“Alice in Wonderland”: Glamping on Moose River

As a young girl, Alice Longfellow was described as being “full of character + originality” and seemed to have a tomboy streak. As an adult, Alice prided herself on having an active lifestyle. She traveled extensively, taking about a dozen trips to eleven countries in Europe and Africa. At the age of 22, she even paddled up the Moose River in Maine on an extravagant camping trip. She detailed her adventures in a journal titled “Alice in Wonderland,” which remains in the Longfellow House collection today.

The Moose River Party
1st row: Benjamin Vaughan, Miss Anne Abbott, Miss Vaughan, Alice Longfellow, Joseph Warner, Mamie Storer (Mrs. Warner)
2nd row:  Mrs. Henry M. Wheeler, Mr. W.W. Vaughan, Mrs. Vaughan, Mr. Henry M. Wheeler
Standing behind: Mr. James Myers, Mr. Draper ("an outsider")

Museum Collection, Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters NHS (LONG 6357)

During the three-week experience, Alice traveled with a group of young friends and two male guides. The group embarked by train from Boston to Maine. After traveling by road alongside the Kennebec River for a few days, they traded their mink fur for waterproof rubber cloaks and transitioned to canoe. “The poetry of motion” that this mode of transportation offered inspired Alice and she wrote:

Nothing could be lovlier [sic] than the river was in the afternoon the clear, brown water, reflecting every tree on the shore, the sunlight flickering on the delicate green leaves & graceful stems of the birches, & the delicious silence, only broken by the gentle ripple of the canoes, coming into light, & then disappearing in the numerous bends of the stream.

The crew slept in a large tent, complete with a chandelier. They were not without their creature comforts on this trip, though Alice did have to fashion a makeshift pillow at night, making note of "A new receipt for a pillow":

Find a book, either poetry or prose will do, then a pair of leather boots & rubber boots on top. Next add any stray articles of clothing you don’t happen to have on, cover with a towel, & sleep the sleep of the righteous.

Alice seemed to get a thrill from the challenge of camping and the novelty of independence. She noted with joy that they had to bathe in deliciously cold water, fish for their own dinner, and even had a cow burst into their tent during the night. She endured daily downpours, improvised cooking over a fire, and learned to steer a birch canoe (though she admitted her path was "uncommonly crooked"). Alice wondered (whether correctly or not) that she and her friends must be the first women there since native women. Reluctantly closing out her three weeks in the wilderness, Alice reflected: "So ends our delightful expedition, which we have all enjoyed to the fullest extent, & which has given us something we can never lose. We have been altogether about 100 miles in birches."

The trip gave Alice a taste for camping in nature and by the water, and she returned to camp in Maine several times through the 1870s, for trips with friends on the Penobscot River, Moose River, and Lake Caucumgoc. Later in life, Alice often referred to this trip, where she experienced the wilderness and gained a sense of her own capabilities in handling challenges.