Considerant and Brisbane left Lake Erie April 30, 1853, where ice was still floating in the lake and the trees had not yet budded, for Texas. The first day they went to Cleveland, from there to Wellsville, to Canton, and then to Cincinnati. Here their arrival was announced in the papers in the following way: Albert Brisbane and Victor Considerant, two of the most eminent living Socialists, of the Fourier school, were in Cincinnati on the 5 inst. Both of these Gentlemen are able, popular advocates of the Phalansterian system of the great French associationists above named. They are on their way to Northern Texas and the Red River country, for the purpose of selecting from twelve to fifteen thousand acres of good land, with a view to the importation of a colony of French and American Socialists.[5] 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]