How few men venture out
beyond the last
Familiar mark upon the well-known trail!
And he who has
the courage to go past
This sign that cannot in his mission fail.
He will
have left at least one mark behind
To guide some other brave exploring
mind.
--from "Me Path of Life" by Charles H. Meiers, published in the
Hampton Columbian Magazine, January 1912
In 1861, writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau made a journey to Minnesota, It was his longest trip outside Massachusetts. At the urging of his doctor, Thoreau came to our state for a cure of his illness, tuberculosis. In the 1860s, it was a commonly held belief that Minnesota's fresh air could cure tuberculosis. Of his 33 days in Minnesota, the author of Walden spent nine of them in the Lake Calhoun area. Thoreau's traveling companion was a 17-year old naturalist by the name of Horace Mann, Jr. Mann was the son of the famed teacher and educator. Their stay in the Lake Calhoun area was at Mrs. Hamilton's boarding house.
In his journal, Thoreau left some notes, mostly focusing on plants and animals. Young Horace Mann wrote more than a dozen letters back to his mother in Massachusetts. This is what he wrote about his experiences .
Lake Calhoun Minn. Friday June 7, 1861
Dear Mother,
You see by the date of this letter that we are staying at a house on the edge of Lake Calhoun. It is a beautiful sheet of water, perhaps a mile and a half or three quarters the longest way and nearly a mile the other way in breadth; it has an outlet by which it empties itself into Lake Harriet, which lies a little ways to the SE of here, and that again into the Minnehaha and goes over the falls. We are staying at the house of a Mrs. Hamilton, a widow, and one of the first settlers near this lake. The house is surrounded with very thick woods which is full of great big mosquitoes (sic), so when you walk in them, particularly near twilight, they swarm around you in such a cloud that you can hardly see through them. There are also a great many pigeons in the woods, back of the house, (though I should hardly know them from a mosquito here by size) which are breeding, and 1 found the nest of one this afternoon which had but one egg in it which I took. The lake is full of fishes a-rid we have them at every meal almost. I went into St. Anthony this morning where I put some birds and clams in alcohol and got some blotting paper to press flowers with and I have just been putting some away to press under the bed post. The trees around here are not very large ones, and the fires seem to have run through the woods all around here and killed a great many of the trees. The "oak openings" on the prairies consist of small oaks -cattered around at some distance (I to 10 rods) from one another and where the fire has not run for several years the hazel bushes spring up; also little oaks and aspens, and after a little longer basswood trees ... It is pretty wann weather here all the time now. We had a thunder storm last night but I did not know it till I got up this morning. W. Thoreau and I went in sw g this afternoon and then we went to walk and we came to a pond hole near some woods which was full of shells and frogs... Mr. Thoreau continues to get better and I am very well of course. We drink lake water here. I will write more before I send this letter, so Good Night,
Your loving son Horace Mann
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The Thoreau party later returned to Walden's Pond. A year later, on May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age 44.
He left our neighborhood a spiritual gift, the poem, 'A Different Drummer," which he wrote earlier in his career, but which could be describing our neighborhood:
"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?
"If a man not keep pace, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
"Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
- Henry David Thoreau
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More information about Thoreau and Mann's travels is in Thoreau's Minnesota Journey: Thoreau's Notes on the Journey West, or The Letters of Horace Mann Jr., edited by Walter Harding, Thoreau Society Booklet #16, 1962.
Thoreau's Minnesota Diary
June 5 - Lake Calhoun. Hear s@pe, loon and orchard oriole.
June 6 - Young eagle eating blue jay over an island in Minnetonka Lake. Alum root in bloom at last,
June 7 - Lake Calhoun area. Hoary puccoon in flower. The prevailing goldenrod on these prairies is the Solidago rigida (stiff goldenrod), judging from the rudimentary leaf and withered stem and head.
June 11 - Lake Calhoun. Loons said to nest on old muskrat houses. Found a cluster of wild crabapple trees.