the region.

Bartram already had visited Georgia in 1765 and 1766 with his father, John Bartram, who was appointed Botanist Royal in America by King George III.

At 35, the younger Bartram sailed from Philadelphia again, traveling to Charleston, S.C., then to Savannah, southwest Georgia and eventually to Augusta and beyond.

He usually traveled alone, but sometimes was accompanied by merchants, surveyors and American Indians, whom he called friends. He moved among the trading outposts and frontier settlements, recording the abundance of nature.

Harvard University's Gordon DeWolf, a scholar of Bartram's works, wrote that William was the third of John Bartram's seven sons. Benjamin Franklin offered to teach young William the printing trade in 1753. In 1756, at age 17, he instead became apprenticed to a merchant and later worked in his uncle's trading store on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.

Bartram's artistic abilities began to flourish in the 1760s when he sent friends in England detailed illustrations of American flora and fauna. The drawings came to the attention of John Fothergill, a physician who hired Bartram to find and categorize plants and animals of the New World.

Bartram's published account of his journey, hailed both as a work of literature and an accurate account of natural and cultural history, includes observations on early Augusta:

``The village of Augusta is situated on a rich and fertile plain, in the Savannah River; the buildings are near its banks and extend nearly two miles up to the cataracts, or falls, which are formed by the first chain of rocky hills, through which this famous river forces itself.''

He further described the gathering of the warriors and chiefs of the Creek and Cherokee nations. They assembled in Augusta that year for a congress to discuss a demand from the merchants of Georgia for 2 million acres of their lands to ``offset accumulated debts.''

He described the encounter: ``The Creeks, being a powerful and proud spirited people, their young warriors were unwilling to submit to so large a demand,'' Bartram wrote, ``and their conduct evidently betrayed a disposition to dispute the grounds by force of arms, and they could not at first be brought to listen to reason and amicable terms.''

However, ``the cool and deliberate counsels of the ancient and venerable chiefs, enforced by liberal presents of suitable goods, were too powerful inducements for them any longer to resist, and finally prevailed. The treaty concluded in unanimity, peace and good order.''

Bartram's voyage, begun in 1773, ended in Philadelphia in 1777. Bartram published a collection of engravings, Elements of Botany, in 1803; and later joined the Lewis and Clark expedition into the new territory of Louisiana, at President Jefferson's request.

Bartram died in 1823.

Georgia's portion of the Bartram Trail winds 220 miles. In 1976, a group of civic-minded Augustans spent $2,000 to mark the trail near Augusta, which has since been repeatedly bisected by River Watch Parkway, housing development along the Savannah River and other modern obstructions.