Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  From Niagara they headed to Chicago on Monday, May 20, taking the train through Lower Ontario, or Canada West, the very country Thoreau had always meant to explore. He liked what he saw out the window—“agreeably diversified”—and Lake Ontario to the north, “quite sea like.” But there would be no exploration. At Windsor they ferried across the river to Detroit. Thoreau’s correspondent Calvin Greene lived just a few miles north, but a social call was beyond his strength. Instead he let the train carry him through Michigan hardwood forests, bearing west to Lake Michigan, then down through the high sand dunes along the Indiana shoreline into Illinois, reaching Chicago by suppertime. They splurged for two nights at the celebrated Metropolitan Hotel, $1.50 a night, for next day they had urgent business: Horace must convert their Massachusetts bank draft to gold coin. But Chicago was in financial chaos. The city’s banks were backed with Southern securities, which now, in wartime, were all failing. Mann worked his connections, finding a family friend who exchanged their Massachusetts bank draft for a check for $100, which, in a small miracle, Thoreau’s devoted correspondent Benjamin Wiley, now a banker, converted to $100 of scarce gold coin.

  Thoreau had his own round of visits to perform: first to the comfortable sofa of the Reverend Robert Collyer, a fiery abolitionist and Unitarian minister who talked of the war, and the West, and literature, and who long remembered the musicality of Thoreau’s low voice, the way he hesitated for the right word or paused with “a pathetic patience to master the trouble in his chest,” continuing with words “as distinct and true to the ear as those of a great singer” in sentences perfect and entire.62 That evening Collyer wrote Thoreau a note: we hope you write your great book about the West, the one “that will be to us what your other books are”—a wish with special poignancy for all Thoreau’s Western fans. That afternoon, Horace and Henry toured the town with a family friend, William Hull Clarke, brother to the Transcendentalist James Freeman Clarke, an engineer helping lay out Chicago’s 223 miles of sewer lines and a man after Thoreau’s own heart: “Sewers or main drains fall but 2 feet in a mile,” noted the surveyor who had spent a summer calculating the fall of the Concord River. Next morning Horace made a dash to the post office to mail his update: all was well. Thoreau was “getting along very well,” except for “a little trouble with his bowels” due to the lime in the drinking water.63 Their next mail stop would be St. Anthony, Minnesota.

  It would take another three days. They spent a long day riding across the Illinois prairie, passing near the 160-acre homestead Ellery Channing had tried to farm in 1839. From the speeding cars Thoreau, frustrated, craned his neck to see a pink-blooming tree: Was it the wild crabapple? There was no way to tell. At the Mississippi River, in East Dubuque, the line ended; from there they traveled by riverboat. Next morning they were chugging up the Mississippi aboard the Itasca, reaching Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, that afternoon, passing Red Wing, Minnesota, the next evening, and docking at St. Paul early Sunday morning, May 26. Years before, Thoreau had seen a moving panorama of the Mississippi scrolling past, and celebrated it as a picture of the golden age of America. Real life on the Mississippi seemed less heroic. Immense stacks of wheat straw overshadowed wheatfields, houses, and people like “mice nesting in a wheatstack which is their wealth.” The river journey fascinated him: each little one-street village was a drama in itself, the stately approach of the steamboat, the whistles and bells, the postmaster running down with his bag, the passengers hustling off and on, the dogs and pigs rushing to the commotion, the great silent bluffs beyond.64 After breakfasting in St. Paul, they rode nine miles by stage through a rainstorm to St. Anthony. After two long weeks, they had arrived. Now for a warm welcome by the Thatchers and a long healing rest.

  Instead they found the Thatcher household in crisis. Samuel Thatcher had been thrown from a carriage, and his injuries were life threatening. Soon he would die of them. Of course Thoreau and Horace could not stay, but before they left, Thatcher managed to pen a note recommending the wayfarers to his friend Dr. Charles L. Anderson, a local physician who lived across the river in Minneapolis. From a room in the Tremont House overlooking the river, Henry wrote Sophia of their relative’s plight while Horace wrote his mother another reassuring letter. For nine days they explored the area around St. Anthony. Horace, the budding naturalist, bought a five-gallon keg at the local drugstore that he filled with alcohol, and which the obliging owner allowed him to keep in the store, so each day Horace could deposit into it whatever he had shot. When it was full, he’d seal it up and ship it home for dissection and study. Gleefully Horace went to work with his gun, blasting away at birds and small animals, while Henry—who had long ago put his gun away—nosed around collecting plants and observing prairie birds. He must have explained his philosophy to Horace, for over the course of their weeks together the young man began to shoot less and botanize more. In fact, at Harvard, Horace Mann would grow into the era’s most promising young botanist, the very man Asa Gray himself picked to be his successor. Thoreau had made another convert.

  On Tuesday they looked up Dr. Anderson, who happened to be the Minnesota state geologist. The moment he read Thatcher’s note, he invited them home to dinner, and that afternoon he drove them out in his buggy to see Lake Calhoun. The next day he drove them down to Minnehaha Falls—a name made famous by Longfellow’s Hiawatha, but which, Thoreau noted testily, was entirely fictitious—then out to Fort Snelling, whence three hundred men had just left for the Civil War. Anderson was a generous host: later he drove them into the great woods to the northwest and opened his library to them as well, so when the weather turned cold and wet, Henry could curl up by the fireside with copies of the Transactions of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society or the Annals of the Minnesota Historical Society. He took pages of notes: when the last bison was seen in Wisconsin (1832) and the last beaver (1819), the Indians’ culture of wild rice, the best books to follow up for further studies.

  For Thoreau was still thinking ahead. Here in the western prairie was a fascinating new landscape, a whole new laboratory to test his ideas. Every plant he listed was a fresh bundle of relations, facts that keyed to a changing landscape of flowers and seeds, new suites of animals, deep histories of Native land uses, settlement, destruction, regeneration. Thoreau was particularly curious about the distinctive “oak openings,” clusters of oaks kept open by fire such that the scattered trees each developed full and rounded crowns. The University of Minnesota, he found, was set “in the midst of such an oak opening,” which looked strangely artificial. Did he think back to Inches Woods and the Indians’ use of fire to keep the forest open? He roamed and rested, studied and took notes, working intensely, filling his field notebook, laying a foundation for future work. It was his usual method: dense, elliptical jottings in the field for expansion in his Journal, revision into lectures, essays, books. This was meant to be the start of a new chapter on the West.

  Lake Calhoun, four miles southwest of Minneapolis, proved too enticing to merely visit. On Wednesday, June 5, they rode to the lakefront boardinghouse run by one of the region’s first settlers, the widowed Mrs. Hamilton, and for nine idyllic days at the edge of the prairie they ate fish, went swimming, and explored. When Thoreau ran into some local lumberers, he was full of questions; Minnesota was nothing, they told him, compared to the Penobscot. And here, Thoreau finally found the wild crabapple. The Hamiltons had tried to transplant a few trees, but they were tricky to manage and had not survived; neither had those planted by their horticulturalist neighbor, Jonathan Grimes. But Grimes led Thoreau toward a few living trees in his pasture, and finally Thoreau had the pleasure of finding the wild apple for himself, and securing “a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium.”65

  But something broke into this idyll. Thoreau had planned to stay for a couple of months, but after three weeks he was ready to leave. Did his health defeat his hopes for recovery? Were their funds running low? Perhaps it was the news from the war front: the first major engagement,
the Battle of Big Bethel on June 10, flooded the newspapers with alarming reports of Union incompetence and Confederate victory, the first clear signal that this would be no brief skirmish but a long and bloody campaign. Northern troops were dying, and Confederate forces were advancing. Thoreau had tried to avoid the war, but at Lake Calhoun his closest contacts, Dr. Anderson and Jonathan Grimes, were both Virginians. Talk of the war infected everything. “Our faces are already set for home,” he wrote in a letter to Sanborn.66

  But first there was an opportunity Thoreau could not resist: the newspaper announced a special excursion, only ten dollars round-trip, for a two-hundred-mile riverboat journey up the Minnesota River to the Lower Sioux Agency in Redwood, where five thousand Indians had gathered to receive the government’s annual annuity payments, promised by treaty to the Sioux (known today as the Dakota) in exchange for the southern half of what, since 1858, was the new state of Minnesota. It would be the perfect climax. On Friday, June 14, they returned to St. Anthony so Horace could ship home his keg full of critters, then moved to St. Paul for the weekend. On Monday they boarded the side-wheeled steamboat Frank Steele—named, Thoreau noted, after “the first white man who flashed his axe in the unbroken wilderness.” That afternoon they embarked on the “Grand Pleasure Excursion to the Sioux Agency” up the meandering Minnesota (or “sky-tinted”) River.67

  It was late in the season and the water was low, making for a slow trip as the boat ran aground and backed astern to swing around tight, winding turns. There was lots of time to watch the shore slide past, so close they could reach out a hand and sample the plant life. On board, a hundred boisterous partygoers tripped to the tunes of two different German dance bands. Also on board were twenty-five soldiers bound for Fort Ridgely to train for the Civil War, Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey and his wife, the new Indian agent Thomas Galbraith, a few other officials, and by coincidence, Joseph May, a cousin of the Alcotts and a Harvard classmate of Sanborn’s. About half the people they met in Minnesota, Thoreau calculated, had come there from Massachusetts. Henry and Horace had a stateroom, giving them some privacy against the crowds that piled aboard and slept on chairs, decks, or sprawled over trunks.

  They arrived in Red Wing four days later, at 9:00 a.m. on June 20. Henry and Horace had just enough time to walk a few miles south to overlook the Great Plains. Henry longed for more time, to walk farther, far enough to see the bison herds said to be grazing twenty or thirty miles away. Instead they turned back to witness the council meeting at one o’clock. The annuity payments, $100 to each “chief” and $20 to each “brave,” would not, it was announced, be made that day after all. But there were plenty of speeches. Governor Ramsey assured the Indians that the new Fort Ridgely offered no threat, only protection against the bad white men, and Galbraith promised to look after them “as a father should care for his children.” Thoreau, dipping his pen in irony, noted the Dakota looked “hungry, not sleek & round faced” like children well cared-for. Their spokesman was Red Owl, a dark and sinewy Mdewakanton with an intelligent face from Wabash’s band, a vigorous and eloquent orator. His complaints were many and bitter: stingy payments, promised food and supplies diverted and lost, promised schools unbuilt. Altogether they were quite dissatisfied, noted Thoreau, “and probably have reason to be so,” adding that the Indians, as usual, had “the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence.”68

  The speeches over, two beef oxen were presented, and one of them was butchered and cooked for a general feast. The dance followed: thirty men, Thoreau counted, half-naked, dancing to twelve musicians. Some were blowing flutes; others struck their bows with arrows. They kept good time, moving “feet & shoulders, one or both.” What he saw and thought of the Dakota was never made public, but another onlooker published his report in the newspaper: the Indians’ dance was nothing but “the rudest hoppings” with wild howls and vehement gesticulations, “a pitiable, disgusting spectacle” that proved these “poor childish creatures” could never be elevated unless such barbarism were stamped out.69

  The dance over, the boatload of inebriated tourists headed back toward St. Paul. The band made them howl with laughter by stomping around in moccasins, draped in quilts and chanting “ugh” to each of the governor’s pompous pronouncements. Apparently Henry and Horace were sheltering in their stateroom and spared the spectacle. Thoreau noted many had purchased souvenirs for fifty cents or a dollar or two, elaborate ceremonial pipes carved of the distinctive red Catlinite pipestone. Thoreau himself had acquired not tourist art but functional clothing. Many of the Dakota were being forced to exchange their Native attire for proper European trousers and jackets and dresses; he may have bargained with some for their clothing, or he may have picked a few items out of the discard pile: a man’s handsome fringed deerskin jacket and leggings; a woman’s deerskin dress, beautifully fringed and beaded; a fine working saddle, elaborately beaded, with stamped leather stirrups. He also noted that “the most prominent chief was named Little Crow,” the future leader of the Dakota War.70 Red Owl would not survive the harsh winter to come; Little Crow, who lived nearby, would take his place.

  The annuity payments were eventually made, but they were the last the Dakota ever saw. That summer, cutworm destroyed their corn crops, and the winter that followed was unusually bitter. By the following summer they were starving. Galbraith proved incompetent; time and again the desperately needed annuity payments were unaccountably delayed. Without money, the Dakota were refused the food stored for them in the warehouse. Tensions exploded in August, when four young Dakota killed five white settlers. In the war that followed, hundreds of whites and unknown numbers of Dakota were killed. Governor Ramsey vowed that all the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be “exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State.”71 The treaties were nullified, the reservations disbanded, and the surviving Dakota forced under armed guard to Fort Snelling or pushed westward out of the state. Three hundred and three Dakota men were condemned to be hanged. President Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but thirty-eight, who were hanged in a public spectacle, the largest mass execution in US history.

  Some of them were likely men Thoreau had seen, perhaps had spoken with. Little Crow fled west. In July 1863 he was shot by a white settler while picking blueberries with his son; his grave, if any, is unknown. His head and arms were put on public display at the Minnesota Historical Society, until they were removed and eventually returned to his descendants in 1971, who buried them in a private ceremony. What words would Thoreau, the defender of John Brown, have written had he lived to hear of Little Crow’s desperate battle? How would Thoreau have reacted to the government’s abrogation of the treaties, to the forced removal of the Dakota—the very people he had seen and met—to the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men for defending their treaty rights and ancestral lands, or to the public display, in a historical museum, of Little Crow’s decapitated head? Here, too, Thoreau’s life reads like a prelude to an alternative history that died in the cradle.

  Two days after the Frank Steele left the Lower Sioux, Henry and Horace were back in St. Paul. They stayed overnight before heading downriver to Red Wing on Sunday, June 23. There they stopped for three nights, picking up their mail, swimming in the Mississippi, exploring the steep-sided Barn Bluff, viewing the grave of Chief Red Wing at the summit, and visiting with Professor Horace Wilson at Hamline University. On June 26 they continued down the Mississippi on the steamboat War Eagle, disembarking the next morning at Prairie du Chien to board the railroad straight across Wisconsin to Milwaukee. They passed through Madison on June 27, where the university had just let out for the year, and a twenty-three-year-old John Muir was, that very day, walking north to his home in Portage. Muir, a student of geology, botany, and chemistry, had just finished his first term. Not until he quit school for “the University of the Wilderness” would he hear of Thoreau, who would become one of his heroes; in Muir’s work, Thoreau’s emerging environmental activism would ma
ture into a national politics.

  Thoreau and Mann arrived in Milwaukee to find the city under martial law after the banks had failed and riots had broken out. Next morning, after a night under guard at the Lake House, Thoreau posted a letter of thanks to Dr. Anderson, and they boarded the Edith, outward bound across the northern length of Lake Michigan with a cargo of flour and three safes. Horace had fond memories of his summer on Mackinaw Island, and when they docked there at 2:00 a.m. on June 30, he led Thoreau down Main Street to the Mackinac House, their home for the next four days. Minnesota had become uncomfortably hot—102 in the shade, someone read off the Frank Steele’s thermometer—but here it was so cool that Thoreau found himself, on July 2, sitting by the fire. The list of plants he found on Mackinaw runs for pages, showing him active and curious still.72

  On July 4, they cadged a ride on a freight ship for the long trip across Lake Huron, arriving at Goderich, Ontario the next evening and boarding the train for Toronto in the morning. Even in Canada they could not escape the turmoil of war: the escalating violence led Canadians to call for garrisons on the border, lest the war spill north into the nation where so many fugitive slaves had found new lives. They also feared Union blockades of Southern ports would cut off Southern cotton bound for British mills and destabilize the Canadian economy. Special elections were held to install a new government to cope with the threats. The polls closed late in the afternoon of Sunday July 7, just as Henry and Horace stepped off the railroad platform. As they made their way to the Rossin House downtown, the victors were being announced. Even here, the world was in an uproar.