What I offer instead is a reading of Thoreau’s life as a writer—for, remarkably, he made of his life itself an extended form of composition, a kind of open, living book. I hope my readers are inspired to turn to Thoreau’s own words, to see for themselves how he wrote his life. Interested readers will also find many additional incidents and shades of meaning in earlier biographies. As another of his biographers once remarked, different biographies do not “cancel out or fully supplant each other” but provide particular emphases, information, and insights that continue the ongoing conversation about the “elusive, complex, and gifted man and writer who was Henry Thoreau.” I fully agree, and I hope my own effort will further that ongoing dialogue.8
The biographies closest to mine are Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau, an exhaustive chronicle of the known events and documents; Robert D. Richardson’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, an indispensable intellectual biography of Thoreau that traces in detail the movement of his mind as he lived, read, and wrote; and David Robinson’s Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism, a deep and wise spiritual biography of Thoreau’s life in nature. All are exemplary, and I have learned immensely from them. My many additional debts and recommendations are registered in the notes. These, too, could have been much longer, for given that Thoreau’s writings are all autobiographical, virtually every study of his work takes up some aspect of his thought in the context of his life. The true student of Thoreau and his time will want to explore them widely.9
Still, the Thoreau I sought was not in any book, and so I wrote this one. Today, two hundred years after his birth, we have invented two Thoreaus, both of them hermits, yet radically at odds with each other. One speaks for nature; the other for social justice. Yet the historical Thoreau was no hermit, and as Thoreau’s own record shows, his social activism and his defense of nature sprang from the same roots: he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart. Thus where others see schism, I see Emerson’s “bundle of relations” and “knot of roots”—roots of which Thoreau’s life and writings are the flower and fruit. The sweep of his life takes in the deep, even geological, time of the land he walked and studied and the social history of his family, town, and nation, which were already part of a global network. Thoreau himself embodied this intertwined narrative so deeply that at his death, his friends said his truest memorial was Concord itself. It’s true that he often lived in tension with his townsfolk, but he was always near them, and often among them—a gadfly not above stinging his neighbors to wake them up. This relationship shaped his every word, for as his ideas outran his time, Thoreau often found his voice silenced and censored—so often that I sometimes marveled he found courage to keep speaking at all.
In short, Thoreau struggled all his life to find a voice that could be heard despite the din of cynicism and the babble of convention. That he was a loving son, a devoted friend, a lively and charismatic presence who filled the room, laughed and danced, sang and teased and wept, should not have to be said. But astonishingly, it does, for some deformation of sensibility has brought Thoreau down to us in ice, chilled into a misanthrope, prickly with spines, isolated as a hermit and nag. He could of course be icy, prickly, occasionally hermitous, and even a nag—features that I hope this biography makes clear, perhaps understandable. My real question is how he could be all that and also be a writer of world-class achievement; a natural scientist who gave us the deep poetry of nature writing; a political activist who, in the name of the common good, gave the weak their most powerful tool against the strong; and a spiritual seeker who encouraged every one of us to enter into the great experiment of life. Thoreau earned the devotion of friends who saw in him no saint, but something perhaps more rare: a humane being living a whole human life.
Notes on Usage
The word Indian, a blanket term used by the invading Europeans for all the Native nations and peoples of North and South America, is today controversial, and no single, satisfactory replacement has emerged. I have, whenever they are known, referred to specific tribal affiliations; this, the preferred usage today, respects the continuing struggle for Native cultural persistence and political sovereignty. When I am speaking in my own narrative voice, I have used the words indigenous or Native; but when I am using the voice of Thoreau and his contemporaries, I use, as did they, the term Indian. To do otherwise would not only be anachronistic, it would ignore the limitations that existed in Thoreau’s day—limitations that constrained what he could think, even as he wrestled to think beyond “the” Indian to see Indians, in the plural, as individualized, intellectually sovereign, and vital to any vision of America.
Regarding the difference between Nature and nature: This term was often used as a transcendentalized or universalized expression of a divine or sacred ideal, in contrast with “garden-variety” nature. This is a distinction Emerson holds to, and Thoreau, of course, often follows Emerson here. I capitalize Nature when it names a divine or holy essence, but stay with lowercase nature when the word is used in our modern, secular way.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
INTRODUCTION
Land of the Grass-Ground River
The Germans say—Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst. (Everything is true through which you become better.)
Henry David Thoreau, October 22, 1837
Tahatawan’s Arrowhead
One Sunday evening, late in September 1837, something happened that young Henry Thoreau couldn’t get out of his head. For a month it teased him, until finally he wrote it down in his new Journal. Was it worth recording? Maybe. He tried it out: after spending the day looking for Indian relics, he and his brother John strolled to the riverbank to watch the sunset. Henry, seized by inspiration and gesturing wildly, broke into “an extravagant eulogy on those savage times”: “‘There on Nawshawtuct,’ said I, ‘was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe, and yonder, on Clamshell hill their feasting ground.’” How often the Indians must have stood on that very spot, at that very hour—just like John and Henry!—watching the sunset over the Musketaquid River, communing with the spirits of their fathers gone before them. “‘Here,’ I exclaimed, ‘stood Tahatawan; and there, (to complete the period), is Tahatawan’s arrowhead.’” Down they sat, and Henry, “to carry out the joke,” threw out his hand to seize a random stone—and lo! It “proved a most perfect arrowhead, as sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator!!!!”1
It’s a lighthearted story, just two brothers playing Indian. But when Henry’s hand grasped something real, his youthful fantasy caught hold of an adult truth. The arrowhead, hard and sharp, didn’t feel like a relic from the past, but like a live thing handed to him by an elder—as if Tahatawan himself had materialized at his elbow and offered him a choice: you may laugh this off as superstition, or you may take it up as truth. In the act of committing this story to his Journal, Henry made a choice: he would make it true. This choice will set him off from family, friends, and neighbors—unlike them, Henry David Thoreau would be a writer. This meant taking up the writer’s double consciousness, splitting the self who lives from the self who writes, opening up a double vision: present and past, white and Indian, civil and wild, man and nature. Jumping that gap had been the point of the joke to begin with, the kind of playacting that usually ends when childhood is over. But Thoreau, fingering in the nick of time the stone blade’s edge, felt that gap snap shut. Time folded together, and for an instant, he straddled both sides, beholding two realities in one.
He wasn’t quite there yet on that Sunday watching the sunset from the riverbank. He came closer a month later when he opened his Journal to answer Emerson’s call: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked, ‘Do you keep a journal?’—So I make my first entry today.” There, he’s begun. But what does it mean to be a writer? At first Thoreau was tentative; he had many years ahead of him. In this little experiment, he turned his story of the arrowhead into a story about himself telli
ng a story, feeling a little silly about it, but also feeling genuine awe. The next step was the crucial one: he knew he was “making” the arrowhead story—just as the arrowhead itself was made, or “fabricated,” by the hand of the Indian. But precisely because he knew he was making it, it became real to him, invested, a commitment. Could it be true? Yes, Emerson had told him. So at the end of his first entry, Thoreau wrote down what Emerson said: “Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst.” Everything is true through which you become better.2
Thoreau was learning how to make things speak, learning his path as an artist. But where were the living Indians? Nashoba, the town Tahatawan helped build, had been swept off the map in King Philip’s War: in 1675, as terror spread among the English, the colonial government ordered all Praying Indians confined. Nashoba’s fifty-eight residents were evacuated to John Hoar’s house in Concord (now the Alcott’s Orchard House), where Hoar and the Nashoba people built a stockade together to protect their new homes and workshops. Hoar insisted to the rest of Concord that the Nashoba were peaceful and industrious, posing no threat—even though several Concord soldiers had been killed in a nearby massacre. One Sunday, an army captain came to church to whip up hatred against the Indians, and the people of Concord listened and kept silent. Hearing no objection, the captain and his troops led a mob of “a hundred or two” to John Hoar’s house, broke down the door, seized the fifty-eight Indians inside—mostly women and children—plundered their clothing, shoes, dishes, and food stores, and marched them to the Deer Island prison camp in Boston Harbor. After a long miserable season subsisting on clams and seaweed, they were sold into slavery.3 Thus vanished Tahatawan and his people.
Or so the story ran. Actually, many of Concord’s Native people survived, working their way into Concord’s ordinary life. In 1676, for instance, one of them, Tom Doublet, helped redeem Mary Rowlandson from her famous captivity. But in 1734, Sarah Doublet, the last inheritor, old and blind, sold the last of her family’s land to pay for her care. Family by family, acre by acre, the land base of Concord’s Native people was nibbled away on the marketplace. Yet they lived on, quietly maintaining their customs and kinship networks. Some became farmers who hunted and fished as of old. Many put to sea as whalers, as readers of Melville’s Moby-Dick will recall. Others worked as laborers or in manufactures. Some wove baskets, brooms, and mats, selling them door to door, often on established routes to repeat customers.4 Tellingly, Walden opens with “a well-known lawyer” turning away such an Indian selling his baskets. The lesson, says Thoreau, is not to stop weaving baskets but “to avoid the necessity of selling them”—to subvert the modern marketplace. But the irony goes deeper: the lawyer was Samuel Hoar, a descendent of John Hoar and the patriarch of Concord’s leading family. In 1813, Hoar found himself defending three men charged with murdering an Indian, who escaped execution thanks to the pressure of popular prejudice against Indians as wild creatures to be hunted and destroyed.5 If Indians could be seen only as wild beasts, no wonder Thoreau’s neighbors could not recognize, amid the farmers and laborers living quiet lives among them, Tahatawan’s people. But they were there, as Thoreau knew, and many live there still.
Enclosures and Commons
The wild beasts, on the other hand, really had disappeared forever. In 1855, Thoreau perused with wonder and dismay a colonial account of the landscape that had greeted Concord’s English founders: the meadow grasses were taller, the berries bigger and thicker, the forests more open with great trees whose trunks reached thirty feet or more before branching. There were “lions” or cougars, bears, moose, deer, porcupines, wolves, beavers, martens and raccoons, lynx and maybe wolverines; heath cocks and turkeys, snow geese and swans—“Think of that!” marvels Thoreau.6 By 1855, they were all gone, yet the land did not seem impoverished to Thoreau, who could barely keep up with what creatures remained—the woodchucks and muskrats, turtles and frogs, owls and hawks and smaller birds—or with the farmers’ cycles of planting and harvest. Still, when he traveled to Maine, he felt as though he had traveled back in time, and the contrast startled him into some of his most intense and creative thinking. Domestic and wild: he loved them both, he longed for both, though they seemed like polar opposites. For there was no escaping the fact that the English had made the Musketaquid Valley into a wholly different world.
It had started badly; the English almost gave up the Musketaquid’s rank and swampy bottomlands in disgust. Many moved a few miles north to found Chelmsford on higher ground. Those who stayed reengineered what they could change and adapted to what they could not: dredging the river to improve the drainage, clustering their houses by the millpond, plowing the Indians’ planting grounds, keeping the uplands open as a commons for grazing cattle and cutting timber and firewood. To survive New England’s shockingly long and bitter winters, they built barns to shelter their livestock, which they fed all winter with the rank wild meadow grasses, cut and cured into hay. In spring they carted manure to the fields, and wherever the land looked lean, they fattened it with cartloads of muck hauled from the swamps and meadows. Each family needed at least twenty cords of firewood a year, which required at least twenty acres of woodland, which meant leaving about a third of Concord’s land in forest. For two centuries, large swaths of woodland stayed that way. The largest were the great woods around Walden Pond, where the dry and gravelly glacial tills grew excellent pine and oak, but little else. These woods reminded the English of “the Weald,” or “forest,” of their homelands, the name they gave to the deep blue lake at their center: “Walden.” Thoreau was delighted to discover a branch of his family traced to the English town of Saffron Walden; Walden Pond was a family relation.7
Given the diversity of this crazy-quilt landscape, no single property could include all the resources a colonial family needed to survive. So there amid an American forest, the immigrants set down a sixteenth-century English common village in all its intricate complexity: each family owned bits and pieces scattered miles apart—a field here, a little forest there, a bog or two—while everyone worked together to manage the all-important meadows and grazing lands as a community commons. The wealthiest proprietors underwrote the town’s expenses and were paid in land accordingly. One was Thomas Flint, a London merchant who received 750 acres next to Walden Pond before returning to London, where he died and bequeathed his land to his sons and “his perfect Yankee surname” to his pond. “Flint’s Pond!” taunted Henry Thoreau; what did Flint know of the pond? “Such is the poverty of our nomenclature.”8
The result was a complex system of enclosures and commons that required farmers to work closely together, regulating and maintaining both rights and boundaries. Instead of “farms” in today’s sense—large contiguous plots of land devoted to commercial agriculture—Concord featured a system of mixed husbandry: livestock, crops, and woodlands were interwoven in tight balance, and conflicts over water rights and flowage often led neighbors to court. This was less a story of Europeans conquering and settling the American wilderness than of a tight-knit group of English immigrants importing a premodern English agricultural system and replacing the Musketaquid’s landscape with their own. Where Tahatawan’s people had lived on and with the land, nudging it in directions they preferred and moving fluidly across its various seasons and resources, the English settled and possessed, planting bounds and issuing titles, building houses and outbuildings of stout oak timber that would endure for centuries. And endure it all did—long enough for Thoreau to live in it, study it, and write about it, even as it all melted away.
For Thoreau witnessed the final collapse of this two-hundred-year-old system.9 When he went to Walden Pond in 1845, change was visible everywhere: the new railroad cut right across Walden’s prettiest cove; the traditional subsistence farms nearby were failing, eroded away by the global marketplace. Few of his neighbors still cooked and heated with open wood fires, built with local oak timber, ate homegrown “rye ’n’ Injun” bread, or wore homespun “linsey-woolsey.” Now they c
ooked on stoves, heated with coal, built with Maine white pine, cut their woodlots to fuel the railroads, planting them in English hay to feed the new breeds of cattle they slaughtered for the Boston market and packed for the West Indies. They filled their pantries with China tea, slave-grown sugar, prairie wheat flour, tropical oranges and pineapples; they wore Georgia cotton, China silks, Canada furs, British woolens.
The railroad whistle across Walden Pond sounded the death knell of an old world and the birth of something new. What it would be, no one yet knew; today geologists call this epoch, when fossil fuels put global economies into hyperdrive, the Anthropocene. Thoreau thus saw the end of one geological epoch and the beginning of the next, and the unease he felt is rampant today, infecting the headlines and blocking our own imagination of the future he believed he was helping to realize. Thoreau could see the ground was shifting, and, in the sheer audacity of his genius, he decided it was up to him to witness the changes and alert the world. From his watchtower by the railroad, deep in Walden Woods, he would sound the alarm and point to a better way.
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