Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/55

 up the St. Peter's River to the Lower Sioux Agency, where the Sioux were to receive by this expedition their annual payments from the United States. The Governor of Minnesota, Alexander Ramsey, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northwest, and an Indian agent newly appointed by President Lincoln, were officially of the party, and there were at starting near a hundred passengers, including Thoreau and Horace Mann. Among them, too, was a nephew of Mrs. Alcott, Rev. Joseph May, recently graduated from Harvard and afterward settled as a pastor in Philadelphia, who had been trying to find Thoreau in St. Anthony. On June 17 this voyage began, and this is Thoreau's account of it:

June 17, six Start up the Minnesota River in the Frank Steele. River valley till nine, very broad between the bluffs and hills; banks some six feet high, with much handsome but weedy grass, mixed with roses; but soon sloping to low, wet, and reedy meadows or shallow lagoons behind the river, which is some ten rods wide, fringed with