Ariel articles on 1891 Field Trip

     On Monday, Oct. 26th, the class in Geology will leave here for Taylor's Falls, in a special car via the Soo road. The party will not return until tuesday afternoon and will devote their time to studying the remarkable geologic features of that vicinity.

      A special car for Taylor's Falls left Minneapolis at 8:00 o'clock Monday morning with about forty eager students fresh from the 'arms of morpheus' and eager to read the history of the globe written in an universal language which needs no translation. Prof. Hall lead the party and Mr. and Mrs. Prof. McMillan were present to give 'dignity to the occasion.' After leaving the car and walking about a mile they came near the village of Osceola and ate lunch at the top of a bluff 250 feet high. The next walk brought them to Osceola Falls which they pronounced far superior to Minnehaha. Trilobites were then captured for a time till the pangs of hunger led the party back to the lunch baskets in the car. The town was next “taken in” and several of the boys came very near being treated likewise, for while some of the party were admiring the latest style bonnets at the hotel others walked the streets while “Rah, Rah” and “Annie Rooney” rent the air, which, when the sheriff heard, he told the boys that it was a Methodist town and did not wish to be disturbed and that he would arrest them. The boys noted that the jail was made of the rocks they had come to study and not wishing to study them from within, they desisted. Five of the party came back Monday evening. “Tempus” is too “breve” to tell about that sleepless night in the car where the strains of college songs burst forth at intervals like the flames of Vesuvius; about the steep descent the next morning where Cates lost his equilibrium and dreamed he was a football player; about the mighty masses of igneous rocks melted in nature's laboratory, and through which the St. Croix river rushes in deep, dark, swift channels, forming the “Dalles”; about the entrance into the “Devil's Kitchen” led by Prof. McMillan, and about the mill turned by the water of several crystal springs. The Devil's chair though not in his majesty's kitchen was observed with care, as it is situated some distance from the other bluffs of the neighborhood. As the lunches were vaning, dinner was had at the hotel and after another long walk and many observations of changes in the rocks, a return to the car was attempted, but it was not till about train time that the party seemed to converge from every side, as the Union soldiers did at Gettysburg. The party returned with the conviction that the pleasantest way to study nature is from nature itself.