Wilderness in the City: Summer 2013

 

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

July 27th  Saturday 10 to 12 Noon- Bring a notebook, pen and camera…

 

Join us July 27th, 2013 at the Elizabeth Fries Ellet Interpretive Trail for an excursion in the six distinct biomes at the Richard T. Anderson Conservation Area.

Ellet visited Minnesota in 1852. When she returned to New York she penned her book Summer Rambles in the West: a fashionable travelogue popluar in her day describing her trip to the new territories.

Thorea visited Minnesota in 1861; his last trip before he died. He traveled down the Minnesota River past Shakopee, what would later become Eden Prairie to the east, the same view Ellet had seen nine years before. 

Both Ellet and Thoreau traveled on a steamboat side-wheel packet ship down the Minnesota River. Because of the narrowness of the river, Thoreau was able to botanize from the ship: copious notes on local flora. But, it wasn't just flora that caught his attention, but the fauna…blackbirds, blue herons, thrushes and turtles and their tracks in the sandy banks of the river.