Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The Genesis of Musketaquid

  No American writer is more place centered than Thoreau. Take him away from Nawshawtuct Hill rising behind Egg Rock, where Concord’s three rivers meet; or from the gentle Musketaquid, or “Grass-Ground” River, which the English renamed Concord; or from the “here!” of grasping Tahatawan’s arrowhead, and Thoreau is a different person. He learned this himself when he moved to New York City and tried to be like other writers, mobile and market driven. It was a disaster. But back home the smallest things—like the way the sandy soil breaks through the grass, “the naked flesh of New England her garment being blown aside”—moved him to rhapsody: “And this is my home—my native soil, and I am a New Englander. Of thee o earth are my bone & sinew made—to thee o sun am I brother. . . . To this dust my body will gladly return as to its origin.” Nor could he ever forget who came before.10 What the Indian had by birth, Thoreau claimed through art, a spiritual rebirth for himself and his own immigrant people. His longing for a deep connection with the land would make Walden into the great American fable of alienation, regrounding, and rebirth.

  Thoreau used the specifics of place to embody deeper and more universal truths. Take Walden Pond: thank goodness, he wrote, it was made deep and pure for a symbol. Had he built instead over the hill on Sandy, or “Flint’s,” Pond, that broad, shallow lake with its old Yankee surname, Walden would have been a different book. With no sandy soil, there would have been no beanfield; with no New England winter to freeze the pond, there would have been no spring thaw to melt the soul; with no railroad to carve the Deep Cut, his fable of creation must find a different shape. To grasp Thoreau means grasping where he was and how it became that way.

  Walden Pond is deep—at 102 feet (by Thoreau’s measure) the deepest natural lake in Massachusetts—and steep sided, “a clear and deep green well,” he called it, “a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods.” It has a self-contained feel, a “walled-in” look like a mountain tarn, which in a way it is. Walden is a kettle pond, formed when a huge block of ice fractured off the face of a retreating glacier and melted slowly away while ice-cold meltwaters pooled and flowed around it, layering a thick mantle of gravelly sediment studded with rounded cobblestones. At its birth Walden was not a pond at all, but a pile of dirt-covered ice—a genesis perhaps recorded in the oral memories of the first peoples to live there, for the oldest say that “anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth.”11 This, geologists have remarked, is a pretty accurate description.

  To imagine Walden then, go to the snout of a glacier today and look around. Until roughly 13,000 years ago, Concord was under a mile of ice that had been scouring the land for nearly 10,000 years before melting slowly northward, ending the most recent of four cycles of glaciation and warming that shaped North America for 600,000 years. Meltwaters poured off the ice face and gullied through ice canyons carrying sand, silt, and stones, outwashing to form shallow Sandy Pond and broad Fairhaven Bay. Other stranded ice blocks melted to form White Pond, Goose Pond, and countless kettle bogs. For about a thousand years, the retreating glacier blocked the land’s northward drainage, so the silty meltwaters pooled in great glacial lakes where the fine gray silt settled into broad flats. English newcomers were drawn to the edge of one of those ancient lakes, digging caves for shelter into the high moraine ridge pushed up by the ice face. The glacier ground down but could not smooth away rocky promontories like Fairhaven Hill and Emerson’s Cliff, where Thoreau loved to sit and gaze upon the hills and valleys rippling away westward. As it melted, the glacier left behind a hard-packed stony till carved into long hills—Nawshawtuct, Punkatasset—and smaller “drumlins,” like the low hummock that gives Goose Pond the shape of a butterfly.12

  Thus Thoreau’s world was shaped by ice, rock, and water: ice that ground and scoured and shoved, rock that resisted the ice, meltwaters that smoothed and spread. The result is scenery “on a humble scale,” as he admitted—not grand, not much to look at. But it’s a land riddled with surprises: rocky cliffs break out over sandy plains, and wide valleys sparkle with broad open river bays. Steep slopes plunge into hidden lakes or slide into deep gullies seeping with moisture and running with spring-fed brooks, giving way to chains of pocket bogs percolating with tea-colored juices. Slow, meandering rivers interlace the whole, widening into meadow wetlands recharged by the dark muck rich with nutrients that the spring floods leave behind.

  As the ice retreated north, plants pushed up from the south, creating a tundra landscape of sedges, grasses and shrubs whose remnants Thoreau would explore in the kettle bogs: cranberry, cotton grass, Labrador tea. Trees took hold slowly. By 11,000 years ago, Concord had become an open woodland of spruce, fir, and willows—good browse for the caribou and mastodon hunted by Concord’s first people, who fished and foraged and built trade networks stretching from Tennessee to Maine; it was they who saw Walden melt from hill to lake. As the climate warmed, hardwoods replaced most of the evergreens (though some, like the mysterious dark hemlocks Thoreau loved, never left): oaks with nutritious acorns; hickories with rich, oily nuts; hazelnuts, butternuts, and groundnuts; birches and beeches; pine in sunny uplands and hemlock in shady copses. By then the mastodon were long gone, but deer and turkey were plentiful, and in spring migrating fishes filled the willow fishweirs. The people adapted, using fire to create good browse for the deer, keep back the juniper and hemlock, and encourage their favorite hardwoods for nuts and acorns. They made pots to store grains, grew hard-shell gourds to carry liquids, and feasted on freshwater shellfish, leaving clamshells behind in great middens. About two thousand years ago, squirrels—and perhaps people, too—brought in chestnuts from the Mississippi Valley over the Allegheny Mountains, and soon the people were planting chestnut trees.

  A dramatic change came a thousand years ago: the still-warming climate allowed new crops needing long hot summers to come in from the west and south. With farming, the population grew tenfold. The earliest Europeans found an indigenous civilization growing corn, beans, and squash, planted together in untidy hillocks where they strengthened one another, replenished the soil, and, when eaten together, produced a complete protein. These farms did not stay put behind fixed fences but migrated among favored sites, allowing the Massachusetts Indians to take advantage of New England’s sharp seasonal changes. In summers they lived in light, movable shelters, growing crops and picking berries in the warm uplands. Fall meant gathering mast from the forests while moving into snug wigwams on the milder coasts, sheltering from bitter winters and eating shellfish from the tideflats. Spring meant following fish migrations upriver to weirs that trapped alewives and salmon. The land abounded with food: cattails and water lilies, cranberries, wild onions, wild rice; a dozen kinds of nuts and acorns; turtles, freshwater clams, muskrat and beaver, deer and turkey—all part of the feasts Thoreau imagined on Clamshell Hill, a huge midden heap built over the millennia. For 11,000 years, indigenous people adapted to this evolving landscape, modified it to meet their needs, cultivated and shaped it into a physical expression of their culture and artistry. Story and song, elaborated into distinctive cultures, tied them to their history and bound them to one another and their homelands via “a rich spiritual and ceremonial calendar that defined their place in the created world.”13 In Thoreau’s world, the people were as old as the forests.14

  The Coming of the English

  Thoreau knew little of all this. Indeed, we know hardly more, for by the time the English arrived, the Native world was in such chaos that no clear understanding of how they once lived survives. Around 1616, just before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Harbor, an epidemic burned through the coastal communities inland to the Musketaquid Valley and beyond, reducing the Native population by roughly 90 percent. This much Thoreau knew from reading Lemuel Shattuck’s History of Concord (written for the town’s 1835 bicentennial), where he learned that the first Pilgrims attributed this
“great mortality” to Divine Providence, who thereby made room for civilization.15

  Tahatawan was one of the few survivors. He was a leader, though not a “prince” or “king”; his people lived in loose kinship groups that gathered or split as occasion called, governed by family leaders and guided by sachems whose authority was granted by the people. Their base was a lodge on Nawshawtuct Hill, “hill between the rivers,” and they called the main river Musketaquid, grass-ground or marsh-grass river, from the same root that gives us the word mosquito. The name pleased Thoreau for its descriptive precision; he liked to say the Meander River “musketaquidded,” for it runs so lazily that, as Hawthorne joked, one couldn’t tell which way it flowed. Nawshawtuct Hill divides the north fork, or Assabet—“drinking-water stream,” since it runs brisk, strong, and clear—from the lazy south fork, or Sudbury, which pools behind Concord’s Main Street, making a convenient boat launch. The Musketaquid Indians grew corn in the light sandy soils above the riverbanks or on the old lake-bottom flats the English dubbed the Great Field, still some of Massachusetts’s most productive agricultural land. They built a fishweir in the Mill Brook to trap migrating alewives in spring and salmon in summer. Once or twice a year they burned off the underbrush, keeping the forests open and the blueberries growing thick on the upland hills.

  · · ·

  Tahatawan knew quite a bit about the English newcomers. In 1620, when the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay, they were greeted in English by Native Americans who had been trading with Europeans for a century or more and could bargain in several European languages. Not until 1634 did the English venture inland: Simon Willard, hoping to make money in the fur trade, followed an Indian trading road to Musketaquid Valley, which the epidemic had left vacant and overgrown—the perfect site for a new town. Willard teamed up with the wealthy Peter Bulkeley, and in 1635 the first band of English moved to Musketaquid, which they optimistically renamed “Concord.” Bulkeley took possession of the fishweir, which he dammed up to power a grist mill for grinding corn, giving birth to the millpond that would delight young Henry Thoreau. Willard moved in next door to Tahatawan on Nawshawtuct Hill, where he set up a fur trading post with perfect access, via the three river highways, to the interior, whence came Indians with canoes full of deer hides and beaver and marten pelts.

  Land that proved bountiful to the Indians seemed barren to the English. The latter survived that first winter by burrowing earthen shelters into the south-facing hillside along Mill Brook—the remains of the ancient glacial lake—whose broad green meadows turned out, disappointingly, to be too marshy for corn. They bartered with the Indians for venison and raccoon, which they thought not so good as lamb; they complained of the strange Indian diet of corn, pumpkin, and squash; they watched in horror as their sheep and cattle died and wolves devoured their pigs. The next year they built board houses (some of them still standing), and in later years they would proudly call themselves America’s first western pioneers, who began the march leading all the way to the Pacific. Concord launched America’s Manifest Destiny; it was, quite literally, America’s first West.16

  Not until 1637 did the English formalize their relationship with the Musketaquid Indians. That May, a group led by Tahatawan, Squaw Sachem, her husband Wibbacowett, and Natanquatick met Concord’s English leaders at the town square under Jethro’s Tree, still thriving in Thoreau’s day. In an official ceremony, the Musketaquid accepted useful objects—hatchets, hoes, knives, cotton cloth, shirts—plus a parcel of wampum, the shell beading manufactured on the New England coast that the Native Americans used to keep records and the English repurposed into currency: literally, the first American money. Thus the English taught the Indians that in this new world, things had not merely value, but a price. Accordingly, the English believed they were purchasing, fair and square, a six-mile-square plot of land. But the Indians’ entire economic system was ecological, so intricately tied to the land base as to be inseparable from it; they believed they were receiving payment for usage rights, including cultivation, fishing, hunting, and gathering seasonal produce. Since land could not be owned, it could not be sold. This fact is still recorded in their place names, which were not markers of ownership (as in “Flint’s Pond”) but signposts to ecological relationships. To know Native names was to know the shape of the land and the patterns of seasonal change.17 Thoreau would seek out and use Indian names to help keep alive the indigenous knowledge of place.

  The tragedy for Tahatawan and his people started under Jethro’s Tree. Since they hadn’t “sold” their land, they didn’t leave it; they lived their lives alongside the English as before. But Willard’s trading post was tutoring all the Indians within three rivers’ reach about money. Trade turned beaver and deer into commodities, giving Indians a powerful incentive to kill animals and purchase a place in the English economy. The beaver population crashed, creating far-reaching changes in the land as beaver dams rotted and wetlands became fields; wild turkey, that Thanksgiving staple, vanished, and deer became scarce. Thoreau never saw a deer in Concord, and was amazed when George Minott told him his mother had once seen a deer in her childhood. While Native food sources collapsed, the English ate well—better than ever, for as deer disappeared, so did their predators: the cougar, lynx, and wolves that also preyed on cattle and pigs. When one wild commodity crashed, the English turned to another or simply lengthened their trading networks to reach communities where ecological diversity still reigned. As the ecological communities Native Americans had shaped and nurtured for thousands of years melted away, their way of life disintegrated. Without deerskins, for example, they needed English cloth and blankets, which took money to buy—as did axes, knives, hoes, and kettles, not to mention guns, which they needed more and more for self-defense as well as hunting. Even arrowheads became commodities for purchase.

  In the face of all this, Tahatawan’s people proved remarkably resilient. In 1644, only seven years after their bargain with the English, they petitioned to become Christian subjects of the English crown—a good sign, thought the English, especially in the wake of the terrible Pequot War of 1636–37. Local governments were ordered to care for local Indians by civilizing them in English ways and teaching them Christian theology. In 1646, the Reverend John Eliot, who argued for books over guns as civilizing agents, took advantage of the Indians’ initiative by preaching a series of sermons. Tahatawan and his family were among those who converted to Christianity, and they petitioned for a town of their own. The English Puritans would not agree unless the Indians gave up their religious rites, or powwows, and their games—as well as howling as an expression of grief, lying, theft, polygamy, and all conflict. They must wear their hair “comely as the English do,” improve their time, pay their debts, pray in their wigwams, say grace before and after meals, and always knock before entering an Englishman’s house. The Musketaquid people agreed to these conditions, asking in return for a little land: eastward in Lincoln perhaps, or between Flint’s Pond and Walden.

  The English balked—but Walden was a commons open to all, and Indians were already living there, wearing the paths Thoreau saw encircling Walden Pond and leaving the arrowheads he plowed up in his beanfield. Years went by until finally, in 1654, the Musketaquid were granted a township a few miles northwest of Concord for a “Praying Town,” Nashoba. Tahatawan and his family moved there, and in 1660 his son John Tahatawan became Nashoba’s leader; Tahatawan himself had become a missionary, often traveling with John Eliot.18 Not all the neighboring Indians approved. Many distrusted the English and tried to hold on to their old ways—but that meant keeping the English at bay, and only guns could do that. Tahatawan chose instead the path of books: his people would become readers and writers, not warriors, and use mastery of the word to make a place within the English economy. In Nashoba they planted corn and apple orchards, and raised cows and pigs. They wore English clothing, cut their hair short, prayed and sang hymns, and made buttons and brooches to sell. Caught between two worlds, acce
pted by neither, the Musketaquid carved out a middle space to call their own—a space destroyed two decades later. This was the story told by Tahatawan’s arrowhead.

  Living the Revolution

  For Thoreau, looking around meant looking back, seeing the future through eyes educated by the past—including that past to which others seemed blind. But all his neighbors had their eyes on America’s Revolutionary past, for it was the key to Concord’s unique identity, its great role on the world stage. Thoreau’s generation was the last to know the American Revolution as a living memory. The Reverend Ezra Ripley had been Concord’s spiritual guide since the Revolutionary War, and he still walked the town in stockings and knee breeches. As a boy, Thoreau soaked up the thrilling stories told by his grandmother, a proud Tory who had married and buried two Patriots in succession. All true Concordians knew exactly what their parents had done to win American independence. The sons and daughters inheriting that legacy also inherited that beautiful, terrible question: What have you done to deserve it? For Concord reeked with self-importance, to the annoyance of neighboring Lexington, where the British had first fired and American blood had first been shed—a sore subject in 1825, when young Henry watched Concord celebrate the Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary.