Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  115. Walton Ricketson quoted in Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 145; CHDT, 480 (HDT to D. Ricketson, May 13, 1857). Edward Emerson always thought “Tom Bowling” (or “Bowline”), a lament for a sailor lost at sea, “stood in his [Thoreau’s] mind for his lost brother, for there was sympathy & admiration and a tear in his voice” whenever he sang it (Harding, Thoreau as Remembered, 220).

  116. J, 7:467–68, 9:335–37; Walter Harding, “Thoreau and Kate Brady,” American Literature 36.3 (November 1964): 347–49.

  117. CHDT, 476 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, April 17, 1857).

  118. J, 9:377–78, JMN, 14:143.

  119. CHDT, 480 (HDT to D. Ricketson, May 13, 1857); J, 9:379.

  120. J, 9:373–74, JMN, 14:144; J, 9:391–93.

  121. J, 9:397–98.

  Chapter Ten

  1. J, 9:403; CHDT, 484 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, June 6, 1857); J, 9:414–20. See also Ellen Watson in THOT, 178–79; she is clearly combining Thoreau’s first trip to Clark’s Island, in July 1851, with either his Plymouth lecture in 1854 (at which he may have traveled to Clark’s Island) or this trip.

  2. J, 9:420; Francis B. Dedmond, “James Walter Spooner: Thoreau’s Second (though Unacknowledged) Disciple,” Concord Saunterer 18.2 (December 1985): 40.

  3. J, 9:435–36.

  4. Ibid., 439–55.

  5. [Isaac Hecker], review of Cape Cod, Catholic World 2.8 (November 1865): 281.

  6. CC, 137.

  7. Ibid., 59, 147.

  8. Ibid., 128, 215.

  9. CHDT, 485–86 (HDT to George Thatcher, July 11, 1857); J, 9:481.

  10. Edward S. Burgess Papers, vault A45, Burgess unit 1 [interviews with Edward S. Hoar], folder 4b, CFPL; J, 9:402. For a profile of Ed Hoar, see Ray Angelo, “Edward S. Hoar Revealed,” Concord Saunterer 17.1 (March 1984): 9–16.

  11. PEJ transcript (the Princeton edition transcript of Thoreau’s Journal) manuscript 23:221 (hereafter cited as PEJ transcript). The 1906 edition of Thoreau’s Journal does not print any material that in the editors’ judgment was duplicated in The Maine Woods; to see Thoreau’s original reactions, one must look at the original Journal, which at the date of writing is unpublished but available online at “The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau,” http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu (accessed September 10, 2016).

  12. PEJ transcript, 23:221–22; cf. MW, 158.

  13. PEJ transcript, 23:222.

  14. Edward S. Burgess Papers, vault A45, Burgess unit 1, folder 4b, CFPL. Edward Hoar’s father’s refusal to buy an “Indian” basket gave Thoreau his image in Walden for an alternative economic system. For Burgess’s interviews with Hoar, see Marcia E. Moss, “Edward S. Hoar’s Conversations on Concord with Edward S. Burgess,” Concord Saunterer 17.1 (March 1984): 17–33.

  15. PEJ transcript, 23:361.

  16. Ibid., 230 (emphasis in the original); cf MW, 162–63. Thoreau remarked that Polis never addressed his clients by name, “while we called him Polis” (PEJ transcript, 23:235).

  17. PEJ transcript, 23:237; MW, 169.

  18. MW, 172. In his Journal, Thoreau left a space to insert the name of the “mighty Indian hunter” but finally scrawled in pencil, “I forget” (PEJ transcript, 23:239). See John J. Kucich’s important “Lost in the Maine Woods: Henry Thoreau, Joseph Nicolar, and the Penobscot World,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 19/20 (2011–12): 22–52; and Phillip Round, “Gentleman Amateur or ‘Fellow-Creature’? Thoreau’s Maine Woods Flight from Contemporary Natural History,” in Thoreau’s World and Ours: A Natural Legacy, edited by Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1993), 325–27.

  19. PEJ transcript, 23:242, 244–45.

  20. Edward S. Burgess Papers, vault A45, Burgess unit 1 [interviews with Edward S. Hoar], folder 4b, CFPL; PEJ transcript, 23:247 and MW, 180–81.

  21. MW, 181.

  22. PEJ transcript, 23:251; MW, 185.

  23. See PEJ transcript, 23:263; cf. MW, 193–94. Polis was, observed Thoreau, “very religious,” kneeling morning and evening to say his prayers “in a loud voice in Indian” (PEJ transcript, 23:263).

  24. PEJ transcript 23:267 and MW, 199–200; PEJ transcript, 23:273; MW, 168. Polis’s sign would today be called an “arborglyph.”

  25. PEJ transcript, 23:283 and MW, 217.

  26. PEJ transcript 23:286.

  27. Ibid., 304.

  28. Ibid., 316; MW, 253; Kucich, “Lost in the Maine Woods,” 45.

  29. PEJ transcript, 23:322; cf. MW, 258. Thoreau’s published account downplayed both his concerns about Hoar’s ability to continue and his own emotional turmoil.

  30. PEJ transcript 23:325–26.

  31. Ibid., 328–29.

  32. Ibid., 331–32.

  33. PEJ transcript, 24:356; cf. MW, 284.

  34. PEJ transcript, 24:358; cf MW, 285–86.

  35. MW, 295–96; PEJ transcript, 24:366.

  36. PEJ transcript, 24:354–55; MW, 297. Polis offered to sell his canoe to Thoreau, who declined.

  37. MW, 235–36.

  38. See Courtney Traub, “‘First-Rate Fellows’: Excavating Thoreau’s Radical Egalitarian Reflections in a Late Draft of ‘Allegash,’” Concord Saunterer 23 (2015): 74–96.

  39. CHDT, 491 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, August 18, 1857).

  40. “Private Journal of John Langdon Sibley of Harvard University Library,” 1846–82, 2 vols., 1:443–45, Harvard University Archives, repr. in Keith Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva, 3 vols. (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1958), 2:485–86.

  41. THOT, 79–80; ABAJ, 325, JMN, 14:166.

  42. See Robert F. Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 119.

  43. TL II, 291; CHDT, 503–4. The person who invited Thoreau for an encore was Rev. Charles C. Shackford.

  44. CHDT, 504 (HDT to James Russell Lowell, January 23, 1858), 509 (HDT to Lowell, February 22, 1858, and March 5, 1858).

  45. Bradley P. Dean and Gary Scharnhorst, “The Contemporary Reception of Walden,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 328; MW, 156.

  46. MW, 121–22; CHDT, 515–16 (HDT to Lowell, June 22, 1858), 520–21 (HDT to Lowell, September 1, 1858, and October 4, 1858).

  47. J, 10:4; CHDT, 491 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, August 18, 1858).

  48. J, 10:10–13, 14 (the Natick naturalist was Austin Bacon).

  49. ABAL, 248. The house cost $600 and the land $345; Alcott’s purchase was aided by the annuity Emerson established, to which Thoreau added the less than princely sum of $1. LRWE, 5:159–60; Days of HT, 380.

  50. ABAJ, 307, 326. Anna Alcott and John Pratt were married on May 23, 1860.

  51. To Set This World, 126–29; J, 10:266 (January 28, 1858).

  52. J, 10:49, 12:343; also Exc., 182. Thoreau may not have remembered the label correctly; poitrine means “breast” or “chest.” “Squash” would be gourde or courge.

  53. Frances Jane Hallett Prichard (Fanny) to Jane Hallett Prichard, October 22, 1857, Prichard, Hoar, and Related Family Papers, vault A45, Prichard unit 2, box 2, folder 7, CFPL.

  54. J, 10:92–93; CHDT, 496 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, November 16, 1858).

  55. CHDT, 500 (D. Ricketson to HDT, December 11, 1858).

  56. J, 10:233–34, 219.

  57. Ibid., 69, 80 (Ruskin); 75–76, 118 (Red Walden). For more on Thoreau and Ruskin, see Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 358–60.

  58. J, 10:165–65, cf. PEJ transcript, 24:610–11 (November 5, 1857). The 1906 editors, by extracting Thoreau’s comments on the “the man of science” from their larger context in the Maine Woods material, eliminated the social context of Thoreau’s most innovative critique of scientific objectivity.

  59. J, 10:202, 253–54.

  60. PEJ transcript, 25:55 (January 23, 1858).

  61. CHDT, 495 (HDT to George Thatcher, November 12, 1857), 502 (HDT to Thatc
her, January 1, 1858); Days of HT, 397.

  62. J, 10:291–93. The name of Joe Polis’s brother is from Fanny Hardy Eckstorm, “Notes on Thoreau’s Maine Woods,” TSB 51 (Spring 1955): 1. On Maungwudaus (George Henry), see Donald B. Smith, Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 126–63.

  63. J, 10:291–95, 313–14.

  64. Ibid., 369, 388, 404.

  65. JMN, 14:203–04; The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg, 2 vols. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1:142.

  66. Corr., 3: [in press, previously unpublished letter] (Mary Brown to HDT, April 23, 1858); CHDT, 511 (HDT to Marston Watson, April 25, 1858).

  67. J, 10:142–44; CHDT, 491 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, August 18, 1858), 497–98 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, November 16, 1858).

  68. J, 10:452–80. Monadnock is now the generic name for a barren, rocky peak rising from level ground.

  69. J, 10:467–68, 477–80.

  70. Ibid., 11:3–8.

  71. Ibid., 16–29.

  72. Ibid., 29–49.

  73. CHDT, 521 (HDT to Ricketson, October 31, 1858), 538 (HDT to Blake, January 1, 1859). Blake seems to have agreed, though Brown admitted he had, rather to his embarrassment, enjoyed it (ibid., 562, Theo Brown to HDT, October 19, 1859).

  74. J, 11:120.

  75. “The wild fruits of the earth disappear before civilization, or are only to be found in large markets.” Ibid., 78–79.

  76. Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 146; Jane Hallett Prichard to Moses B. Prichard, August 17, 1858, Prichard, Hoar, and Related Family Papers, vault A45, Prichard unit 2, box 6, folder 7, CFPL. The connection proved weak and failed in less than a month; not until 1866 did an improved cable allow reliable transatlantic telegraphy.

  77. J, 11:86–87, 107.

  78. Ibid., 170–80; CHDT, 521 (HDT to D. Ricketson, October 31, 1858), 527 (D. Ricketson to HDT, November 10, 1858).

  79. CHDT, 528–29 (T. Cholmondeley to HDT, November 26, 1858); Anna Ricketson and Walton Ricketson, Daniel Ricketson and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 309–10.

  80. CHDT, 540 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, January 19, 1858), 547 (HDT to D. Ricketson, February 12, 1859). Their correspondence continued until Thoreau’s death; Cholmondeley, who died in April 1863, did not outlive his American friend by long.

  81. J, 11:218–21.

  82. Ibid., 12:97.

  83. JMN, 14:158.

  84. PEJ, 1:330 (September 4, 1841).

  85. J, 11:358–59.

  86. Ibid., 324–25.

  87. Ibid., 396, 435.

  88. CHDT, 543 (D. Ricketson to HDT, February 9, 1859).

  89. J, 11:436–37; CHDT, 546 (HDT to D. Ricketson, February 12, 1859). See also Days of HT, 408, for Thoreau’s thanks to Rev. Grindall Reynolds, who conducted the funeral.

  90. J, 11:437–39, 12:88–93.

  91. Ibid., 12:120–23, 175.

  92. Ibid., 316 (September 5, 1858); Days of HT, 409.

  93. LRWE, 5:149–50; CHDT, 555–56 (HDT to G. Thatcher, August 25, 1859); J, 13:272. The selectman’s report for 1859 details the town’s fears of vandalism; Thoreau’s joke would have been widely appreciated.

  94. For details, see CHDT, 559–60.

  95. J, 12:344.

  96. See also CHDT, 541, 545, for Thoreau’s donation of five dollars to the Harvard Library, which sum, he told them, exceeded his income “from all sources together for the last four months.” Thoreau conducted two annual examinations, on July 13, 1859, and July 13, 1860; the examination was on Asa Gray’s Botanical Text-Book. For the letters of appointment to the Harvard Committee for Examination in Natural History, see Corr., 3: [in press] for March 28, 1859, June 7,1859, and June 7, 1860. See also Robert D. Richardson Jr., “Thoreau and Science,” in American Literature and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 123. Other members included his friends John Russell, Marston Watson, Samuel and James Elliot Cabot, Augustus Gould, and future Justice of the Supreme Court Horace Gray Jr.

  97. J, 12:152–55, 166.

  98. THOT, 47–48. Dall’s lecture was December 14, 1859. See “Caroline Dall in Concord,” TSB 62 (Winter 1958): 1.

  99. TL II, 297; Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 1:174; J, 12:9.

  100. TL II, 299–303.

  101. CHDT, 555 (HDT to G. Thatcher, August 25, 1859), 558 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, September 26, 1859).

  102. J, 11:287; “Report of the Joint Special Committee upon the subject of the Flowage of Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers,” January 28, 1860 (Boston: William White, Printer to the State, 1860), 15, 18.

  103. LRWE, 8:622.

  104. Thoreau’s “Plan of Concord River from East Sudbury & Billerica Mills, 22.15 Miles” is held by the CFPL (along with associated records), and may be viewed online: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/107a.htm (accessed September 4, 2016).

  105. J, 13:149 (Minot Pratt is reporting David Heard’s testimony).

  106. See Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 230–34. Donahue documents, in detail, the unintended destruction of the ecological/social order witnessed by Thoreau.

  107. J, 12:387; Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York: Norton, 2000), 236–28.

  108. Records of the Concord Farmers’ Club, 1852–1883, vault A10, unit 3, series 1, vol. 6, 170–72, CFPL.

  109. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 107.

  110. To Set This World, 114; the petition is reproduced in Concord Saunterer 15.4 (Winter 1980): 1–6.

  111. Ellen Tucker Emerson, Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 131.

  112. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 2 vols. (Boston: Gorham Press, 1909), 1:102–8; To Set This World, 120–23.

  113. JMN, 14:125–26; J, 12:437. Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 118.

  114. To Set This World, 127–29. The question is often raised whether Thoreau, or anyone in his circle, knew of Brown’s role in the Pottawatomie Massacre, either during Brown’s 1857 visit or by the fall of 1859, when in the wake of Harpers Ferry the Pottawatomie Massacre was widely reported in Northeastern newspapers. Thoreau and his allies might have discounted such reports as proslavery propaganda. But Fuller points out that Thoreau’s friend T. W. Higginson, one of the Secret Six, certainly knew, for in September 1856, while in Kansas as an agent of the National Kansas Committee, Higginson discussed the murders with the free-state governor of Kansas, Charles Robinson. Like the free-state Kansans he represented, Robinson regarded the murders as beneficial to their cause, for they checked the armed aggression of the proslavery Missouri forces. Higginson later acknowledged his personal discomfort with the massacre; Sanborn claimed not to have known of it. Whether, or how much, Thoreau himself knew of the Pottawatomie Massacre remains an unresolved question. See David G. Fuller, “Thoreau and John Brown’s Pottawatomie,” TSB 210 (Winter 1995): 2–3.

  115. CHDT, 435–36; To Set This World, 125.

  116. Brown quoted in To Set This World, 127–28; Days of HT, 416.

  117. CHDT, 550 (D. Ricketson to HDT, March 6, 1859); ABAJ, 315–16.

  118. The phrase is Ricketson’s, from CHDT, 560 (D. Ricketson to HDT, October 14, 1859).

  119. TL II, 304–8; LRWE, 8:639.

  120. J, 12:400–402. My interpretation is indebted to Ted A. Smith’s penetrating discussion in Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). See also Jack Turner, “Thoreau and John Brown,” in A Political Companion to John Brown, ed. Turner (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 151–77.

  121. J, 12:401–02, October 19, 1859.

 
122. J, 12:404, 406, 420.

  123. On the newspaper accounts Thoreau read, see David G. Fuller, “Correcting the Newspapers: Thoreau and ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown,’” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 5 (Fall 1997): 165–75.