Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The Thoreaus had close ties with their Maine cousins, and were always welcome there. In 1832, Henry’s cousin Rebecca Billings had married George Thatcher, a Bangor merchant who owned timber interests up the river, who knew the country and the logging business. In 1846, spring floods scoured the upper reaches of the West Branch, weakening the logging dams and strewing logs down the riverbed for many miles. Some of those logs were Thatcher’s, and when he decided to travel upriver and inspect the damage for himself, he invited Henry to come along. When Henry insisted they could hardly come so close to Mount Katahdin without climbing it, an expedition was born. On August 31, Thoreau took the railroad to Portland and the steamboat to Bangor, that last great outpost of commerce on the verge of a forest that stretched clear to Canada. At 11:00 a.m. on September 1, Thatcher brought around a wagon and tossed in a carpetbag and his double-barreled shotgun; Thoreau added his knapsack, and they rattled out of “this depot of lumber—this worn Old Bangor,” heading sixty miles upriver to Mattawamkeag.92

  The Penobscot River system had been for decades a great organic machine transforming the Maine woods into commercial timber: its 250 sawmills, Thoreau read, produced two hundred million board feet annually.93 Their journey upriver allowed Thoreau to study this great machine from port to source. A few miles out, they stopped at the fall line in Stillwater, the region’s largest concentration of lumber mills, where Thoreau first saw how “the arrowy Maine forest” was night and day “lop[p]ed—scarified—soaked bleached—shaved—& slit” until it came out “board, clapboards, laths, and shingles,” bound for export to Boston, New Haven, and New York City. Farther up, they watched the watermen leap from log to log with their “spike poles,” thrusting the floating logs toward the mill and occasionally getting a ducking. They stopped at a batteau factory in Oldtown so Henry could see how the region’s distinctive riverboats were made—long, solid, canoe-like craft whose “wildly musical” name evoked the French voyageurs.94

  From there they took the ferry upriver past Indian Island, where the Penobscot, who once roamed freely for hundreds of miles, lived on their island reservation. The town had a “shabby and forlorn and cheerless look all backside and woodshed,” deserted, for all Thoreau could see, except for “a short shabby washerwoman-looking Indian” who landed his canoe and, taking up a bundle of skins in one hand and an empty keg in the other, headed for the tiny grocery. “Here was his history written,” Thoreau intoned, offended by the squalor and poverty. The political history that removed this “once powerful tribe” from their lands and confined them to this tiny plot of land was, at that moment, beyond his caring or comprehension; all he could see was a remnant swiftly heading for “extinction.”95 The ferry landed them in Milford, and they drove up the Houlton Military Road along a late-summer river, all rocky shallows and rapids. Everywhere, Thoreau saw damage from the flood: houses overturned, great logs strewn like matchsticks, still unclaimed though each bore the owner’s brand. Thatcher kept an eye out for his own brand among the rest. They stayed the night at Treat’s temperance house, the country’s oldest settler’s house, where Thoreau noted the fine, healthy orchard bearing heaps of worthless wild apples.

  The next day, upcountry in Lincoln, they sought out an Indian guide, walking through the forest until they could see the Indians’ shanties on an island across the river. They borrowed a canoe, paddled over, and found Louis Neptune, “a small wiry man with a puckered and wrinkled face”—a respected tribal elder who had guided Emerson’s brother-in-law Charles T. Jackson, the state geologist, up Katahdin in 1837. Neptune said he and his friend were planning to leave the next day for Chesuncook to hunt moose. What luck! Thoreau and Thatcher hired them on the spot, agreeing to meet them at McCauslin’s farm by the dam on the West Branch. Thoreau teased Neptune about Pomola, the evil genius of the mountain: maybe she wouldn’t let them go up. Katahdin (or Ktaadn, as Thoreau spelled it), whose name meant “highest land,” was sacred to Neptune’s people. He deflected the insult with a joke: they’d have to leave a bottle of rum on the top; he’d planted a good many, and when he returned, they were always empty. Thoreau understood neither the insult nor the joke.96

  Back in Lincoln, the cousins watered their horse and bought ammunition, and Thoreau sniffed at the “bungling” pencils they sold. After reaching the inn at Mattawamkeag, they whiled away the afternoon riding up the Military Road, Thoreau studying the settlers’ way of clearing the land: they clearcut the trees and burned them where they fell, rolling the remains together and burning them again, then again, until nothing was left. Meanwhile, they planted potatoes and turnips between the smoldering ash heaps. Thoreau, something of a frontier farmer himself, pulled up a few potato vines and was impressed. It seemed so easy! Why didn’t the starving immigrant in New York or Boston get some of this cheap land “and be as rich as he pleases?” Back at the inn, he traced the newest map of Maine to bring along. It turned out to be “a labyrinth of errors”; despite decades of intensive logging, most of Maine’s interior had never been accurately mapped. Meanwhile, Thatcher’s friends walked in: his brother-in-law Charles Lowell and Horatio P. Blood, whom they all called “Raish.” Early the next morning, September 3, the four men shouldered their packs, leaped over the fence, and set off. Henceforth the river was their road, for they left all other roads behind. Thoreau was thrilled. On either hand “was a wholly uninhabited wilderness, stretching to Canada”: no horses, no cows, no vehicles—nothing but river and evergreen woods. “Here, then,” declared Thoreau, “one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil.”97

  The wilderness trail took them first through a smoking wasteland where the trees had been clearcut, “four or 5 deep and crossing each other in all directions all black as charcoal”—enough wood, observed Thoreau, to “keep amply warm the poor of Boston and New York for a winter,” here a nuisance to be eliminated as quickly as possible. Thereafter, they ran into a surprising number of people for “uninhabited” country: they rested for a spell at the Crockers’ cabin, then at the Howards’ sprawling household, and then a little farther on at the Fisks’, passing out books to the children and newspapers to the adults as they went. To cross the river they hunted up the ferryman, finding him in a neat little dwelling “with plenty of books and a new wife just imported from Boston.” Across the river they passed a barn filled with summer hay ready to feed the overwintering cattle, and soon they were inspecting loggers’ camps—great log buildings chinked with moss, roofs shingled with cedar or spruce, and huge fireplaces; no need to conserve wood here. At the Hale farm, they hoped to get a view of Katahdin from the clearing, but the air was so smoky from the burning trees that they could see nothing. Mrs. Waite served them a generous lunch and refused their payment; conversation was all she asked. They left a picture book for her boy, who, as they left, was reading it avidly.98

  At George McCauslin’s spread, they paused to wait for the Indians. After twenty-two years as a logger and waterman, “Uncle George” had settled down, clearing several hundred acres and building his farm into a business supplying the lumbermen’s needs. The supper table overflowed with wheat cakes, ham, eggs, potatoes, milk, cheese, shad, salmon, cakes both sweet and hot; and for dessert, stewed mountain cranberries and tea sweetened with molasses. There was so much butter they used it to grease their boots, and “many whole logs, 4 feet long were consumed to boil our tea-kettle.” The way to their bedrooms led past a dairy “teeming with new milk and cheeses in press.” Rain pounded on the roof as the men slept, and they awakened to a storm, so they waited out the day, keeping watch for their guides while looking over the farm. Why, Thoreau asked Uncle George—still thinking of those immigrant masses—weren’t there more settlers on this land? Because, he replied, the land was not for sale. The companies who owned it wanted no towns on their tax rolls, and the few individuals who’d acquired land wanted no neighbors. People brought nothing but trouble.99

  Clearly this was not the untrammeled wildern
ess Thoreau had expected. The Indians disappointed him too: Neptune and his friend never showed up. So the next morning, McCauslin himself agreed to be their guide, ignoring his wife’s protests that she could hardly milk their cattle by herself. He packed up supplies—a tent, a blanket, fifteen pounds of hard bread, ten pounds of pork—and four miles upriver they stopped at Thomas Fowler’s place to recruit young Tom to help handle the batteau, which was a two-man job. For the batteau itself, they headed up the Millinocket to find Tom’s father, Old Fowler, who agreed to lend them his. This, wrote Thoreau in his notes, was the last house, for sure. While someone ran off to catch the horses to portage the batteau over the first carry, Mrs. Fowler told them how wolves had just killed nine of their sheep, and she showed off their array of steel traps: wolf-sized, otter-sized, bear-sized. By two o’clock the horses were caught, and the travelers slogged over the rutted Indian portage trail to Quakish Lake while the horses trudged behind, hauling the quarter-ton batteau on its cart. The horses arrived just as the heavens broke into a thunderstorm; the men flipped over the batteau and waited out the deluge, whittling thole pins and singing boat songs. Outside the horses stood “sleek and shining with the rain, all drooping and crestfallen.”100

  At last a streak of blue sky promised fair weather. The six men packed up and set off, the two boatmen poling the twenty-foot craft up the rapids with a speed and skill Thoreau found exhilarating. From Quakish Lake they got their first glimpse of Mount Katahdin, still twenty miles away, its summit veiled in clouds. At the head of the lake they examined the dam—a substantial work of engineering, noted Thoreau, built to flood some sixty square miles—where a gang of men was repairing the spring damage. At the loggers’ camp, the cook served tea with hotcakes and sweet cakes, and Thoreau found a well-thumbed copy of Emerson’s 1844 “Address on West Indian Emancipation”—the address for which he’d rung the bell two years before, and for which he’d overseen the printing and distribution. Thatcher, himself an antislavery activist, had left it there on an earlier trip and made, he boasted, no fewer than two converts to the Liberty Party. Even here, Thoreau must have thought, the State was everywhere to be seen. This, he promised himself again, was truly “the last human inhabitation of any kind in this direction.”101

  This time, he was more or less right. The sun had set but the moon was up, and by its light the men rowed five miles up North Twin Lake, “a noble sheet of water” on the high tableland between the United States and Canada. By the time McCauslin guided them into a campsite he remembered from his logging days, it was growing dark, and they hurried to gather deadwood while McCauslin felled a few trees to feed a campfire ten feet long by three or four feet high, before which they pitched their cotton tent without calculating on the sparks. When the tent caught fire, they swept it away, laying the remains on the ground for a tarp and sleeping under the overturned batteau, their chilled feet toward the flames. Thoreau awoke around midnight, put some wood on the fire, and gazed far out onto the moonlit lake, hoping to see a moose or a wolf, listening to the tinkling of the rill in the vast silence, and feeling himself at last in a new world, whose “stern yet gentle wildness” he would never forget.102

  Before dawn the men were on their way, leaving their tremendous fire to burn itself out—common practice, noted the fire-savvy Thoreau, in this damp woods where the valuable timber was gone and no one much cared if what was left burned down. He’d been reading Melville’s Typee, and as they rowed on, he fantasized he was in the South Pacific approaching the bay of the Typee, who were rushing into the hills to gather coconuts and breadfruit to bring to the beach. But no friendly natives met the voyageurs as they rowed through a chain of lakes joined by narrow passages bound by “fencing stuff”—log booms of unhewn timber lashed together for the spring drives down rapids to the hungry mills below. Every time, without fail, Thoreau was startled to see “so plain a trail of the white man” in country so beautiful and wild. After breakfast at the head of Lake Umbedegis, Henry, Tom, and Uncle George explored the overgrown remains of an old logging camp, complete with a crumbling blacksmith’s forge. Even here there were ruins and antiquity. “Go where you will somebody has been there before you.”103

  On they went, mile by mile, lake by lake, carry by carry. Once, they passed an orange billboard wrapped around a tree trunk, advertising Oak Hall, a large Boston clothing store. Finally McCauslin landed them at Mount Katahdin’s base, at a campsite marked with the skeleton of a dead moose, where he promised “trout enough.” Groping round the loose grating of the moose’s ribcage, they seized the birch poles hunters left behind; soon they were hauling in fish as fast as they could throw out hooks. After Thoreau lost his hook, he was delegated to catching the fish the men tossed ashore: they fell about him in “a perfect shower,” glistening, when alive, “like the fairest flowers, and he stood over them as if in a trance unable to trust his senses—that these jewels should have swum away in that Aboljacknagesac water for so long! So many dark ages these bright flowers seen of Indians only!” McCauslin remanded the bounty to the frying pan, now sizzling with pork. After they ate their fill, Thoreau counted the fin rays and scales to identify the species: “chivin” or white trout, he noted in his Journal, Leucisci pulchelli. He fell asleep and dreamed of trout fishing. Awakening in disbelief, he cast a line into the water again “and found the dream to be real and the fable truth.” There, under the dark outline of Katahdin, Thoreau fished until the moonlight faded into dawn.104

  · · ·

  At 6:00 a.m., sated with trout, the six men set off up the creek, following Thoreau’s compass in a beeline toward what he mistakenly thought was Katahdin’s highest peak, tramping through rough country, eating blueberries, and stepping around bear, moose, and rabbit droppings. By four o’clock, afraid lest there be no water above, they stopped to camp; but Thoreau couldn’t stop, so he kept climbing, pulling himself up by the roots of firs and birches or scrambling across precarious gardens of treetops flattened and matted by mosses and cranberries, glimpsing through holes at his feet the dark caverns below—“the most treacherous and porous country I ever travelled.” Finally he broke above treeline to a hillside “where rocks grey silent rocks of every shape & size were the flocks and herds that pastured—chewing a rocky cud at sunset. They looked hardly at me without a bleat or low.” This, a mockery of the pastoral, was his limit. Darkness was falling, above was nothing but cloud. But when he turned around, he saw Maine itself, “waving, flowing, rippling down below.”105

  He found his friends huddled miserably on the edge of a ravine, one rolled up in a blanket sick, the rest sitting supperless. It was a long night with little sleep “in the very nest of a young whirlwind.” After a cold breakfast of pork and hardtack, Thoreau led them up the ridge. Soon he left them far behind, pressing up relentlessly to a high tableland a few hundred feet below a summit he could not see. On he pressed through the rocks—“as if sometime it had rained rocks”—until he climbed into the skirts of cloud. Now and then the wind ripped open a moment of sunshine before wrapping him in a gray dawning light. It was a cloud factory, where “the wind turned them off from bare rocks.” He groped for words: this was Caucasus, where Prometheus was bound for deathless punishment; this was Pomola, the “evil genius” of Ktaadn; this was God, angry with all who climb here. No. He tried for words of his own:

  It was vast titanic & such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends—he is more lone than one. . . . Vast Titanic inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage caught him alone—& pilfers him She does not smile on him as in the plains—She seems to say sternly why came Ye here before your time—This ground is not prepared for. Is it not enough that I smile in the vallies I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing. . . . Why seek me where I have not called you and then complain that I am not your genial mother.

  He couldn’t stay. “For what canst thou pray here—but to be delive
red from here.—And should thou freeze or starve—or shudder thy life away—here is no shrine nor altar—nor access to my ear.” His friends waited below, anxious to get off the mountain, back to the river, and home. The clouds might linger for days; he could not stay. But he had to will himself to leave.106

  He found his friends waiting for him in a treeless mountain meadow, grazing on cranberries and blueberries. After consoling one another with the view from the slope—what was a mountain without its clouds and mist?—they hurried away, down and down, leaping from log to log, uncertain where they were going. Tom climbed a tree and directed them to a clearing, where fresh tracks told them they had spooked a moose. Soon the landmarks grew familiar, and by two o’clock they were back at the batteau. They hurtled downstream, their spike pole broken, their provisions short, and the weather unpredictable, praying they wouldn’t strike a rock and be swamped. That night they camped at the Oak Hall carry, setting off next morning through the long chain of lakes and carries until they reached beautiful Umbedegis Lake, where they breakfasted on the last of their pork. As they glided on, the sky cleared and Katahdin rose above them, high, serene, and cloudless. The afternoon shadows were lengthening when they arrived at Tom’s house, where they found Neptune and his companion paddling their birch-bark canoes upriver and inquiring, mildly, “‘what we kill’”? Thoreau and his party refused to reply, presuming that Neptune, who said he wasn’t well, had gone on a drunken bender. After dropping Tom off and spending the night at McCauslin’s, the three Bangor men plus Thoreau kept on down the river, not reaching Bangor until 1:30 the next morning, September 11. Three hours later Thoreau boarded the steamer to Boston, and by day’s end he was home on Walden Pond—not quite two weeks away, yet long enough to work a revolution in his consciousness.