Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  They began the next day by washing up in the lake before paddling across to the outlet of the Allagash River. Polis, paddling at the stern, had to prod poor Hoar, who kept threatening to tip the canoe by falling asleep. They portaged over a pair of dams to Eagle Lake, part of the Allagash itself, and landed on Heron Island. There they munched an early dinner while they weighed their options. Originally Thoreau had planned to continue north from this point, on into French Canada and back by way of the St. John River. This was perfectly feasible, said Polis, as he pointed to the various camps they would use; he knew the way well. And it was easier than going around on the rugged Penobscot, which was full of dangerous rapids. But which way was wilder? asked Thoreau. The Penobscot, replied Polis: the Canadian route took them through well-settled country. In this land, north did not mean “wild.” That settled it: Heron Island, almost 110 miles from Bangor, marked their northernmost point. From there they turned south and east, following the “lumberer’s road” that every spring carried Maine’s trees downriver to Bangor’s sawmills. It was faster, too. That meant there would be time for a side trip to the summit of Mount Katahdin, which beckoned in the distance.

  By then the clouds had rolled in again, and for the rest of the day they hurried between thunderstorms, relieved to reach Chamberlain Farm by nightfall. Thoreau ran up to the main house to buy supplies, then Polis ran up for a visit—it was bad form, he explained, to pass a house without stopping to exchange the news. Thoreau and Hoar waved him off with a laugh. They wanted wilderness, not gossip at every cabin along the way. While Polis sat visiting, the weary Concord adventurers snugged into their tent, lulled by the rain into deep sleep.

  Thoreau would need it, for the next day brought his severest test. They skipped breakfast to cross Chamberlain Lake in the early morning, coasting along while Polis scoped out the hillsides with an eye to purchasing a few hundred acres—commercial success meant that the dispossessed Polis could buy back some of the Penobscots’ former lands.27 Their route led them through Telos Lake, the original head of the Allagash–St. John watershed, and down the artificial canal to Webster Lake, the head of the Penobscot watershed. When the northbound drainage had been reversed, it released rushing waters that carved this connecting canal into a fast, rocky waterway, “somewhat like navigating a thunder-spout”—far too dangerous, judged Polis, for his inexperienced clients. So while Polis ran the birch-bark canoe down the rapids, his clients portaged the baggage and rejoined Polis at Webster Lake. During an exhilarating coast down the lake’s smooth-slanting water, Polis reminisced about stopping by Daniel Webster’s home in Boston to pay his respects. The great lawyer kept Polis waiting so long that he gave up and left. Being patient, Polis returned the next day, and was again ignored. Seeing Webster walking back and forth past the open door, still ignoring him, Polis approached. “What do you want?” challenged Webster, raising a hand as if to strike. The architect of Manifest Destiny was not open to diplomacy, let alone common courtesy. Polis left disgusted. No Indian would have been so rude.28

  The trouble started at the next rapids. The water was high and violent, and again Polis asked the white men to lighten the canoe and walk alongside, keeping him in sight to make sure he was all right. Some ways down, as Thoreau paused to help Polis lift the canoe over a rock, Ed Hoar quite unaccountably disappeared. The last Thoreau had seen him, he was rounding a precipice, picking his way down toward shore. Thoreau knew his friend was very nearsighted, and that his mangled feet disabled him from walking far—that Hoar was, in fact, struggling badly. One more carry, he had confessed to Thoreau, and “we should see a dead man.” “It was as if he had sunk into the earth,” wrote Thoreau, who bolted along the precipice looking for him, then in mounting panic coursed back and forth at the base, fearing to find Ed’s broken body in the rocks.29

  Polis, meanwhile, was searching down the river, but by the time he returned to tell Thoreau he found Hoar’s tracks, Thoreau was in a full-blown anxiety attack: What if Hoar were not found? How could he face Ed’s family if he returned without him—the same family that had smoothed over the damage when Henry and Ed set fire to the woods? Polis struggled to calm the hyperventilating Thoreau, who tried to listen. The sun was setting, and they could not possibly continue down the rapids in the dark. Hoar had surely found his way downriver, and nothing in these woods offered him the slightest danger. A night alone would hardly kill him. But all night Henry tossed and turned, hearing Ed’s voice calling him, and he darkly distrusted Polis. Perhaps the Indian had deceived him; perhaps he’d only pretended to find Ed’s tracks, in order to placate Thoreau and excuse his own Indian laziness. In short, Thoreau was a wreck and he knew it, but he couldn’t control his emotions.

  The awful night was barely over when Thoreau shook Polis awake, insisting they leave before breakfast. Polis obliged, and they managed the rest of the difficult carry together, Thoreau constantly hallooing Ed’s name until, joy of joys, Ed answered, just after Polis and Thoreau reached calmer waters and launched the canoe. Again and again Thoreau shouted back until Polis, exasperated, snapped, “He hears you”—“as if once was enough,” recollected Thoreau drily. And there, just below the mouth of Webster Stream, was Ed Hoar, sitting by his campfire smoking his pipe. He had done exactly as Polis said. The reunited three cooked their breakfast over Hoar’s campfire, and ate it, Thoreau remarked, with “good appetites.”30

  Their intense relief carried them down the beautiful Grand Lake Matagamon, calm, serene, and smooth as glass—a halcyon moment. Suddenly Polis exclaimed: “Moose! Moose!” His own goal for the trip had been to shoot a moose, and here she was, watching unafraid from the shallows as they approached, then stepping warily to higher ground. Polis fired and missed; she moved off, without haste, while he reloaded and fired two more shots. Polis was as excited as a fifteen-year-old boy, said Hoar, who saw his hand trembling, but his shots were true: the moose dropped where she stood, “perfectly dead.” Despite all his objections at Chesuncook, Thoreau had just witnessed his second moose kill.31

  Polis skinned and butchered the moose with swift and practiced efficiency while Thoreau noodled about looking for fish in the muddy shallows. Polis wrapped a large sirloin neatly in the folded skin, which he packed in the bottom of the canoe—a hundred pounds or, as he said, “one man” more, in a canoe already heavily loaded with two clients and their massive gear. If they waited, Polis offered, her calf would come by, and he would get it for them. Thoreau, revolted, picked an argument with him. It was a sore subject: killing moose for the market had allowed Polis to maintain his traditional culture and buy back his land, but when he insisted that he had to kill to support his family, Thoreau charged this was “the common white man’s argument.” While Thoreau had protested that economy in Walden, in Maine neither Thoreau’s philosophy nor his example could help Polis and his people survive. But, finally, there by the river, the whole argument was academic. They were all sick of cured pork, and Thoreau admitted that the moose meat, fried up over the campfire, was “very sweet & tender.”32

  The rest of the journey was far easier. As they coursed down the Penobscot in their overloaded canoe, Polis lightened the load a bit at every stop by cutting away more fur from the moose skin, which he stretched one night in camp. The teaching continued: Polis showed them how to write on birch bark with a black spruce twig—a form of literacy long known to his people—and when he noticed Thoreau having trouble reading in the firelight, he showed him how to make a birch-bark candle. When Hoar lost his pipe, Polis made him another from birch bark. By August first, two days after killing the moose, they had nearly reached the Hunts’ house, the last on the journey upstream before the road turned to Katahdin. Thoreau hoped to complete the ascent he had attempted in 1846—a chance to reckon again with the mountain that still troubled his dreams. But it was not to be. Ed Hoar could barely walk; his feet were still raw from sloshing for miles in the swamps around Chamberlain Lake. Polis offered to run up to Hunt’s for a pair of soft moccasins, swe
aring that with a few pairs of socks, they would allow Hoar to walk, and that, being porous, they would keep his feet dry. But the men went down the river nevertheless. Getting seriously lost was deeply instructive for Thoreau, but it cost him his longed-for rematch with the primal mountain of his imagination. And Polis had his own cause for sorrow: had he known they were heading straight home, he would have taken all the moose meat to his family, not just one sirloin—a waste he regretted deeply.33

  As they approached the settlements, Polis took care to lighten the mood. At the carry around Whetstone Falls, he challenged Thoreau to a race: “I take canoe & you take the rest—suppose you can keep along with me?” Thoreau took the bet and started packing up (“gun—axe—paddle—kettles—frying pan—plates, dippers—carpets &c”) whereupon Polis tossed him his cowhide boots. “These too?” gasped Thoreau. “O yer,” called Polis as he disappeared in bare feet over the hill with the canoe on his head. Thoreau scraped his load together and pounded off, soon passing him, but suddenly the plates and dippers “took to themselves wings,” and while Thoreau grabbed them up, Polis passed him again. So Thoreau hugged the sooty kettle and rattled off again, passing Polis, for good this time. “Where’ve you been?” Thoreau teased him at the finish. “Rocks cut my feet,” laughed Polis. “O me love to play sometimes—often race at carries—see who get over first.” “I carried the sign of the kettle the rest of the voyage,” added Thoreau.34

  On down the river, whole villages appeared where in 1846 Thoreau had seen only a house or two. Once, a mother held her child up to the window to see the motley voyagers pass by. On their second-to-last day, Polis woke up sick, forcing them to lay over just above Lincoln. An annoyed Thoreau thought Polis was moaning for show and considered leaving him to take the stage to Bangor, but when Polis objected, Thoreau stayed with him. The next morning Polis was well again—having cured himself with a decoction of gunpowder! He knew, he told Thoreau, the medicinal uses of all the plants in the woods. And as they approached their last rapids, Polis finally taught Thoreau how to paddle a canoe properly. Puzzled, Thoreau went along, recalling that Polis had earlier praised him, even given him a name that meant, he said, “Great Paddler.” But that was then, and this was serious: Polis genuinely needed Thoreau’s help. He showed Thoreau where to place his hands, and how to use the side of the canoe as a fulcrum. Thoreau was astonished at the improvement and proud to pass his first test: as they reached the rapids, Polis shouted, “Paddle!” and paddle he did, getting them through without splashing a single drop into the boat.35

  In the 325 miles and nearly two weeks they traveled together, Polis shared with Thoreau many stories of his own life, each one revealing something of the Penobscot world. Now, on their last day, he shared some of his tribe’s history, including the ruse Polis used to prevent a Catholic priest from cutting down their liberty pole, which for Polis and his followers signified their belief in modern schools. Polis believed education was essential as a way to protect Penobscot sovereignty. As he told Thoreau, if you had been to college and learned to calculate, you could “keep ’em property,—no other way.” He was proud of his son, the best scholar at the white school at Oldtown. As for himself, when Thoreau asked if he wasn’t glad to get home, Polis answered, “It makes no difference to me where I am.” Thoreau was impressed: “There was no relenting to his wildness.” They lingered for an hour at Polis’s “roomy & neat” house, and Thoreau saw Mrs. Polis, though without being introduced. When he and Hoar inquired about the next train to Bangor, Polis’s son brought in the Bangor newspaper, which Thoreau noticed was addressed to “Joseph Polis.”36 They took the last train, reaching Bangor that night, and lingered for three more days, resting, healing, and regaling Thoreau’s cousins with stories as they hunted ducks or poked around the sites of old Indian villages. On Friday, August seventh, they headed home. Thoreau was back the next day in time for breakfast.

  Through the fall, Thoreau worked on “The Allegash [sic] and the East Branch,” wrestling with the meaning of his encounter with the Penobscot world. Once upon a time he and John had played Indian, Thoreau pretending to be the long-vanished Tahatawan mocking the “council chambers” of white America. But Polis had been inside those very chambers, playing for real and for keeps for the future of his people as a living and vital nation. Polis confounded everything Thoreau knew. He lived in a neat and roomy frame house and took the daily newspaper, even while stretching animal hides in his front yard. He was at home on the streets of Philadelphia, calling on Senator Daniel Webster, purchasing a few hundred acres of real estate, or managing his fifty-acre hay and potato farm. He was also at home, “Niasoseb / We alone Joseph,” from the high Allagash to the slopes of Katahdin to the inland seas of Millinocket, “places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States . . . never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”37

  From then on, Thoreau never missed a chance to praise Indians and defend them against the prejudices of his friends. In a sentence he wrote for The Maine Woods (which someone eventually deleted), he asserted that his Indian guides were as reliable as white men, “far more instructive companions,” and “first-rate fellows” to boot.38 “He begins where we leave off,” he gushed to Blake a few days after his return. “The Indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses so much intelligence which the white man does not,—and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it. I rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than I knew.”39

  At Harvard, he startled the new librarian, John Langdon Sibley, by insisting on the mistake of science “in not giving more attention to the Indians & their languages and habits.” They have much to teach: for instance, what must they know of the cedar, they who have “more than fifty names” for it? His guide had located a snake by its call—what naturalist knew that fact? Polis could call animals to him, and knew more of the habits of fish than Agassiz had even dreamed.40 George Curtis was astonished at such talk, so entirely unlike that in novels or the theater, “untouched by romance or sentimentality.” Thoreau told Curtis the Indian was not doomed, but “damned, because his enemies were his historians; and he could only say, ‘Ah, if we lions had painted the picture!’” He startled Alcott and Emerson, too, by defending “the Indian from the doctrine of being lost or exterminated,” and asserting “he holds a place between civilized man and nature and must hold it.” Alcott dismissed the notion; like the woods and the beasts, “the savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man,” for savages “all are brute largely still.” As Emerson said with a fond smile, “Henry avoids commonplace, & talks birch bark to all comers.”41

  Throughout 1857, Thoreau added to his Indian Books, finishing volume 10 early in 1858. Only in April 1861 did he set aside the twelfth and final volume. His thousands of pages of notes documented the damnation he saw visited upon Indians by their so-called historians and recorded all he could glean of their lives and customs. Most of his sources were by white authors, since few Native Americans had yet broken into print. But when Thoreau could find books by Native authors, he read them avidly—such as the history of the Ojibwe of western Lake Superior by George Copway, or Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, the first book by a Canadian First Nations author. Thoreau, who could rarely afford books, purchased a copy for his personal library and annotated it heavily.

  What were his intentions for this tremendous project? He may have planned to write a book on “the Indian,” but if so, this plan ended with Joe Polis.42 Even so, his interest in Indians continued. He worked The Maine Woods into a counter-ethnography of living Indians as well as a revealing account of his own evolution from prejudice and disgust in “Ktaadn,” to his awed recognition of their humanity in “Chesuncook,” to a flawed and challenging exploration of cultural boundaries in “The Allegash and East Branch.” After this journey, Thoreau’s goals shifted: his next book would weave Indian names and practices together with the seasonal ripening and communal enjoyment of “wild f
ruits,” imagining a turn to nature not as a return to primitivism, but as a contemporary renewal of the deep communal intertwining of nature and culture. The idea had been percolating for years. Now, having been tutored by Polis, he could see how it might be focused and organized. From the fall of 1857 on, Thoreau’s Journal explored some of his most luminous insights before honing them into his next book: Wild Fruits.

  As usual, Thoreau took his new material out on the road. His annual advertisement in the New-York Tribune yielded, that year, only one lecture engagement, but it was a good one, in Lynn, just northeast of Boston, on January 13, 1858. There he read “The Allegash and East Branch” to a gathering in the parlor of John B. Alley, a Massachusetts state senator, Quaker abolitionist, and friend of Charles Sumner. No one kept notes, but when Alcott spoke to the same group a few weeks later, he found them a good company, “thoughtful, catholic,” and receptive. They liked what they heard so much they invited Thoreau back a year later. John Russell had invited him back, too, for a visit in nearby Salem; once he was home, Thoreau had to write Russell an apology. Later, he pleaded—more than one visit at a time made him feel rushed.43