Upper Mississippi Scenery
from Chapter XLIII of "Floral home; or, First years of Minnesota.
Early sketches, later settlements, and further developments" by Harriet E. Bishop.
In which: Minnehaha is compared to Venus de Medici
One of the two thousand five hundred excursionists to the Falls of St. Anthony, in June, 1854, in commemoration of the union by rail of the Atlantic and Mississippi was a writer for "Putnam's Monthly." His remarks: "In returning from St. Anthony to St. Paul, we all left our vehicles to follow the wheel-plow, as drawn by six noble yoke of oxen; it cleared the tough turf, and upheaved it for the first time, for the sun and hand of man to do their joint fructifying work upon it. The oxen (not the men) looked like the natural lords of the soil. It was sublime of plowing. When will our poets white their bucolics?
"Our next sight, and hard by the plowing, was one of nature's perfect works--the falls of a creek, poetically called by the Indians, 'Minnehaha'--laughing waters. Miss Bremer say s they deserve their picture, song, and tales. So perfect is this fall in color, in form so graceful, so finished, that by some mysterious accident of association, it brought to my mind at once, the Venus de Medici.
