In the years before the Civil War, Olmsted was a travel writer and reporter for the New-York Daily Times (now the New York Times). From 1852 to 1854 he traveled through different parts of the American South, documenting his experiences in a series of dispatches to the newspaper, which were collected into three book-length volumes. In 1861, during the first year of the Civil War, he edited and abridged those volumes into the collection Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom.