Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  The question of genius was on Henry’s mind. Was it was something one had? “Men commonly talk as if genius were something proper to an individual. I esteem it but a common privilege & if one does not enjoy it now—he may congratulate his neighbor that he does.”47 No, one didn’t possess genius—but if you lived right, genius might possess you.

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  Under the surface of Thoreau’s placid homelife was a mind on fire. The quieter his days, the more extravagant his pages. The key to creativity, he thought, was to keep writing and not judge or edit too soon: “You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one—as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak.” And stay close to the earth, away from books: “Antaeus like be not long absent from the ground,” so sentences could be “like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life.”48 In January 1852, Thoreau dusted off the manuscript of Walden and reimagined the book he wanted to write. Outside his window he saw farmers carting peat and muck over the frozen meadows to fertilize the soil. Didn’t scholars do the same?—muck out in winter the fertile soil thrown up in summer? “My barn-yard is my journal,” he joked, and “decayed literature makes the best soil.”49 Once, he had dreamed of buying a farm, and despite his condescension to farmers in Walden, he always felt a kinship with them. They lived on the land; he, too, should “live in each season as it passes—breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit,” give himself to it wholly. Walden must live in season, it must be an agrarian book, close to the earth. To write it, he would dig deep into the muck: “It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an Irishman his spade.”50

  The Walden Thoreau had put away in 1849 was a spring-and-summer book, recalling the bright days when he built his house and set off to find reality beneath the shams and delusions of society. But starting in 1852, Walden encompassed fall and winter as well, recalling the closing of the house against the winter cold, and the visitors, both human and animal, who brought society in dark days. The great cycle of seasons seemed to be not merely weather, but the deep metaphysical framework for a spiritual life: “Would you see your mind,—look at the sky. Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise.” This new Walden would be about watching through the long night to announce the break of day, bragging like chanticleer at the dawn.51 Politics and war had drawn Thoreau deep into the newspapers, but now he set them aside: “You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day’s devotion to know & to possess the wealth of a day.” So he wrote instead the story of another war, between “the red republicans & the black despots or imperialists” at Walden, mortal enemies engaged in deadly combat—reaching beyond the headlines to the wider world “of thought & of the soul.” Thus was born the Ant War, Thoreau’s famous mock-heroic parable. Afterward he paused: Why had he left Walden, anyway? Why did he feel compelled now to return, if only in his imagination? Perhaps “the contemplation of the unfinished picture may suggest its harmonious completion.” It was time at last to “make wholes of parts.”52

  The Higher Law from Chesuncook to Walden

  The question now, with Walden under way again, was how to buy enough time to finish it. The few dollars he’d earned in Plymouth wouldn’t go far. Thoreau wrote Greeley asking for a slot in the popular “People’s Course” lectures in New York, but Greeley doused that idea: Thoreau was neither good enough nor famous enough. Perhaps he could swap some of his “wood-notes wild” for dollars? Thoreau sent him two excerpts from Walden—“The Iron Horse” and “A Poet Buying a Farm”—plus the Canada manuscript. While the latter made the rounds, Greeley quickly placed the former with Sartain’s Union Magazine, where they ran in July and August 1852. But the magazine went bankrupt and Thoreau went without pay, again. Write something that will sell, begged Greeley: a profile of Emerson, “calm, searching, and impartial” along the lines of that Carlyle essay. For that he’d pay fifty dollars out of pocket. For a second time, Thoreau declined to exploit his friendships for money, asking instead if Greeley would loan him seventy-five dollars—a sign of real distress.53 In March 1853, Putnam’s finally paid the fifty-nine dollars for the aborted “Excursion to Canada,” allowing Thoreau to repay Greeley’s loan. Fiasco though it was, the Canada essay bought him enough time to complete a fresh draft of Walden. Meanwhile, he took Greeley’s advice and concentrated on writing, excusing himself from the Plymouth circle’s December lecture invitation by claiming his current work was too “profane,” if not downright “unholy”—“for, finding the air of the temple too close, I sat outside.”54 The new Walden was not ready to share.

  When lecturing and writing both failed, surveying must pay. Lecturing “has not offered to pay for that book which I printed,” he grumbled, but though a hundred others could do it just as well, “I can get surveying enough.” The summer of 1853 he landed a big job surveying the new Bedford Road and the adjacent farms, where the town was building the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the innovative new garden cemetery inspired by Emerson’s writings. It was sweaty work: by June Concord felt like “the black-hole of Calcutta,” and by August it was “sultry mosquitoey nights with both windows & door open—& scarcely a sheet to be endured.” The heat was so intense that in New York, hundreds died of it.55 By February 1854, though, workers were cutting into ground frozen a foot deep and carting off the icy lumps, turning Thoreau’s abstract lines into reality. By then he was laying out the cemetery grounds, which meant cutting down more than nine acres of woods—oak and pine worth $767.25, he wrote Thatcher.56 Altogether, it was a good time to stay home, he told Blake. Let others wheel and deal; the whole westward enterprise “toward Oregon, California Japan &c, is totally devoid of interest to me,” nothing but “a filibustiering [sic] toward heaven by the great western route. No, they may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine.” Thank goodness, he told himself, poverty had nailed him to “this my native region so long and steadily—and made to study & love this spot of earth more & more.”57

  Yet Thoreau also longed “for wildness—a nature which I cannot put my foot through.” Drafting a new chapter, “Higher Laws,” reminded him that even as he asserted that hunting and fishing introduced young men to the wild, he himself had never hunted anything bigger than a woodchuck.58 So when George Thatcher invited him on a late-summer hunting trip to Lake Chesuncook, Thoreau said yes in a heartbeat. On Tuesday, September 13, 1853, when the steamer Penobscot left Boston Harbor bound for Bangor, Thoreau was leaning on the rail in the warm night, watching the lake-smooth seas glide past. By noon the next day he was walking up to the Thatchers, where he learned that George had gone to Oldtown to hire an Indian guide—just what Henry had hoped. For if George’s goal was to hunt moose with a gun, Henry’s was to hunt the Indian with a pen. He was not disappointed: George returned having hired Joe Aitteon, son of the Penobscot Governor John Aitteon, who had already planned to go moose hunting at Chesuncook and was happy to adjust his plans for a little extra money.

  Joe Aitteon arrived punctually that evening, and next morning he loaded his birch-bark canoe onto the stagecoach to Moosehead Lake while George and Henry followed behind in a wagon loaded with enough provisions to feed “a regiment”: hard bread, pork, smoked beef, tea, and sugar. While Henry groused at the seven-dollar fare for Joe and his canoe—better to have hired a canoe and an Indian up ahead at the lake—Joe spent the long day riding outside in a driving rain, having given up his inside seat to the ladies. Fifty miles up, Thoreau and Thatcher stopped overnight at a tavern in Monson, getting under way before dawn to meet the little steamer Moosehead at the foot of the wild and shaggy Moosehead Lake. There they joined a soaking-wet Aitteon, who had hoped to dry out before setting off. But it would be four days before the steamer’s next trip, so when the whistle summoned them, they piled aboard, bound for the northeast carry at the head of the lake—thirty-eight miles over rough stormy waters.

  Once Henry had a chance to size up Joe, his doubts vanished: “He was a good-looking Indian—short and st
out with a broad face and reddish complexion,” eyes turned up at the outer corners. Aitteon was an experienced lumberman, and he wore the river-driver’s practical clothing: wool pants, cotton undershirt, red flannel overshirt and a black Kossuth hat, with an India rubber raincoat (the only one of them equipped for the weather). At half past noon they reached the carry, and the cousins walked on ahead, Henry with his eye out for plants, George with his gun out for partridges, while the little railway drew the baggage on behind to the West Branch of the Penobscot River. At the log camp at the north end of the carry, the cousins lit a fire and boiled tea for dinner while Aitteon pitched his canoe—carefully blowing a small flame from a firebrand onto the birch bark to soften and spread the mix of rosin and grease, testing it for leaks by setting the canoe on crossed stakes and pouring water into it. “I narrowly watched his motions,” noted Thoreau, “and listened attentively to his observations, for we had employed an Indian mainly that I might have an opportunity to study his ways.” He observed that Aitteon swore once—“Damn it, my knife is dull as a hoe”—but what Aitteon thought of being put under such close inspection is not recorded.59

  Soon they were in the canoe: baggage in the middle, Aitteon on a crossbar in the stern, the cousins in the bow, complaining. No matter how he sat, grumbled Thoreau, the position was unendurable. While they paddled on looking for moose sign, he pressed Aitteon for Penobscot names: kecunnilessu for chickadee, wassus for bear, upahsis for mountain ash, words that Thoreau thought had possibly never been spelled before, but he pronounced them carefully until his informant said it would do. The only moose they saw that day was the rotting carcass left behind by hunters at their campsite that night, which gave Thoreau pause. But, he reminded himself, he was “not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one.” His role would be innocent, “as reporter or chaplain.” That evening, they pitched their tent and went out hunting, Aitteon calling again and again through his birch-bark horn, but all they heard in response were the nearby timber cruisers, and, once, in the twilight, “a dull dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it,” a bit like the shutting of the door to the “damp and shaggy wilderness.” What was that? they whispered to Aitteon. “Tree fall.”60 Thoreau never forgot the beauty of the moonlight on the treetops, and he went to sleep watching sparks from their campfire ascend through the firs.

  The next day they got their moose. Thoreau had begun to lose faith in their Indian guide, who disconcerted him by saying “Yes siree” and “sartain” and whistling “Oh! Susannah,” but in midaf-ternoon, when Henry called his attention to the crackling of some twigs, Joe back-paddled a few feet and there they were: a cow moose and her half-grown calf, looking around the alders at them like “great frightened rabbits.” George fired his first barrel at the mother, who spooked away; then, as she paused to look back at her shivering young, he leveled his second barrel at the calf, which fled up the hill. Joe landed the canoe to track their victims. Now Henry was impressed: “He proceeded rapidly up the bank & through the woods with a peculiar elastic—noiseless & stealthy tread—looking to right & left on the ground & stepping in the faint tracks of the wounded moose—now and then pointing in silence to a single drop of blood.”61 After a half hour—too soon, Henry thought—Joe gave up, and they pushed on upstream until suddenly there she was, the mother, lying warm and dead in the water. Henry grabbed her by her ears while Joe pushed the canoe ashore, where, with Joe’s assistance, Henry measured her with the canoe’s painter cord: seven and a half feet tall (inaccurate, he later concluded), and eight feet two inches long, a “grotesque and awkward” animal, the true “kind of man” at home in this wilderness.

  And then began the butchery. “Joe now proceeded to skin her—with a pocket knife—while I looked on—& a tragical business it was—to see that still warm & palpitating body pierced with a knife—to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder (There were 4 teats)—& the ghastly naked red carcass appearing within its seemly robe—Some of the muscles continued to twitch even after the skin was stripped off.” The hunters were not sated. They sampled a little moose meat for supper—rather like veal, thought Henry—and then were off again, thrashing upstream through bushes and drift logs, Henry in a dream state. By the time they returned to camp, he had had enough. While Aitteon and Thatcher hunted on downstream, Thoreau stayed behind and, by the light of the campfire, filled pages with his visceral shock and horror: “The afternoon’s tragedy and my share in it—as it affected the innocence—destroyed the pleasure of my adventure.” Hunting for subsistence was one thing, but “this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him—not even for the sake of his hide . . . is too much like going out by night to some woodside pasture & shooting your neighbor’s horses—They are God’s & my own horses.” Late that night the hunters returned, having seen no more moose. On Henry’s insistence they hauled up a quarter of the meat, a great weight for the small canoe.62 At least some of it would not go to waste, rotting pointlessly in the wilderness.

  The next day, a Sunday, there was no hunting. Instead they paddled to Ansell Smith’s logging camp at the head of Lake Chesuncook, where friends of Aitteon’s walked in and reported on moose hunting up north: lousy, so bad that Thatcher, though eager for more, gave up his plan to hunt up that way. Thoreau had stepped out for a walk and was sorry to learn he had missed the Indians camped nearby. But it was too late to visit them, so he made do with inspecting the logging camp—buildings, batteau, farm, livestock, blacksmith, and a cool cellar where they left the moose meat to feed the loggers. Thoreau and Thatcher stayed the night in a comfortable bedroom at the lodge, while Aitteon stayed at the Indian camp. The next day they backtracked up the Penobscot to the north end of the carry. Henry stayed near Joe the whole way, closely observing how he paddled so powerfully and walked so noiselessly. He wrote down more Penobscot names for everything, and tasted all the berries Joe sampled. When they reached the carry, three Indians were camped there, smoking moose meat and curing moose hides. They shared their cooked moose tongue (tough, they apologized, there not being time to cook it properly) and boiled cranberries—delicious after days of pork and hard bread. While Thatcher fixed supper, Thoreau watched Aitteon cure the moose hide, which he could use even though Thatcher’s duckshot had damaged it.

  Then came an interesting moment. Thatcher wanted to continue hunting up the Penobscot. But, “somehow,” that plan “was given up.” Then Thatcher wanted to spend the night with the white lumbermen at the nearby log camp, though the Indians had invited them to stay. Thatcher seems to have prevailed, for the cousins headed to the log camp—which Thoreau found disgusting, “close & dirty,” with an “ill smell.” He’d rather spend the night with the Indians, who were “more agreeable & even more refined company.” So back they went. Joe said something about heading out after midnight to do a little hunting, so the cousins spread their blankets over the moose hides on the ground and settled in to talk with the Indians, who included Joe’s friend Sebattis Dana, also Penobscot, and Tahmunt Swasen, a St. Francis River Abenaki from Quebec, who wrote out his name for Henry.63

  This was a pivotal night in Thoreau’s life. Until that night, “the Indian” had been a figure casually encountered on the margins of his own world, or a remote and vanishing legend from books of history and romance. After that night, they were, for Thoreau, far more—just what, he spent his last years trying to understand. All night long the Wabanaki talked, for “they were very sociable,” sometimes with the white men in English and sometimes with each other in their own language. Thoreau took pages of notes, trying to recall every word they said: about hunting moose and the many uses of moose hide; about the meaning of Indian words—penobscot, said Tahmunt, meant “rocky river,” and Moosehead Lake, said Joe, was sebamook, though “Tahmunt pronounced it Sebemook.” What does it mean? asked Henry. Tahmunt explained the concept in English with difficulty, until Henry caught the meaning: “reservoir,” where water runs in and does not run away. On it went: what does musketa
quid mean? It’s musketicook, they corrected him, and it means “dead water.” And other Concord names—Ponkawtasset? Annursnack? They shook their heads: these names were in another language. And Quebec? asked Thatcher. It means “Go back!” answered Tahmunt mischievously.64 It’s not clear if either George or Henry got the joke.

  That night there was no hunting. Somehow Joe forgot, and no one reminded him. As darkness deepened, Henry lay back on his blanket and listened, in awe, as the Wabanaki friends talked on with each other: “There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct & comparatively aboriginal race—than to hear this unaltered Indian language spoken—which the white man cannot speak nor understand.” Here, living in their own world, they were complete and whole, utterly themselves, and utterly “unintelligible to us.” Weeks later, he was still thinking about that night: hearing their language had convinced him that Indians were real, “not the invention of poets”—more so than all the arrowheads he had ever found. “I sat & heard Penobscots gossip & laugh & jest in the language in which El-liots Indian Bible is written—The language which has been spoken in New England who shall say how long? This sound these accents. . . .” He liked to fancy himself the last man in nature. But here were the true men in nature, as present to the world of 1853 as he, speaking a copious and living language entirely their own. The reckoning begun here would force Thoreau to rethink everything he knew.65