by Eric Rutkow
Before the controversy bubbled over into crisis, scientists in both France and America determined, somewhat expediently, that the English designation of Wellingtonia gigantea was scientifically invalid. The big trees, they argued, belonged to the same genus as California’s coastal redwoods, the tallest trees in the world; and the redwood’s genus had earlier been classified as Sequoia, a name that honored the Native American who had independently created a writing system for the Cherokee nation. The big trees were subsequently designated Sequoia gigantea or, in layman’s terms, the giant sequoia. This common name stuck in America, but many English people persisted in using the name Wellingtonia. The scientific controversy, meanwhile, simmered deep into the twentieth century, when the big trees were again recognized as an independent genus.
The biggest fight over the sequoias, however, concerned not their names but their protection.
The national government as a matter of policy encouraged the transfer of federal territories into private hands both to generate revenue and on the theory that private actors would use such lands most productively. The forests containing giant sequoias were no exception. Thus, while the big trees were needlessly difficult to fell and produced mediocre timber, they were nonetheless vulnerable to the ravages of progress and the ax. In a rapidly developing region like California, their eradication appeared inevitable from the outset. The editor of an influential newspaper, the California Farmer, wrote in 1853:
[M]any a towering mountain, upon whose lofty summit now stand, in all their pride and glory, those giants of the forests, that like that wonder of the age, “the Mammoth Tree,” the woodman will no longer spare, these too must give place to that onward march of the Anglo-Saxon race, o’er mountain, hill and valley, and marking its progress onward along the Pacific, by civilization, cultivation and Christianization.
Such an attitude was commonplace at midcentury, and would only strengthen as logging activities accelerated.
Admirers of the big trees rallied to their defense. Hutchings considered any cuttings to be “a sacrilegious act” and a “desecration.” The trees were part of the natural heritage of America, a treasure that belonged to all citizens. Lands containing sequoias, the protectionists argued, must not be parceled out like any ordinary piece of woodland. An 1854 New York Herald editorial expressed a commonly felt sentiment: “[I]t is the duty of the State of California, of Congress, and of all good citizens, to protect and preserve these Californian monuments of the capabilities of our American soil.”
Following a decade of lobbying, the defenders of the sequoias won a major battle on June 30, 1864. That day, President Abraham Lincoln signed landmark legislation that forever altered the relationship between the federal government and the nation’s natural resources. Known colloquially as “The Yosemite and Big Tree Grant,” the act ceded lands containing the sublime Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove to the state of California, “for public use, resort, and recreation [to be] inalienable for all time.” This was the precursor to every national park in the country: the first time that the federal government stepped in to preserve natural resources (even if done obliquely through state transfer); the first time the government recognized a noncommercial value in land; and the first time that concern for the commons triumphed over private development. The big trees and Yosemite Valley had captured the imagination of a country and, for a moment, reoriented its priorities.
But the 1864 act was ultimately only a small step toward preservation, decades before its time. As late as 1900, a government report noted:
At the present time the only [sequoia] grove thoroughly safe from destruction is the Mariposa, and this is far from being the most interesting. Most of the other groves are either in process of, or in danger of, being logged. The very finest of all, the Calaveras Grove, with the biggest and tallest trees, the most uncontaminated surroundings, and practically all the literary and scientific associations of the species connected with it, has been purchased recently by a lumberman.
For Dowd’s Calaveras Grove, protection finally arrived in 1931 with the creation of the Calaveras Big Trees State Park, but only in 1954 did the park expand to incorporate all the nearby big trees. The process of defending every grove of big trees from logging would extend late into the twentieth century.
Thoreau’s Life in the Woods of Concord
BACK EAST, forests continued to fall in the name of progress. Many of the most forbidding backwoods from the Revolutionary period had yielded to fertile fields in little more than two generations. Even gone were the forests around Cooperstown where Natty Bumppo of The Leatherstocking Tales had once supposedly roamed. Bumppo’s pure wilderness was little more than a memory for the next generation, which included James Fenimore Cooper’s daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper, a writer and amateur naturalist. In 1850, she published Rural Hours, a popular work that recorded her daily interactions with the region’s landscape:
Probably there is no part of the earth, within the limits of the temperate climate, which has taken the aspect of an old country so soon as our native land. . . . Whenever we pause to recall what has been done in this secluded valley during the lifetime of one generation, we must needs be struck with new astonishment.
And while she, like most Americans, considered these developments across New York’s Otsego County “wonderful changes,” she nonetheless worried that such rapid development and deforestation risked leaving the country “bleak and bare” in the future.
Susan Cooper’s fears, however, had already been realized across the older settlements in New England. There, the forests that had once covered 95 percent of the land in many places had been reduced to the few areas where husbandry proved impractical because the soil was too poor or the terrain too uneven. Even where scattered forests remained, the individual trees were not the pristine giants that had overwhelmed early explorers, but youthful pines and hardwoods that were three, and sometimes four, generations removed from the forest primeval, the results of hundreds of years spent converting trees into fuel. The largest old-growth region in all of eastern Massachusetts by that point contained a meager four hundred acres, well less than a square mile.
No place better represented the development of New England in the mid-nineteenth century than Concord, Massachusetts. The twenty-six-square-mile town, located about twenty miles east of Boston, was founded in 1635, the first inland settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When the Revolutionary War broke out, Concord had been part of the initial hostilities, the final stop in a daylong fight that became known as the Battles of Lexington and Concord. In the early nineteenth century, the town thrived thanks in part to its proximity to Boston—one of the nation’s earliest railroad lines connected the two locations, allowing for easy transport of goods, including timber. By the 1830s, in addition to the miles of farmland, Concord boasted mills for wood, grist, and cotton, as well as large factories for lead pipes and shoes, and countless smaller manufacturers, who produced everything from clocks to pencils.
All of this economic and social growth had taken its toll on the trees of the local environment. Forests originally covered more than 90 percent of the town, but by 1850 that number had dropped to an incredible 10.5 percent (which, it turned out, represented a historic low for the area). Residents had slowly but inexorably cleared most of the land for agriculture, and remaining trees invariably ended up burning in their hearths or in those of Boston—by midcentury, that city’s 135,000 inhabitants were consuming about six hundred thousand cords a year for heat. White pines that had once grown to diameters of four feet or more were rarely found larger than ten or twenty inches. Only four isolated woodlands remained.
Against this denuded backdrop of Concord was born Henry David Thoreau in 1817. He was the son of a pencilmaker, one of the countless local careers dependent on trees, in this case cedars. Thoreau sometimes worked with his family’s business, but his primary interests were writing and nature, twin obsessions that defined him. Compared to the stand
ards of the day, he lived an existence while pursuing these two activities that was highly eccentric. He never married; showed little interest in pursuing women; preferred to live alone; assiduously skipped church; refused to pay state taxes; avoided voting; and abstained from strong drink, tobacco, or meat. Thoreau, in short, was an iconoclast.
His appearance was suitably striking. Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, after meeting Thoreau, wrote in his journal: “He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.”
While a student at Harvard in 1836, Thoreau read a widely circulated essay, “Nature,” which affected him profoundly. The author, the popular Concord-based minister and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, posited that nature—in his words, “essences unchanged by man”—was a force for salvation and restoration. Emerson wrote: “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. . . . In the woods, is perpetual youth. . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith. . . . In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages.” Emerson’s essay was attempting to reorient the relationship between Americans and their forests: While early settlers had openly feared the woods and later generations had learned to exploit its resources, few, aside from the botanists and backwoodsmen, ever delighted in the restorative, almost divine, powers of the wild. For Thoreau, who found himself naturally drawn to Concord’s rapidly diminishing wilderness, the ideas expressed in “Nature” justified and nourished his youthful interest.
Emerson’s essay was not a work in isolation, but one of the foundational texts of a major social movement coalescing at the time Thoreau was entering adulthood. Part philosophy, part activism, it was known as transcendentalism and centered on Concord. The philosophical component was a uniquely American outgrowth of several epistemologies popular in nineteenth-century New England, including Unitarianism, German Idealism, and Swedenborgianism, the same creed that Johnny Appleseed had attempted to popularize. (Emerson once called Swedenborg a “man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of life.”) In the broadest terms, the Concord-based movement asserted that an ideal spiritual state transcended the material world and that a correspondence existed between human thoughts and the natural universe, allowing for insight through personal reflection.
Although few could pinpoint exactly what a transcendentalist was (Emerson bravely attempted the challenge in his 1842 essay “The Transcendentalist”), many rushed to join in the movement. It became a hub of not only intellectual activity, but of progressive causes and social reform. Transcendentalists were among the first to articulate seminal concepts like “self-reliance,” “civil disobedience,” and the restorative powers of nature. They also championed social causes such as abolition, free public libraries, utopian communities, and vegetarianism.
In the late 1830s, Thoreau met Emerson, and the two immediately entered into an informal mentorship. Under Emerson’s tutelage, Thoreau began keeping a journal and crafting essays for transcendentalist publications such as The Dial. But the young writer found no immediate success. For nearly ten years, he bounced from job to job, as teacher, editor, tutor, and repairman. Emerson provided frequent support, offering his home to Thoreau and finding him new sources of employment, but Thoreau seemed plagued with bad luck as well as tragedy. In 1842, his brother, John, contracted a fatal case of tetanus from a shaving cut and died in Thoreau’s arms. Two years later, Thoreau accidentally set fire to several hundred acres of Concord’s scarce woodland. While he rationalized the damage as equivalent to “if the lightning had done it,” he noted in his journal that “some declared behind my back that I was a ‘damned rascal.’”
A decade of toiling was leading nowhere for Thoreau, and in 1845 he decided to radically redirect his life. His plan was to abandon all concerns for the community-oriented society of Concord and retreat to the woods, where he could work undisturbed on a book project and, perhaps, find the sort of enlightenment that Emerson had described in “Nature.” As Thoreau famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Of course, finding a forest for this purpose was no easy task in Concord. Thoreau once more turned to Emerson, who happened to control a tract of land in one of the town’s four remaining woodlands. It was located a few miles from town on the edge of a body of water known as Walden Pond, which Thoreau considered “a perfect forest mirror.” However, the forests around Walden were not the dark and savage woodlands of old, but a collection of young trees, allowed to stand because the underlying soil was too poor to sustain cultivation. The only people who used Walden Woods were woodcutters and the ice harvesters who skimmed the pond in wintertime. Walden was less than an hour’s walk from downtown Concord; the train to Boston passed nearby, its whistle echoing among the trees.
In early 1845, Thoreau set out for Walden Pond, ax in hand. He selected for his planned retreat a site by the shore of the pond, an area he described as “in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories.” These surrounding trees became the raw materials for a modest shelter, and he spent the spring consumed in the laborious task of erecting his home. After several months of tiresome work, Thoreau moved into his dwelling on July 4. Walden Pond then became his full-time residence for two years, two months, and two days, until September 6, 1847.
Life in the woods allowed Thoreau to finally focus on his two delights, writing and the contemplation of nature. He passed days recording his thoughts in a journal and drafting a manuscript that described a trip he had taken with his departed brother, later published under the title A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. When he wasn’t writing, he explored the surrounding forest, observing and taking notes, interacting with the animals, canoeing along the pond, enjoying the solitude. The trees acted as his new companions. He explained:
Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees . . . such as the black-birch, of which we have some handsome specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin, the yellow-birch, with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; [and] the beech, which has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in all its details. . . . These were the shrines I visited both summer and winter.
While Thoreau’s spiritual life existed among the trees, his social life was not wholly eliminated. He visited his family often, and his mother frequently provided him lunch. Occasionally, he passed through town, including one famous incident in 1846 when the tax collector briefly imprisoned him for tax evasion, an experience that inspired him to write his famous 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience.” He even took a lengthy excursion to Maine in which he ascended Mount Katahdin and described the pristine forests as “something savage and awful, though beautiful.” Still, it was within the woods of Walden that Thoreau transformed from a promising talent to one of the most influential voices in the history of America.
In 1854, at the age of thirty-seven, Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods, the work that came to define him as a writer and thinker. In form, it used a series of loosely collected essays that followed the cycle of a single year—for literary effect, Thoreau had shortened his period of residency. In substance, it was a plea for the virtues of simple living and the promise of nature. With the wit of a satirist and the graceful language of a poet, Thoreau challenged his readers to question the values of modern life, insisting, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Walden built on the idea from Emerson’s “Nature” that renewal awaited in the solitude of wilderness. But unlike Emerson, Thoreau treated the outdoors not from the spiritual perspective of the minister, but from that of a rapt observer, always ready to capture a telling detail and t
he slightest nuance. The natural world of Concord, limited though it was, came alive in stories of a cagey lark, a stubborn beanfield, or a noble pine, and the forests of Walden provided Thoreau with the fulfillment that he’d been unable to find in the materialistic culture of New England.
While the thrust of Walden was not on the need to protect the forests, Thoreau nonetheless stood up to defend them against the wanton tree felling that characterized his time. “Since I left those shores,” he wrote,
the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Thoreau, it should be noted, was not mourning the death of America’s pristine forests—such a lament would have been akin to grieving for long-departed ancestors. He was simply requesting the salvation of that tiny fraction of uncultivated land that remained. For him, some semblance of nature was a necessary counterbalance to society: “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of the wildness.”