2nd annual
Literary Tour
Saturday August 14/10
This hiking tour was as much about food as it was about literature or hiking. On the bus out to Neepawa, we were served fresh coffee and a delicious rhubarb platz. Our mid day lunch was a feast of roasted vegetables, DeLuca dinner rolls, Wpg Old Country baked ham and slices of BBQ marinated flank steak. But our afternoon pioneer picnic circa 1880s was a sumptious affair that had to be the highlight of the day.
On our second Literary Tour we followed the footsteps of Nellie McClung, Margaret Laurence, and Ernest Thompson Seton, three of Manitoba’s best-loved and most famous literary figures. Seeing where they lived and worked opened up a new perspective and fresh understanding of their work. Short hikes were interspersed with visits to the romantic ghost town of Milford, the beautiful Carberry Sandhills and the iconic stone angel in Neepawa’s Riverside Cemetery.
Hiking the Carbery Sandhills
provided us with a panoramic view of the countryside that inspired the first works of Ernest Thompson Seton. Back in the 1800s Seton would roam these hills for weeks on end, recording images of the wildlife around him. He also wrote stories about animals and gave birth to a new literary genre.
His books ‘The Trail of the Sand Hill Stag’ and ‘Wild Animals I Have Known’ became wildly popular, were read all over the world and in many ways, changed the way people viewed nature. Stories were told from the animal’s point of view with animals invested with such human qualities as curiosity, desire and sympathy.
In his lifetime Seton achieved great renown as a wildlife illustrator and a naturalist who was also a spell-binding storyteller and lecturer. Although his books brought him worldwide fame and fortune (they are read to this day), he always credited the Carberry Sand Hills as the source of his finest inspiration and his days spent here the happiest of his life.
Picnic lunch & stroll in the Millford Cemetery
Nellie McClung’s parents and family members are buried in this tree filled cemetery which is now a designated historic site. The early settlement of Millford at its peak, boasted three livery stables and three doctors. In the mid 1880s, however, construction of the railway line bypassed the settlement and within two years the village was abandoned. Nellie McLung loved this part of Manitoba. In “Clearing the West” the first of two autobiographical works by Nellie McClung she recounts her early interest in writing and the events and influences that shaped her political and personal future. Millford was the social and business centre for the McLung family. In the summer of 1882 Millford was the site of the first community picnic that Nellie describes in great detail - bright and warm yet cooled by a gentle wind - there were ginger and molasses cookies, railroad cake and vinegar pie. Our afternoon tea picnic will replicate that time in great style.
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