Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  A few weeks later, on February 25, Thoreau repeated his new Maine Woods lecture at the Concord Lyceum. In the normal course of events, the next step would have been publication, but curiously, when his old nemesis James Russell Lowell wanted the new Maine essay for the Atlantic, Thoreau held back. The “fatal objection,” he insisted, “is that my Indian guide, whose words & deeds I report very faithfully,—and they are the most interesting part of the story,—knows how to read, and takes a newspaper, so that I could not face him again.” Nothing could more clearly signal Thoreau’s shift in thought. His subject was no longer the Indian, that mythic generalization, but Joe Polis, a specific person who would most certainly read Thoreau’s frank portrait. But he still had the earlier, unpublished “Chesuncook” on hand. Would that do? Though it was a bit outdated, Lowell accepted it, and Thoreau got down to revisions. Yes, he assured Lowell late in February, in this case he would name names. On March 5 Thoreau posted “Chesuncook” to Lowell, asking to see the proofs so he could check the spellings of the Indian names and reserving the right to publish it in a future book.44 The Maine Woods was now, in Thoreau’s eye, a future reality.

  Lowell broke “Chesuncook” into three parts to run as the summer travel feature over June, July, and August 1858. In June he gave Thoreau pride of place: “Chesuncook,” his first publication in three years, opened the issue. The Boston Transcript sniped that Thoreau was washed up as a writer, merely repeating himself. This was hardly fair: July’s installment hit readers with Thoreau’s powerful indictment of hunting, dramatized by the lurid butchery of the nursing mother, and August’s concluded with his clarion call: “Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’ . . . ? or shall we,” he ended, “like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?” His vision of a national commons would help to inspire America’s unique system of national parks and forest and wilderness reserves.45

  Over and over Thoreau entrusted his words to print only to find them censored. While reviewing proofs on June 22, he discovered Lowell had ignored his instructions and deleted a key sentence. “A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man,” he had written, before concluding that honoring the living tree was a sacred commitment: “It is immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” Lowell deleted that final sentence, turning Thoreau’s statement of religious principle into a poet’s mere personal preference. Furious, Thoreau fired off a letter protesting Lowell’s “very mean and cowardly” action, so “bigoted and timid” that he could hardly believe Lowell himself was responsible. It broke the fundamental contract between author and editor: “I do not ask anybody to adopt my opinions, but I do expect that when they ask for them to print, they will print them. . . . I should not read many books if I thought that they had been thus expurgated.” Worse, it was “an insult” to presume “that I can be hired to suppress my opinions.” No reply from Lowell survives. This time the series was not aborted, but Lowell deepened the insult with injury, withholding Thoreau’s $198 until Thoreau begged for it, twice, in ice-cold letters.46 Thoreau wouldn’t touch the Atlantic—America’s leading literary magazine—until Lowell resigned the editorship, and The Maine Woods be not be published until 1864, two years after Thoreau’s death. Thus Thoreau never had the satisfaction of seeing in print either of the books he completed after Walden.

  Life in the Commons: Village, Mountain, River

  A raft of letters awaited Thoreau’s return from Maine. Marston Watson had mailed him a “glowing communication,” literally: six glowworms, rare and beautiful as precious gems. Soon the Watsons came to visit, and they puzzled over glowworms together. Meanwhile, Thoreau issued an apology to Ricketson for postponing a visit to New Bedford, and another—ticklish, this one—to Blake for not inviting him to Maine. Blake was deeply hurt, so Thoreau tried to explain, without coming right out and saying Blake wasn’t up to the physical challenge: it would have been “imprudent”; he had left so suddenly; the trip had been so difficult even the sturdy Ed Hoar “suffered considerably.” It rained all the time, the mosquitos were terrible, they never even made it up Katahdin.47 He would have to make it up to Blake later. For now there was a round of social calls: to Natick to examine Indian sites and landmark trees with a local naturalist; up the Assabet with Ed Hoar (from now on, one of Thoreau’s steadiest friends) and the old Brook Farmer George P. Bradford; walks with Emerson; and, best of all, long conversations with Bronson Alcott.48

  Ever since poverty had forced him to sell Hillside, Bronson had been looking for a home. The Alcotts hated the isolation of Walpole, and their daughter Elizabeth’s lingering illness—she never recovered from scarlet fever—made his search more urgent. They finally settled back in Concord, next door to their old home on Lexington Road: twelve acres with woodlands and a fine apple orchard that would supplement the family income. Soon they were calling it “Orchard House.” On September 22, 1857, Alcott closed the deal while Thoreau surveyed the grounds, and the family moved into rented rooms in their old house next door, the Hawthornes being still abroad.49 In July 1858, repairs finally completed, the Alcotts moved into the home Louisa would make famous with Little Women. Thoreau found it good having them back in his daily life. When Elizabeth passed in March 1858, he attended her funeral and burial; when Anna married his friend Minot Pratt’s son, Thoreau danced at the wedding.50 When Louisa directed a theatrical fundraiser for the antislavery cause—she had “Slavery,” in clerical dress, take swigs out of a bottle in the form of a Bible while “Manifest Destiny” staggered on stage “whining for a bolt of whiskey”—he was there. Returning through the village afterward, Thoreau noticed the clouds were “distinctly pink or reddish, somewhat as if reflecting a distant fire.”51 It was the aurora borealis, but by then, everyone saw fire on the horizon.

  Throughout his years of village life, Thoreau had always enjoyed the annual “Cattle Show,” known more formally as the Middlesex County Agricultural Fair; but in the fall of 1857, he was more than a spectator. That spring he had planted six seeds from the patent office labelled “Poitrine jaune grosse”—large yellow squash—and two of them sprouted, one yielding four huge squashes and the other a single squash that tipped the scales at 123½ pounds and captured the Cattle Show premium. The man who bought Thoreau’s prizewinning squash planned to sell the seeds for ten cents apiece, but it was so coarse it was inedible—exactly the kind of artificial forcing that turned the most simple and wholesome garden plants into rank weeds, wrote Thoreau, foul products of human “vileness and luxuriance.”52

  His pessimism fit everyone’s mood, for that year the talk at the Cattle-Show was the Panic of 1857. “Nobody seems to know the cause of all this trouble,” Thoreau’s neighbor Fanny Prichard wrote her mother from New York. “The hard times is all we hear of—every body has failed—there is the fear of great suffering and a great deal of crime.”53 The causes were many. Wheat prices plunged as the Crimean War ended and Russia reentered the global market. Western railroads were failing, banks were collapsing, and even the SS Central America sank in a hurricane, sending four hundred souls and thirty thousand pounds of California gold (worth half a billion dollars today) to the bottom of the ocean. Businesses all over the North went bankrupt, causing mass unemployment and urban riots. The depression spread around the globe and lasted into the Civil War. It was all utterly bewildering. Thoreau was exuberant: the Panic vindicated everything he ever said. “If thousands are thrown out of employment,” he wrote sagely to Blake, “it suggests that they were not well employed. Why don’t they take the hint?” For decades men of wealth and power had stood on the Roman porticos of banks built of granite atop safes of iron and mocked his Transcendental moonshine. Now they were all toppling away—Concord’s own bank among them�
�and lo! “there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, and unchanged.”54 “How grandly your philosophy sits now in these trying times,” exulted Ricketson. When a merchant friend failed, Ricketson offered him his copy of Walden.55

  Despite the collapse, Thoreau had all the surveying work he could handle. All fall, his Journal thinned under the strain. He hated seeing his dear Walden woods mapped so meticulously: rummaging in crumbling old deeds reminded him that his “wilderness” was really just “some villager’s familiar wood-lot from which his ancestors have sledded their fuel for generations, or some widow’s thirds, minutely described in some old deed.” In one of those old deeds he found a flicker of redemption: it turned out that in 1797, his Walden beanfield had belonged to George Minott, brother of his grandfather-in-law Jonas Minott, descended from Thomas Minott in Essex who had been the Abbot of Walden.56 Thoreau’s family history was inscribed deep into those Walden woods, even into Walden Pond’s very name.

  To compensate, Thoreau read all five volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, though in the end he was disappointed. Where he wanted to see Nature, Ruskin wanted to see Nature through Art. But Ruskin showed him how to see autumn through an artist’s eye, and he painted in words a Red Walden of color fields and abstract form—like Indian tattoos. For everywhere Thoreau looked that fall, Walden spoke of Indians. They may have been swept away, but their Kineo arrowheads remained. “Such are our antiquities. These were our predecessors. Why, then, make so great ado about the Roman and the Greek, and neglect the Indian?”57 The insight grew: “The man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you.” How, then, was he related to Maine’s pines? To build Concord’s new houses, people turned beaver: damming streams, raising lakes, turning nature against itself to float their spoils out of the country. Like ten thousand mice they nibbled at the base of the noblest trees, toppling them and dragging them off, then scampering away “to ransack some other wilderness.” For what? To build the hollow wealth destroyed by the Panic of 1857. The four hundred who drowned in the SS Central America were like men gasping out “I am worth a hundred thousand dollars” as the weight of their gold bore them to the bottom.58

  His new writing gave him a surge of joy. The Romantics were mistaken “that writing poetry was for youths only.” Youth obtained the vision, but real poetry took a lifetime of “steady corresponding endeavor thitherward”—not just seeing the road, but traveling it. Which took real resolve, he reflected that Thanksgiving, as he hauled his boat out of the river and braced for winter. To further protect his throat from the coming cold, he grew his Galway whiskers into (as Ricketson teased) a “terrible long beard.” But winter soured. The January air warmed, the snow didn’t fall, the river didn’t freeze, and one hardly needed gloves. “What is winter without snow and ice in this latitude? The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer.”59 In a foul mood, Thoreau even lashed out at “the Indian, inevitably & resignedly passing away—in spite of all our efforts to christianize and educate them. . . . The fact is the history of the white man is a history of improvement—that of the Red man—a history of fixed habits—stagnation.”60 It was as if he’d never gone to Maine, never met Joe Polis. Yet on that very day, he offered “Chesuncook” to the Atlantic, insisting on withholding “The Allegash and East Branch” because Polis (that Christianized and educated Indian) would read it. Fatalism was rare for Thoreau. Perhaps he was lashing out at Polis for being too literate to subdue, or at Lowell for enforcing the same old gloomy savagism.

  There were other sources of tension. His father, the family’s quiet and steady anchor, was gravely ill. In November the family alerted his father’s sisters Jane and Maria to come up from Cambridgeport. By New Year’s his ominous cough had worsened, and the family knew he was dying. Henry had to shoulder the family business, even as the Panic of 1857 was hitting home. Their customers were often unable to pay, or paid in IOUs that Henry feared were worthless. He pushed to increase his surveying income, and when Thatcher came to visit, he pumped him for business advice. One obvious solution was to hire outside help, and in May 1858 Henry did just that, traveling to New York City to find an agent for their graphite business. As his father wrote to Thatcher, Henry succeeded, but not until he cut their price in half; their old rivals the Munroes had cut their prices, too, and the depression was still squeezing business.61

  His glum mood started to lift as spring approached. On March 5, he put “Chesuncook” in the mail to Lowell, while still riding a high from reading Father Rasles’s dictionary of the Abenaki language, “a very concentrated and trustworthy natural history of that people.” Indians were back to being thrilling and generative. That very evening Thoreau was riveted by the performance of “a Chippeway Indian, a Doctor Mung-somebody.” Maungwudaus, or George Henry, was a Mississauga Ojibwe from Canada and a friend of George Copway, whose book Thoreau owned—an accomplished speaker, tall, commanding and at ease with his audience, who had led his performance troupe on tour across England to Europe. After smallpox took his wife and three children, Maungwudaus toured the United States on his own, selling herbal medicines—hence “Doctor.” Thoreau listened closely as Maungwudaus, draped in the theatrical “Indian” garb his audiences demanded (a buffalo-skin robe decorated with porcupine quills, an eagle-feather headdress) explained his people’s origins over the Bering Strait from Asia, showed how they cradled their children, detailed their marriage customs, displayed their inscribed birch-bark basketry, and blow-darted arrows straight through an apple at twenty feet. He was aided by a Penobscot friend—none other than Joe Polis’s brother Pielpole (or Peter) Polis.62

  When the Concord audience laughed at Maungwudaus’s speaking voice—like Polis and the Penobscot generally, he ended his words with “um” or “em”—Thoreau righteously defended his “unsubdued Indian accent,” the real “bow-arrow tang!” And he was deeply moved by what he saw: “How little I know of that arbor-vitae when I have learned only what science can tell me! It is but a word. It is not a tree of life. But there are twenty words for the tree and its different parts which the Indian gave, which are not in our botanies, which imply a more practical and vital science.” In the light of the Abenaki words, he saw the world “from a new point of view,” revealing “a life within a life . . . threading the woods between our towns still.” A few days later, Thoreau came across an Indian fishtrap made of willow wands and full of fish—a cunning art that filled him with regret: had his father stayed on the farm with an Indian for his hired man, “how many aboriginal ways we children should have learned from them!” He drew it carefully, thinking how the Indians’ words were objects, and their objects, words. The man who wove that fishtrap basket “was meditating a small poem in his way. It was equal to a successful stanza whose subject was spring.”63

  Soon Thoreau was weaving his own spring stanzas. His subject this year was frogs, and his theme was patience: “He must take his position, and then wait and watch.” He brought frog and fish eggs home and watched them hatch; the little frogs woke him up at night with their jostling and peeping. He noticed how closely frog song registered the temperature: “perfect thermometers, hygrometers, and barometers” who expressed with their voices “the very feelings of the earth.”64 Emerson was fascinated by Thoreau’s ability to sit still for hours, becoming “a log among the logs,” until the birds and frogs came to him, but he also thought his friend carried his studies to extreme. “My dear Henry,” he wrote, “A frog was made to live in a swamp, but a man was not made to live in a swamp. Yours ever, R.” But young people loved to enter Thoreau’s charmed circle, and their numbers were growing: Edith Emerson was cultivating a wild garden; Dr. Bartlett’s son Edward had an aquarium full of snails, bugs, and salamanders, which everyone envied; and Ellen Emerson wrote her cousin that “we are, as usual at this season, interested especially in flowe
rs and birds, and Mr. Thoreau is in great demand.”65 And there were others: Mary Brown sent more flowers from Vermont, the Worcester circle sent a hummingbird’s nest, Marston Watson sent pear trees from Hillside. “This looks like fairy housekeeping,” a pleased Thoreau wrote back.66

  · · ·

  “Ktaadn is there still,” Thoreau had written to Blake once he returned from Maine, just as “the truth is still true.” The mountain had haunted him all through the fall of 1857; late in October he had climbed it in his dreams, wandering lost and thrilled over “the bare and pathless rock” of the misty summit, feeling “purified and sublimed.” As he later wrote to Blake, “You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not. . . . It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.”67 Going “over the mountain” became his next project—not to look from the mountain but to look at it—and for this the best companion was Blake the philosopher. On June 2, 1858, the two met at the Troy railroad station and hiked the four miles to the rocky summit of Mount Monadnock, barren of soil ever since farmers had set fire to the mountaintop to destroy wolf habitat.68

  They were hardly alone. Climbing Monadnock was all the rage, and that very year a local entrepreneur had opened the “Halfway House” hotel on its slopes. Thoreau and Blake picked their way not over a pathless summit but through a litter of newspapers and eggshells among graffiti-covered rocks. After setting up camp in a sheltered spot, they spent the next day tracing a circle a mile in diameter with two transepts over the summit itself—an ecological survey, Thoreau noting everything he could see: the alpine plants and birds; the worn, rounded rocks scratched by glaciers; the wee wet bogs tucked into the hollows. The frogs, high up in a barren rocky cistern, baffled him. How had they gotten there? It boggled belief to think they had hopped up. “Agassiz might say that they had originated on the top,” yet it seemed about as likely that they had rained down from the clouds. And how did they survive? Thoreau pondered the puzzle as they walked down the next day to where, right by the railroad, stood some of the grandest white pines he had ever seen, old-growth timber that would long since have been logged out of Maine. He stopped to gape at their straight, tall, polished perpendicularity.69