A Day at Minnehaha
by Rev. Prof. E. E. Edwards
Published in The Ladies' repository: a monthly periodical, devoted to literature, arts, and religion./ vol. 20, iss.
11.
In which: disturbingly earnest poetry is commingled with more prosaic doings at the Falls
A DAY at Minnehaha! Can I share the pleasure with my reader? It is not a long journey; it is only a few hundred miles at farthest. You need not wait for the lazy steamboat, or creeping rail-car, but in that other vehicle that no Fulton or Fitch ever invented, compared with whose speed
"The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-winged arrows of light,"
you may traverse the intervening space till you arrive
"At the region of the west wind,
Of the north-west wind, Kewaydin."
You are now in " the land of the Dacotahs." The wilderness, however, has fled away. The landscape is dotted with farms, and the green and quiet valleys are sold by the acre. How prosaic! the pleasant nooks, the groves, the picturesque rocks belong henceforth to Smith, or Jones, or Brown, and no more may the lover of nature, whether he be poet, or plumed Dacotah, find an unappropriated spot. Even in apparent solitude, the traveler may discover, half-hidden among ferns and grasses, the stakes marking the limits of a future city.
But these we do not seek. We have come to look upon the
unvailed face of Laughing-Water, to sit for a summer's day at the feet of Minnehaha.
