"Daisy" Traditional Cache

We think this will be an easy find. Do not attempt to get there from the parkway along the lake. You will find the trolley path between 36th and 34th. The path heading up the little hill from 36th does look like private property, but it is not. This is found down a slope. Therefore it can be slippery. Any strollers or bikes will have to be left waiting for you on the path. Compliments of GS Troop 13936.  Please read the history lesson in the description.

"Daisy" was the nickname of Juliet Gordon Low, the founder of Girl Scouts of America. It is also the name of this cache as well as the travel bug that will start her journey here.

The "Trolley Path" you are on is named because, yes, it once was where the trolley came through. Head South towards 36th and a bit beyond, and you can get a ride on a trolley. Follow it North and down the alley to see where it once passed through.

Lake history

Before Europeans settled this area, Lake Calhoun and environs were populated by Dakota people.  The first recorded village on the Lake was established in 1828 thanks to Cloudman, a Dakota leader and Major Lawrence Taliaferro, who was based at Fort Snelling.  The village, known as Eatonville, was short-lived due to a Dakota-Ojibwe feud.   Lake Calhoun was named in honor of John Caldwell Calhoun, the United States Secretary of War, who sent the Army to survey the area around Fort Snelling in 1817 and who ultimately authorized the construction of Fort Snelling.  The lake was originally called “Mde Ma-ka-ska” by the Dakota, which meant “Lake of the White Earth.”  Settlers later named it “Medoza” or Loon Lake. Much of the land around Lake Calhoun in the 1880s was swampland.  By 1900, only five houses had been built in the area just north of the Minikahda Club.  Dredging of the area occurred during two periods – between 1911-15 and 1923-25.  Virtually all of the park, beaches and boulevards are built on man-made land.

In the 1870s, Lake Calhoun was a resort area.  People came to the area to get away from the city.  In 1874, Louis Menage developed a resort hotel on the western shore of Lake Calhoun, where the Minikahda Club stands today.  The area was called Menage’s Lake Side Park.  Visitors reached the park by a small steamer run by the Motor Line (which also ran trains to the area in hopes of cashing in on the resort business.)  The area was expected to “appeal to the super wealthy who would be able to commute to Minneapolis in their personal carriages.”  Lake Side Park did not attract the super rich.  The area was replatted in 1891 as Mendoza Park.

The Minikahda Club was established in 1898.  In the early days, the club ran their own launch from 31st Street to their dock.  The golf course was opened as a nine hole course, but was expanded to eighteen holes by 1923.

In 1914, the Minneapolis Park Board purchased two launches and offered scheduled trips around Lake Calhoun and into Lake of the Isles, Cedar Lake and Brownie Lake.  Stops on the boat trip included 31st Street, 34th Street, Thomas Avenue, 36th Street (referred to as “Mineral Springs), “Spring Beach” (opposite the Minikahda Club) and Lake Street.  The Park Board also operated a boat concession, renting rowboats and sailboats.  

Reference:  Lanegran, David A. and Sandeen, Ernest R. The Lake District of Minneapolis, A History of the Calhoun-Isles Community.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  1979.

Kettle Lakes

Legend has it that some of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes formed in the footprints of Paul Bunyan's blue ox, Babe. Actually, there are over 15,000 lakes in the state, and many of them formed during the last Ice Age--when glaciers moved back and forth across most of Minnesota. In places, particularly those near ice margins where a lot of sediment was being deposited, large fragments of ice could become buried under layers of dirt. The buried ice would eventually melt and the dirt collapse leaving holes, called kettles, in the ground. The kettles filled with water to become lakes. Areas of Minnesota where a lot of lakes occur may mark the edge of an ice sheet. 

In early 1861, Henry David Thoreau, the renowned naturalist, abolitionist, philosopher. and author of Civil Disobedience and Walden, found his health in decline.  He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in May of that year.  His doctors thought that a change in climate might help him recover.  At that time, Minnesota was marketed as a desirable part of the western frontier with an abundance of fish, game, pristine lakes and fresh air.  Thoreau decided the change would do him good.  He also wanted to study the plants, animals, and American Indian culture before this part of the frontier vanished completely.  break

He took the 17-year-old son of his friend Horace Mann, named Horace Mann, Jr., along to assist him in his frail state.  They left Concord, Massachusetts on May 11, 1861 and took a train across the country to the Mississippi River town of East Dubuque, IL.  They completed their journey by riverboat up the Mississippi River, arriving in St Paul on May 26th.  Thoreau and Mann spent almost a month in the Twin Cities.  They arrived at Mrs. Hamilton’s Boarding House, located near the Lake Calhoun shoreline, on June 5th.  They spent days taking an extensive inventory of the flora and fauna of the area. 

The following is a letter from Horace Mann Jr. to his mother regarding their natural discoveries and observations around Lake Calhoun.  The Chain of Lakes are still considered critical habitat for migratory birds.  This historic record documents the Lake Calhoun ecosystem as it existed in the 1860s.

Lake Calhoun, Minn., Friday June 7th, 1861

Dear Mother

 You see by the date of this letter that we are staying at a house on the edge of Lake Calhoun.  It is a beautiful sheet of water, perhaps a mile and a half or three quarters the longest way and nearly a mile the other way in breadth; it has an outlet by which it MTS [empties?] itself into Lake Harriet, which lies a little ways to the SE of here, and that again MTS into the Minnehaha and goes over the falls.  We are staying at the house of a Mrs. Hamilton, a widow, and one of the first settlers near this lake. 

 The house is surrounded with very thick woods which is full of great big mosquitoes, so when you walk in them, particularly near nightfall, they swarm around you in such a cloud that you can hardly see through them.  There are also a great many pigeons in the woods back of the house, (though I should hardly know them from a mosquito here by size) which are breeding, and I found the nest of one this afternoon which had but one egg in it which I took.

 The lake is full of fishes and we have them at every meal almost.  I went into St. Anthony this morning where I put some birds and clams in alcohol and got some blotting paper to press flowers with and I have just been putting some away to press under the bed post.  The trees around here are not very large ones, and the fires seem to have run through the woods all around here and killed a great many of the trees.  The prairies burn over most always in the spring or fall of the year out here.  The “oak openings” on the prairies consist of small oaks scattered around at some distance (1-10 rods) from one another and where the fire has not run for several years the hazel bushes spring up; also little oaks and aspens, and after a little longer basswood trees, which I think are planted by the little spermophili (stripped squirrels) carrying the nuts from the woods to their holes to eat, and then the brush begins to get thicker and thicker until it is very hard to get through it.

 You want me to tell you how things make me feel but I will not do so about the mosquitoes.  It is pretty warm weather here all the time now.  We had a thunder storm last night but I did not know it till I got up this morning.  Mr. Thoreau and I went in swimming this afternoon and then we went to walk and we came to a pond hole near some woods which was full of shells and frogs; there were principally two kinds of shells, the limneas, I do not know which species, but they were very beautiful, and shaped something like this [drawing].  I have drawn a miserable picture but I shall bring a lot home and then you can see them.  The other kind is a large planorbis or trumpet shell [drawing].  I shall collect them also.  The frogs were the ‘palustris’ and ‘halecina’ or the two spotted frogs and another kind, a brown one which I do not know.  Mr. Thoreau continues to get better and I am very well of course.  We drink lake water here.  I will write more before I send this letter, so Good Night,

 Your loving son

Horace Mann