Wilderness in the City: Summer Writing Tour: Ellet’s Ramblings & Thoreau’s Notes

What Ellet wrote in 1852, Thoreau in 1861, and what we write in Summer 2013

Ellet in 1852 and Thoreau in 1861 traveled down the Minnesota River past Shakopee and the land to the east, now called Eden Prairie, Thoreau in a side-wheeled steam packet called the Franklin Steele and Ellet in a flat river boat called a bateau.

Onboard the Franklin Steele were notables such as Governor Alexander Ramsey and his wife, Indian Agent Thomas J. Galbraith, speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and the Deputy Sherriff of Ramsay County, and Thoreau’s traveling companion, Horace Mann, an American Educational reformist and politician who served in the Massachusetts legislature. In all there were 100 people onboard, including 25 to 30 ladies.

The river ride was billed as the Great Pleasure Excursion including a live band, three meals a day, a saloon, barbershop, communal washing facilities and staterooms, if you were lucky enough to nab one. Mann wrote home to his mother that the river’s “crookedness” made the journey a series of “intricate maneuvers” which resulted in the trip taking much longer than he had anticipated. And the narrowness of the river resulted in trees and bushes falling into the steamboat. That wasn’t all bad, because Thoreau had the ability to botanize from the deck, such flora and fauna as daisy fleabane and honewort, warbling vireos, turtles and rose-breasted grosbeaks. Thoreau wrote, “I could pluck almost any plant on the bank from the boat.” Thoreau, was an amateur botanist.

The author Louisa May Alcott, also a Concord Massachusetts resident, said this about Thoreau, " he used to come smiling up to his neighbors, to announce that the bluebirds had arrived.” Evidently Thoreau’s penmanship was atrocious and his use of antiquated botanical names confounded present day botanists, nevertheless they gathered and compared his notes with current day observations to determine a “relationship between flowering times and rising winter and spring temperatures.” When compared to scientifically gathered data Thoreau’s notes reveal  temperatures that have risen four degrees and 200 less plant species today than there were in the 1850’s.

Ellet, who by today’s criteria would be considered a very popular commercial writer, published in the popular Dime Novels of that era, Edgar Allen Poe’s Broadway Journal and the fancy leather bound, embossed, engraved and hand painted Lady’s Godey’s Books, a precursor to the Lady’s Home Journal, and her own collection of books: Summer Rambles in the West, Women of the American Revolution, Pioneer Women of the West, The Practical Housekeeper and so many others.

Ellet described her Bateau voyage on the Minnesota River as a mode of transit particularly Western, yet with the “charm of novelty and romance.” After being detained a day on a steamboat grounded on a sand-bar, the group accompanying her decided to disembark and paddle a less “devious course” in a Bateau. Serpentine is how she described the Minnesota River with luxuriant undulating wild grass along its banks and an abundance of wild cherry bushes and swarms of mosquitoes.

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