Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts 2.djvu/85

 father, in his pasture, where I found it first myself,—quite a cluster of them.

Diverging a little from his direct line of travel, and looking forward to what he could not live to see, Thoreau, while having access to the Minneapolis and St. Paul libraries, copied a passage or two bearing on the future overland way to the Pacific coast. It was three years after this, and two years after his death, that his friends of the John Brown family left their forest home in the Adirondacs, and crossed the Plains to California, travelling slowly with ox-teams, as the early settlers in Ohio and Illinois had done, half a century before. But in 1864 the necessities of war had hastened the construction of a railroad to California, and the preliminary reports, suggested by Benton, the Missouri statesman, which attracted Thoreau in 1861, were everywhere read with interest. He copied on the back of Mrs. Mann's note, already quoted in full, what follows:

Pacific Railroad Reports (Stephens) Vol. 12, Part 2. J. G. Cooper on the Botany of the Route.