by Peter Stark
He temporarily closed up his cabin at Walden Pond in the last days of August 1846, having lived there just over a year, tending to his bean field and filling his journals with nature observations. A combination of factors probably beckoned him to the north. During this first part of his two-year stint at Walden, he’d immersed himself ever deeper in the notion of “wild.” The woodlots and farmers’ fields around Concord might have been wearing a little thin in their tameness, despite his ardent proclamations of love for them. Northern Maine represented a very large chunk of wilderness, not far away. Conveniently, Thoreau had a relative who lived in Bangor, then the hub of Maine’s lumber mills. This unnamed relative was making a trip up to northern Maine, scouting lands for lumbering, and invited Thoreau along.
Leaving Walden, Thoreau traveled by steamship40 up the New England coast and Penobscot River to Bangor. Met by his relative, the two rode by buggy up the Penobscot riverbank until Mattawamkeag, where they stayed at a public house and where two other acquaintances from Bangor joined the Thoreau party. Here the buggy road ended. Jumping a settler’s fence, the foursome tramped along a dim footpath that led upriver. In thirty miles, they passed only a half dozen cabins.
“Marm Howard’s,” which the outfitter Galen Hale had mentioned to me as the place Thoreau stayed, was a public house near the confluence of the Penobscot’s East and West Branches—what the Indians called Nicatou and today is Medway. Here Thoreau detected the beginnings of a village. He imagined that in a thousand years some poet would come here and write his version of the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” proclaiming all the unsung local heroes who had lived and died in this spot. But here at Nicatou, the seed of what would become Galen and Betsy Hale’s hometown, the unsung heroes were “yet unborn.”
A short way past Nicatou, the party stopped at the farm homestead of “Uncle George” McCauslin—a veteran logger and boatman on the Penobscot. Living off Uncle George’s generous hospitality and farm-raised hams, eggs, and butter for two days, the foursome finally gave up waiting for the Abenaki Indian guides who were supposed to meet them here. Thoreau’s party then persuaded Uncle George—“a man of dry wit and shrewdness”—to carry them in his batteau up the West Branch to Mount Katahdin, which Thoreau aimed to climb. For their second boatman they engaged Young Tom Fowler—son of the oldest settler in these parts, Old Thomas Fowler—while he sawed the window openings in his cabin.
Using twelve-foot-long spruce poles tipped with iron with which they pushed against the river’s bottom, Young Tom in the bow and Uncle George in the stern poled the batteau—a kind of large, flat-bottomed canoe—so deftly into the current that they “shot up the rapids like a salmon.” The party of six soon reached the last human habitation along the river—a crude logging camp with a simple cabin. Beds of cedar boughs lay under its low eaves, and its cook fed them pancakes and tea. The crew was out in the forest cutting the giant white pines that were the choice timber trees of northern New England; in places, they had once been marked with the king’s sign41 to reserve as tall, straight masts for the British Royal Navy. After their repast, the Thoreau party pushed upriver and into a lake just as a nearly full moon rose. Crossing the lake four miles by moonlight, they took turns at the paddles while singing the Canadian voyageurs’ boat songs:
Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,
The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past!
They paused paddling at moments to listen for the howling of wolves. In his prose Thoreau’s joyful exuberance at being truly in the wilds is palpable. He seems eager to embrace the wilds, to wrap his arms around this green forested world he had entered, to, as he would say, “suck the essence out of it.” Concord’s gentle woodlots and meadows and ponds were a tame paramour by comparison to the passions promised by this.
The party slept restlessly on the shore of a lake under their propped-up batteau—sparks from their overenthusiastic bonfire having torched their cotton tent—and the next day worked their way farther upstream and through more lakes. Bald eagles and fish hawks screamed. Though loggers had culled out the white pines from the forested lakeshore, notes Thoreau, the traveler couldn’t detect the difference. From one lake, they caught a good view of several lesser peaks and the great, mesalike mass of Katahdin itself, standing above the surrounding landscape.
“The summit,” Thoreau enthused, “had a singularly flat tableland appearance, like a short highway, where a demigod might be let down to take a turn or two in an afternoon, to settle his dinner.”
Katahdin is a great knob of granite.42 Over the last 350 million years, geologists believe, streams and rivers eroded away a layer of softer surrounding rock that was thousands of feet thick. This left Katahdin projecting above all else, its summit one mile above sea level. The more recent sculpting of Katahdin started about 1 million years ago, when the great glacial sheets of the Ice Age flowed over its crest, carving its ridges and cirques, and finally melting away to leave the shape that Thoreau described, which, viewed from the west as he saw it, looks flat on top.
That day the party made fifteen miles before camping at the mouth of Murch Brook and the Aboljacknagesic, both streams which drained off Mount Katahdin into the Penobscot’s West Branch. The foot of the mountain lay several miles away through dense forest. That evening, using birch poles and pork-baited hooks, they caught a mess of trout for supper from the creeks, tossing the wriggling, rainbow-colored fish up onto shore. Thoreau stood over them in starry-eyed wonder “that these jewels should have swum away in that Aboljacknagesic water for so long, so many dark ages;—these bright fluviatile flowers, seen of Indians only, made beautiful, the Lord only knows why, to swim there!”
The rainbow fish reminded him of Proteus, the shape-shifting, future-telling Greek god who rules over certain beautiful sea creatures. History, writes Thoreau—and by history he appears to be referring to “actual” facts and events, like the fish wriggling at his feet—“put to a terrestrial use, is mere history; but put to a celestial use is mythology always.”
Call it an act of genius, or, as Henry James, Sr. (father of the novelist and the philosopher), did after meeting Thoreau, an act emanating from a personality that was “literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist43 it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of mankind.” Here’s Henry David come along to take history—those wriggling rainbow fish at his feet—and make mythology out of it. Here’s Henry David come along to take the historical fact of himself and make mythology out of it. He aims to climb to the high, wild summit of Mount Katahdin, and there—almost as an equal, his tone implies, or at least an honored guest—consort with the gods themselves. On that high, wild summit would climax, like on some great altar, his passionate embrace of Nature.
MOUNT KATAHDIN lay about sixty miles south of us. Thoreau had never made it as far north—as deep into the wilds—as the St. John. As we packed up that morning at Nine-Mile Bridge after the previous evening’s rainy encounter with Nine-Mile Mike, the heavy gray sky finally dissolved into fleecy clouds and patches of blue. It was the first we’d seen of the sun in five days on the St. John. It blinded us. We paddled down through quick water and bouncy little rapids in a perfect combination of cool breeze and warm patches of sun. We drifted along talking, then broke into canoe races. Molly and Skyler loved to steer the canoe bows so they would plow through the biggest waves they could find in these minor rapids. Drifting along midstream, we nibbled a lunch of goat cheese and smoked oysters on crackers. I’d gotten over my high pique from the previous day’s river lunch when I’d left a whole unopened salami—our only one—on a cooler lid while waiting to slice it. Skyler, amusing himself by making one of his pirate boardings, leaped from one canoe to the next. The canoe rocked, my precious salami rolled from the lid, dropped into the river, and sank from sight with me groping madly after it. My curses echoed from shore to shore.
Now Molly and Skyler decided they loved smoke
d oysters. I thought of the first French people in Acadia and how they picked shellfish off the mudflats at Port-Royal.
The river braided at Seven Islands downstream from Nine-Mile Bridge. The forest briefly opened here to the sky, leaving the islands beautiful and serene and airy. We paddled past grassy banks and wove through narrow channels. Birdsong drifted from the meadowy shores. I heard the throaty melodious trill of a redwing blackbird, reminding me of my Wisconsin childhood and the little pothole swamps I loved to explore in the woods. More geese and their goslings paddled busily along shore, and ducks—mergansers, we thought—swam in the river. An occasional seagull swooped in the distance. Seven Islands projected a sense of fertility and peace.
What it didn’t give any sense of was human habitation, yet Seven Islands, a century ago, had been the center of logging on the St. John. We could see nothing left of the bunkhouses and hotel, or the skid roads where horse teams and sleds pulled the logs from the frozen forest to the river, waiting for the thunderous ice breakup of spring to carry the logs downstream.
We made twenty-five river miles by day’s end—by far our best mileage. The broadening river and the surge of rainwater sloshing down it had swept us along, over the rocky sections, through sunshine and bunching afternoon clouds, through an iridescent, sunlit cloudburst, and into blue sky again. Two helicopters flew in formation in the distance and disappeared. Homeland Security on the Canadian border? I wondered. We heard a distant motor briefly—probably a logging operation back from the river. We spun our canoes around in eddies, sang. At last, the rains seemed to have moved on. But by the time we camped in late afternoon, on a high bank in a dark patch of forest at Basford Rips, the many days of drenching rain followed by the sun’s warmth had hatched ferocious swarms of insects. Molly’s eyes were nearly swollen shut from countless blackfly bites. Swollen red mosquito welts pocked all over Skyler’s tender skin. Powerful mosquito lotion gave only a slight lull in the attacks. Even the headnets the children wore around camp didn’t entirely stop them until the bugs retreated at darkness and we had a pleasant evening sitting on the ground before the sparking campfire under the stars.
I understood why the Indians moved to the breezier coastline for their summer camps, and why Thoreau wrote that during the summer months, the Maine Woods, or so he must have been told, were nearly uninhabitable due to insects. He visited in the fall.
Waking the next morning, Molly sat bolt upright and studied the outside of the tent door’s netting for danger signs.
“There are tons of mosquitoes on the door!” she exclaimed to her younger brother. “You better hide in your sleeping bag when we open it.”
Amy was rubbing my lower back, sore from paddling and hauling gear and shoving canoes over rocks. Suddenly she started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“What we got ourselves into.”
Molly picked up the map, studying it as she did every morning to mark our progress. We’d paddled nearly two thirds of the way from Baker Lake to the tiny dot that marked the village of Allagash, sitting where the Allagash River joins the St. John.
“Is there a five-star hotel in Allagash?” she asked, peering at it intently. “Do you think it will have room service?”
I laughed.
“I don’t think so.”
IN 1627, CHARLES DE LA TOUR sent a desperate plea for help to King Louis XIII of France. For nearly twenty years, he and his band had wandered in the wilderness of Acadia, developing the fur trade and using the St. John River as one of its main arteries. Little written history remains from this period. Lescarbot, the Parisian lawyer who had documented the early doings of Acadia, had returned to France, and, after the English torched the manor at Port-Royal in 1613, the handful of remaining French lived mostly with the Micmac.
De La Tour had become the de facto head of French Acadia in 1623 after Charles Biencourt, then in his early thirties, died. (The cause of his death is not clear.) There is no record of whether Biencourt had married, but La Tour had taken a Micmac wife, with whom he had several daughters; his men likewise intermarried with the Micmac and lived easily among them. La Tour’s band faced a constant battle, however, to stave off European poachers—the British, the Dutch—and rival French outfits on the St. Lawrence, or “Great River,” who would pull into the hundreds of remote, hidden coves of the Acadian coastline and trade with the Indians for furs.
Acadia was a “beautiful and good country,” he wrote to King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but one that France was in danger of losing. “In the four years since [Biencourt’s] death I have had no help or relief44 from anyone. On the contrary, I have been, and am now pursued to death by the French who come from the Great River…” What was worse, he’d learned from his intelligence sources that the British would soon push north from their New England outposts and seize New France, this after hostilities in Europe had recently erupted between the two countries over the ongoing Protestant-Catholic divide.
He was prepared to defend New France from the English, La Tour wrote, having at his disposal his “little band of resolute Frenchmen,” as well as one hundred Micmac families whom he had trained with firearms, plus the three small ships he possessed. He also could, if necessary, muster a potent guerrilla force of Indians—“a large number of people who do not like [the British] and can take them by surprise.” But better than taking to the woods and harassing the British with guerrilla attacks would be for His Majesty to send adequate supplies and men to Acadia so La Tour could deal with the British in “another way.”
La Tour also wrote to his father, Claude, for help, and asked him to deliver the letters to the king and Cardinal Richelieu. The senior La Tour had returned from Acadia to France years earlier, after accompanying Poutrincourt—and both their sons—on the original expeditions of the Order of Good Times. Known for his irresistibly charming manners, thirst for adventure, and dire financial straits, Claude had risen from modest beginnings45 as one of seven children of a master mason, and charmed his way into marriage to a landed noblewoman. Her estates near Saint-Just had conferred on him the aristocratic title “de La Tour” and she had given birth to their son, Charles, before dying at a young age.
As Charles dispatched his plea for help from the Acadian wilds, the senior La Tour was enjoying a brief stay in the ancient confines of St. Eloi prison for his unpaid debts, having already sold off most of his late wife’s properties to fund various grand schemes, including the Acadian colonization. Sprung from prison by a friend in close contact with Cardinal Richelieu, Claude de La Tour heeded his son’s plea and helped muster a flotilla that launched from France the next spring to rescue his son and New France. Unfortunately for Claude de La Tour, however, Britain and France were back in a state of war. Lying in wait for the flotilla was an ambitious Scottish poet by the name of Sir William Alexander who sought a convenient means to fund his attempts to settle what the French called Acadia.
Alexander had served as one of the favorite tutors to the young, poetry-loving James VI, king of Scotland, who became James I, king of England, after Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. At that time, England’s Puritans were clamoring for changes in the Church of England. While King James ignored most of them, he did grant one demand—appointing a group of scholars, among them his ex-tutor William Alexander,46 to translate a new version of the Bible. This, of course, is what’s known as the “King James Version,” first published in 1611.
A new Bible translation didn’t placate the radical Puritan Separatists, and they fled England, eventually—as we well know—wading ashore at Plymouth in 1620. Back in Britain, King James, generous to a fault, wanted to recompense the poet Alexander for his loyalties and labor. So he awarded him exclusive trading rights to a huge, and very controversial, chunk of the New World—everything between New England and Newfoundland, which he called “Nova Scotia,” or New Scotland. Of course, this same swath had also been long claimed by the French, who called it Acadia.
It turned out t
hat Sir William, like the French, couldn’t come up with enough money to actually colonize his enormous grant called Nova Scotia. So, as the Acadia historian John Mack Faragher aptly explained, this Scottish poet and Bible translator reverted to “more tried and true methods of accumulation—plunder and conquest.”
Alexander got wind of the large French flotilla heading to the New World to succor Charles de La Tour in Acadia and resupply Champlain’s fledgling French outpost at Quebec. He hired the three notorious Kirke brothers, privateers, whose preferred tools of the trade ran to heavily manned frigates bristling with cannons. Lying in wait off the Acadian coast, the Kirke brothers managed to ensnare the entire French flotilla, including Claude de La Tour.
It also happened that the never-saw-an-opportunity-he-didn’t-like Claude de La Tour was quietly a French Huguenot—a Protestant, like the British. Taken as captive back to London, the senior La Tour very quickly charmed his way into the Royal Court, married an English noblewoman—a maid of honor to the queen of England, this after having been married to a French noblewoman—renounced his loyalty to the king of France, and swore allegiance to the king of Britain. A year after his capture during his would-be rescue mission for son Charles, Claude de La Tour sailed triumphantly back to Acadia as a newly knighted baronet of Nova Scotia, sworn vassal of Britain, and part of a Scottish colonization expedition headed by the son of the poet and Bible translator Sir William Alexander.
They landed at the site of Port-Royal. They found it abandoned. Charles de La Tour and his roving band of French had left some years earlier, and established a fort at the very lower tip of the Acadian Peninsula in the vicinity of Cape Sable.
The Scottish settlers disembarked and started a small colony at the ruins of old Port-Royal. Claude de La Tour then sailed with two Scottish ships to the stronghold at Cape Sable to have a face-to-face meeting with his son.