oods. I started in to get supper for
my husband and I heard them hollering. I said, "They're lost. Go out and
yell as loud as you can and build a big fire." They got back to our
place all right and had to stay all night. Mrs. French followed me out
to the barn. "Don't it make you mad to hear of that pleasure trip?" she
said. The men couldn't get through talking about it. "Well, it makes me
mad," I said, "but I can't help laughing."

"Well," Mr. French yawned, "I believe this winds up the pleasure trip."

Mr. B. F. Shaver--1853.

My parents came from Lucerne Co., Pa., father in the fall of 1850 and
mother just two years later. She came to Rockford, Ill., by rail, then
to Galena by stage and up the Mississippi by boat. One of her traveling
companions was Miss Mary Miller, sister of Mrs. John H. Stevens. Mother
spent the first night in Minneapolis in the old Stevens house, at that
time the only residence on the west side of the river, about where the
Union Station was.

Two years before this father had learned of Lake Minnetonka and had
taken some pork and flour and a frying pan and started west to find the
lake, over somewhat the route of the Great Northern railroad track to
where Wayzata now is. He reached the site of Minnetonka Mills and
located a claim about where Groveland park on the Deephaven trolley line
is. This was some time before the government survey. He blazed out a
claim. Like the old lady in the Hoosier Schoolmaster, he believed "While
ye're gittin', git a plenty" for after the survey he found he had blazed
out seven hundred acres where he could pre-empt only a hundred and
sixty. He had been up the creek several times to the lake where there
was a beautiful pebbly beach. Once, while wandering back, he had come
upon this spot, he said, "Beautiful as a poet's dream." A forty acre
prairie right in the midst of dense woods covered with wild flowers and
prairie grass. He blazed out his claim right there.

On November 8, 1852, father and mother traveled from St. Anthony to
Minnetonka Mills with an ox team and sled on eight or ten inches of
snow. They kept boarders at Minnetonka Mills that winter and in March
moved to their claim. The house was not completed. There were no
windows, no outside door and no floor. The following August were born
twin boys, the first white children born in Hennepin county outside the
city limits of Minneapolis. Mother was the first pioneer woman of
Minnetonka township.

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