The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes - A series of poetic puzzles.
Clues - Rivers Ponds Oceans Streams Military Battles. They are all connected by water.
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1.
Building pencils and plumbago
Jailed for taxes unpaid
Transcendentalist and abolitionist
Two years alone in the woods, though
living life deliberately, weighed
heavily on this naturalist.
Extra clues - “Civil Disobedience” . “The last days of John Brown”
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2.
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest!
From Edinburgh to Vailima, and still
not exactly the straight and narrow.
Drink to the devil and be done with the rest!
Home is the hunter, home from the hill.
His calling card a black arrow.
Extra clues - Mr. Hyde and The Land of the Counterpane
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3.
He won with “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”
But four weeks in he was deceased.
He was the last of the British-born presidents.
Ran two U.S. territories when they were new.
Defeated Indians and made a treaty of peace.
Inaugurated in 1841, but you already know how that went.
Extra clues - Tecumseh and the Battle of the Thames
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4.
‘One if by land. Two if by Sea”.
A fireside poet from New England
“Under a spreading chestnut tree”
An Ojibwe and a Dakota cannot be
Ever walking hand in hand
“List, to a tale of love in Acadie”
Extra clues - Mary Storer Potter and Frances Appleton
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5.
At 13 years old he went to sea
At 31 he became Commander of “Ranger”.
Which led to a Whitehaven sacking that went amiss
Soon Captain of ‘Bonhomme Richard” was he
“I have not yet begun to fight,” he shouted in the face of danger
Though ‘Bonhomme Richard’ sank, he captured the “Serapis”.
Extra clues - Continental Navy, Russian Navy
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Choose from here if you must:
Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Earle Stanley Gardner, Arthur Conan Doyle, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Penn Warren, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Louisa May Alcott, Alexander Graham Bell, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Carlos William, William Henry Harrison, Robert Louis Stevenson, Martin Luther King, James Fenimore Cooper, William Howard Taft, Edgar Lee Masters, Francis Scott Key, George Bernard Shaw, John Jacob Astor.