Henry David Thoreau and the American Indian

Brianne Keith

To some of Henry David Thoreau’s most committed scholars it is well known that Thoreau maintained a deep and lifelong interest in American Indian cultures.  To these same scholars it is also well known that Thoreau kept an enormous amount of journal pages. Thoreau devoted a large portion of his journal to extracts of various sources concerning not only the American Indian culture, but the Indian cultures of Greenland, Canada, Polynesia, South America, and Africa (Fleck 4). These pages have been compiled into a massive set of notebooks to which scholars refer as “Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks”. The Indian notebooks make up eleven volumes that contain two thousand eight hundred pages and over 500,000 words. (Fleck 3).  Robert Fleck, the editor of The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks, which is, perhaps, the only published portion of the notebooks, says that these notebooks “constitute, probably, the largest body of knowledge on American Indian culture in the nineteenth century” (Fleck 3). 
        “Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks” have elicited a wide range of spirited responses from scholars.  These responses range from highly optimistic to dismissive.  Robert Fleck notes that “Thoreau’s deep involvement far exceeded any other eighteenth or nineteenth-century “primitivist” including Rousseau or Diderot”(Fleck 3).  Fleck imagines that Thoreau would have written a “poetic and scholarly Indian book” and speculates that the finished product “might have…altered…our deplorable treatment of the red man during the nineteenth century”(Fleck 6).  John Aldrich Christie, author of Thoreau as World Traveler, chooses not to focus his concern so much on what Thoreau would have done with the notebooks but what he can derive from them about Thoreau’s thoughts, interests, and study methods.  He writes that to see the “ ‘Indian Notebooks’ as a loss because he never completed his book on the Indians is to miss the richer harvest that these materials offered to Thoreau as a scholar and poet” (Fleck 6). Robert Sattlemeyer questions whether Thoreau was even seriously considering writing a book on the American Indians.  He writes “if [Thoreau] seriously considered a book about Indians, it was likely that he gave it up by 1859 as his attention became more engrossed by the problems of the dispersal of plants and allied botanical phenomena” (Sattelmeyer 109). Robert Sayre, dismisses the question of what Thoreau may have done with the Indian books and chooses to study the The Maine Woods, “the book about the Indians,” he says, “which [Thoreau] did write” (Sayre 155).
        Robert Sattelmeyer, in his opening paragraph, attributes Thoreau’s interest in American Indian culture to essentially three reasons.  First, he believes that Thoreau was attracted to American Indian culture because it was virtually unexamined and the prospect of traversing through new territory in American history was tantalizing to his personality.  Sattelemeyer writes, “its subject was shrouded in mystery” (Sattelmeyer 99).  Sattelmeyer is suggesting that Thoreau was attracted to examining subjects at their “roots”.  This aspect of Thoreau’s character surfaces in a lot of writings by and anecdotes about him.  In one anecdote, Ralph Waldo Emerson praises Harvard’s many branches of learning prompting Thoreau to retort quickly “yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots” (Richardson, A Life, 282).
        Generally, “Thoreau’s Indian Notebooks” serve as a starting point from which scholars hypothesize about what Thoreau was hoping to find in studying Indian cultures, particularly American Indian culture.  Sattelmeyer confidently asserts that “ultimately … this interest in the prehistory of American Indians was really an interest in the possibility of recovering whatever primal wisdom and knowledge the Indian might have possessed and that civilized man had lost” (108).  Robert D. Richardson, Jr., notices that “most of the notes (in the “Indian Notebooks”) are simple observations, on a moose-hide canoe, on cooking methods, on animal trap construction, and are put down as if the important thing were to record the Indian point of view, to acknowledge the actual living Indian” (Richardson 223).  Still another scholar, Robert Fleck, believes that Thoreau had civic intentions for improving the nineteenth-century American culture.  He writes,

if he (Thoreau) could gain insight during his life into a people whose origins and very existence stemmed from the mystical depths of nature, then, perhaps, he as well as his literary audience could renew themselves during an age when civilization had become stagnantly materialistic

adding, “this mystical ‘arrow-headed’ character of Indian culture had to be deciphered, not destroyed, so that our civilization would not obliterate itself with its own expanding, mechanistic bulk” (Fleck 1). At a basic level all of these scholars seem to agree that the root of Thoreau’s fascination with American Indian culture was related to his desire to understand their culture completely and honestly, especially because it was becoming fast extinct. 

“Thoreau’s Sympathy With the French”

One critic gives an even more interesting argument for the motivation behind Thoreau’s interest in aboriginal cultures that involves more personal motivations.  In “ ‘I Am of French Extract’: Thoreau’s Sympathy With the French’”, Richard S. Randolph argues that Thoreau sympathized with marginalized groups because of his Franco-American descent.  His argument includes a multi-layering of many social and economic strains that existed in nineteenth-century America resulting in stereotypical views about Franco-Americans and Catholics.
        Thoreau’s family was “descended from French Hugenots (that is, French Protestants) who immigrated to America to flee anti-Protestant sentiment in Catholic France” (Randolph 47).  In the social context of nineteenth-century America, the French Hugenots were characterized as “shrewd, quaint and stubborn” nonetheless “respected for their intelligence and learning” (Randolph 48).  They did not remain a distinct race, becoming by the “mid-nineteenth century…assimilated into the dominant Anglo culture” and disappearing “as a distinguishable people or religious group” (Randolph 48). 
        The French became assimilated into the dominant Anglo culture only several years after the French and Indian Wars.  Substantial ethnic tensions and stereotypes ensued as a result of the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763).  Secvan Bercovitch notes in The American Jeremiad that the conflict between the French and English “was understood by the American colonists in jeremiad fashion as a spiritual war rooted in ethnic and religious distinctions” (Randolph 49).  Randolph explains that

In this scenario, “the French were ‘the offspring of that Scarlet Whore’ [that is, Catholicism], French Canada was ‘the North American Babylon,’ and the invasion itself a ‘grand decisive conflict between the lamb and the beast,’ preview to Armageddon” (Randolph 49; Jeremiad 115).

This way of looking at the French and Indian Wars has survived in the written history of Anglo-American historians.  These written histories reveal the ethnic prejudices that were prevalent during the nineteenth century.  Randolph explains

Anglo-American historians wrote the history of the French and Indian Wars both to praise the English and loyal American colonists (and thus to reaffirm the colonists’ loyalty and ties to England) and to slander the French.  In doing so, they not only justified the wars but also perpetuated the mythic sense of America and the American colonists as part of a divine mission sanctioned by God and premised on the belief that Anglo-Protestant Americans were a chosen people and the French were a threat to their mission to create a civilized country of true believers, that is, Protestants (Randolph 49).

Some of the fundamental beliefs that this country began with, that is, of the first religious colonists were involved in the rhetoric of the historians.  Randolph delineates a few of the social strains that forced nineteenth-century Americans to formulate ethnic prejudices of the French.
        First, Randolph points out that economic strains caused by the lumber industry prompted many New Englanders to resent the French. The burgeoning lumber industry of the nineteenth century created many jobs in New England which drew French Canadians across the Canadian border and into New England.  Their mass immigration strained the New England economy causing a depression. This, consequently, caused many social tensions.  Randolph explains that “anti-French sentiment among the Yankees in New England intensified dramatically due to this sudden increased immigration and because of a severe economic depression in the United States beginning in 1837” (Randolph 50).
        Second, Randolph also notes that nineteenth century Anglo-Americans attributed character traits to ethnic background, perhaps to a more heightened degree than any other time.  Randolph uses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eulogy to Thoreau as an example of this tendency.  In it, Emerson attributes certain undesirable characteristics of Thoreau to his French Hugenot descent.  Emerson writes

Henry David Thoreau was the last descendant of a French ancestor who came to this country from the Isle of Guernsey.  His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood, in singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius (Randolph 51).

He says that “this passage belittles Thoreau and his accomplishments by explaining him in terms of his ethnicity.  Emerson assumes that Thoreau’s genius must stem from his Anglo-Saxon heritage and implies that his French ancestry was the cause for his faults” (Randolph 51). 
        Ultimately, Randolph believes that the tensions between the English and the French caused by the French and Indian War, the subsequent social strains caused by the lumber industry, and the trend to view people in terms of their ethnic background caused Thoreau to view himself as part of a marginalized ethnic group which, in turn, caused him to sympathize with other marginalized groups. In an important passage, Randolph says that he notices that in Thoreau’s writings about his time at Harvard Thoreau “acknowledges that he has always felt like an outsider among his classmates” (Randolph 54).  Randolph believes that this feeling of alienation may stem from his French Hugenot descent.
        There are several important supports for his argument that Thoreau sympathized with the French and marginalized groups that come from Thoreau’s own writings.  First he finds a passage in which Thoreau criticized historians and their apparent biases.  Thoreau writes

It is remarkable that there is not in English any adequate or correct account of the French exploration of what is now the coast of New England, between 1604 and 1608, though it is conceded that they then made the first permanent European settlement on the continent of North America north of St. Augustine.  If lions had been the painters it would have been otherwise (Randolph 57).

Randolph finds Thoreau’s support for the French a valiant effort spurred by Thoreau’s own sympathy for marginalized groups. In another instance, Randolph looks at Thoreau’s treatment of Alek Therien, the French Canadian woodcutter that he writes about in Walden.  Thoreau writes “a more simple and natural man it would be hard to find.  Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existence for him” (Randolph 54).  James Doyle, another scholar notes that “The woodchopper is the representative man in all Thoreau’s writings who receives the highest praise” (Randolph 55).  Randolph finds that Thoreau’s complementary view of Alek Therien was related not only to Therien’s admirable traits, but to his being French.  Randolph suggests that Thoreau found it easy to sympathize with Therien because of his ethnic background.
        It is important to note that when Thoreau went to Canada, probably with the hopes of finding more people like Alek Therien, he was not impressed.  He writes“I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold” (Randolph 55).  Randolph notes that “if Thoreau hoped to free himself from the dominant culture by finding a community of people like Alek Therien, he was sorely disappointed, and it shows in his inconsistent, but often harsh, portrayals” (Randolph 55).  Thoreau will later have a similar experience with the American Indian.  One of the reasons why Thoreau went to Maine was to meet American Indians and immerse himself in their culture.  He meets them with very high expectations, only to be disappointed by what he sees as their regression into Anglo-American culture.
        The American Indian was also a minority in nineteenth century America, mainly because they were being pushed West and generally becoming extinct.  Like Thoreau’s treatment of Alek Therien, we will later see how Thoreau will at first find an ideal in the American Indian and try to follow this ideal to Maine.  It is in Maine that he will meet American Indians who will disappoint him and American Indians, one in particular he will grow to understand and consider close to an ideal, if only in the way that this particular American Indian impacted his life.

Thoreau and Mythology

Mythology for Thoreau was a pure form of written history that could have lasting significance because of its poetic truths.  In the language of mythology Thoreau found a permanence that he desired for his own writing.  In the “Sunday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he expresses his sense of the truth of myth: “To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography.  So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth” (Thoreau 51).  He found Greek mythology attractive saying that Jehovah lacked the “intimate and genial influence on nature” that the Greek gods had.  He explains that there was “no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva to intercede for me” (Richardson, Myth, 96). He also found American Indian mythology especially attractive.  He found truths and teachings in their myths that he could apply to his own life.
        The topic of Thoreau and his relation to myth has been explored by Robert D. Richarson in the essay “Thoreau: ‘To Link My Facts to Fable’ which appears in his book, Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance.  His essay is centered upon the assertion that Thoreau’s relation to myth was a “one-on-one” relationship, rather than one surrounded by social, cultural and historical conditions and that, in treating myth this way, Thoreau was most original.  He then picks out several of the most prominent examples of Thoreau and his use of myth in some of his more famous published works such as “Ktaadn,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers  and Walden. 
        Robertson asserts that “Of … importance [is] Thoreau’s perception that the ‘original conditions’ surrounding the creation of myth were not so much social, cultural, or historical as they were personal or individual”.  Thoreau, in this sense, is not concerned with dates and names; factual information he feels irrelevant to valuable history.  Robertson writes “Thoreau…[says] that modern knowledge is too detailed and thereby misses the grand truths”.
        Robertson selects a quote that best describes the way Thoreau reads myths.  The passage he uses comes from the Sunday chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  In it, Thoreau writes

When we read that Bacchus made the Tyrrhenian mariners mad, so that they leapt into the sea, mistaking it for a meadow full of flowers, and so became dolphins, we are not concerned about the historical truth of this, but rather a higher poetical truth (Thoreau, A Week, 50).

Thoreau puts great value on “a higher poetical truth”-so much that he renders biographical and historical information irrelevant and unnecessary; “poetry is so universally true and independent of experience, that it does not need any particular biography to illustrate it” (Richardson 77). Since this implies that Thoreau disregarded history altogether, it is important to note that Thoreau had a deep respect for history and that his intentions are to find a truthful, unbiased “history” by disregarding factual information, such as the dates and social contexts he deems inessential.
        Robertson also asserts that “myth appeared to Thoreau to be the product of a magnificent simplicity of perception, which resulted from a certain kind of closeness to nature”.  Richardson explains that “Thoreau himself strives for this condition [a natural, simplistic life] both for the heroic quality of such a life and because living habitually at a pitch of mythic intensity would undoubtedly help him to write myth” (Richardson, Myth, 95).  Surely, Thoreau found this type of life in the American Indian.  Thoreau’s desire to write myth, then, is closely aligned with studying the American Indian. It reveals potential motivation for Thoreau’s feverish attempt to study the American Indian.  Perhaps he felt that through studying the American Indian, he would find the tools, particularly the American Indian language, necessary to create his own myth. 

Pantheism Redeemed

In his Indian notebooks, we find an example of what Robert Sayre, author of Thoreau and the American Indians, might have considered to be Thoreau’s Romanticism:

If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a benefactor, he who discovers two gods where there was only known the one (and such a one!) before is a still a greater benefactor.  I would fain improve every opportunity to wonder and worship, as a sunflower welcomes the light.  The more thrilling, wonderful, divine objects I behold in a day, the more expanded and immortal I become (Fleck 52).

Thoreau wrote this after he transcribed a passage concerning Indian religion and superstition from Hutchinson’s History. Fleck notes that “as with tradition & history, this category appears to have been one of Thoreau’s major interests in Indian cultures.  He shows his entire sympathy with polytheistic Indian culture in his Journal” (Fleck 52).  The Romanticism that is apparent in this passage might be something that his critics would cite as evidence of his naivetee.
        The reason why Thoreau would feel this way and go to such an extreme length to convince himself of the virtue in his loving polytheism might stem from the surmounting opposition he would face in verbally expressing that opinion.  Thoreau lived in a strongly Christian culture.  Edward Wagenknecht recounts an incident in which a

Concord lady who used to decorate the graves of Thoreau’s peers in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and who, having done so, would leave is with a curse: “No flowers for you, you dirty little atheist!” (Wagenknecht 155).

The social attitudes that prevailed in his social environment were obviously anti-Pantheistic and centered on upholding Christian ideals.
        In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers this sympathy toward Pantheism is worked through more logically.  He seems more confident of the concepts of Pantheism when he speaks of those that are of Greek mythology.  Thoreau writes

The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race.  In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead as was rumored.  No god ever dies.  Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant of his shrine (Thoreau 65).

Here he is blatant.  He has a “Pantheon” which would frighten and disgust the old woman that curses his grave.  Not only is he self-assertive, declaring himself to have his own host of gods, “In my Pantheon,” he is also humorous.  Thoreau hints at a sort of impiety inherent in the religious culture of his time by saying “the great god Pan is not dead as was rumored”.  The idea that discussions of religious matters could be thought of as “rumors” degrades their value.  Thoreau softens the edge of his blatant assertion, and tries to reason with his audience by explaining

I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too (Thoreau 68).

Thoreau is asserting a religious idea that considers the names used in worship as the inessentials of religions, while the love that forms the fundamental beliefs is considered the essential part. The logic is more thorough here than in his Indian Notebooks, and it is formed with self-assertive, confident language to form a style that becomes characteristically Thoreau. It is in his strong discussion of Greek mythology that he speaks confidently about his sympathy with Pantheistic religion.

Thoreau the Romantic Savagist?

The tendency for Thoreau to speak ideally and rapturously about certain subjects earns him the term “Romantic”.  Often this term has a negative connotation implying that the person who is a Romantic is naïve.  In discussing Thoreau’s interest in American Indian culture, some scholars refer to Thoreau as a “Romantic” and therefore as having savagist ideas about primitive culture.  There are several points at which this idea could be contested.
        First, it is important to note that Thoreau’s method of extracting scholarship on the American Indian included a wide range of sources, revealing that he did in fact desire to see the whole of the American Indian and understand him thoroughly.  His thoroughness of study reveals a fervor with which he proceeded to study the American Indian.  This may be because Thoreau realized that his subject was fast becoming extinct. By closer examination, we discover that Thoreau in fact strove to have a relationship with the American Indian not based on Romantic or savagist ideals, but based on truth.
        By looking at what sources Thoreau used first to study the American Indian, we can see how Thoreau related to the culture in which he was studying.  Robert Sattelmeyer in his “Aboriginal History” attempts to outline Thoreau’s reading of American Indian culture. His primary intent is to study the impact of reading on Thoreau’s writing.  For example, one of his paragraphs deals with the fact that Thoreau’s “notes on the history of Indians on Cape Cod eventually became the first surviving volume of his eleven-volume set of extracts and notes covering all aspects of Indian history and culture” (Sattelmeyer 100).  Along with this intention, Sattelmeyer gives proof that Thoreau was in fact very particular in what he chose to extract and put in his notebooks. He writes

Theories that did exist were highly conjectural and generally contradictory, and Thoreau’s notes indicate that he was acutely aware of the widely divergent views of contemporary writers about the origins and dispersion of North American Indian tribes (Sattelmeyer 108).

Robert D.Richardson Jr. also notes that Thoreau “tended to avoid the better known and most obvious works on the Noble Savage” (222). We find that he strove toward finding books which had a commitment to a factual focus than other books, such as Rousseau’s, which had begun the idea of the Noble Savage.
        Sattelmeyer gives an explicit catalog of the wide variety of sources he used.  “Thoreau began to expand his Indian reading to the same primary French sources-Champlain, Roberval, Cartier, Lescarbot that he had begun to draw upon for his American historical researches” (103).  Sattelmeyer believes that these accounts were more useful to Thoreau because there was an element of sympathy to them that was lacking in the English missionary accounts.  He writes “The French explorers and even their missionaries he would find more useful than the English in providing reliable and even sympathetic descriptions of Indian life, for they were more prone to regard the Indians as human beings, to adopt their habits and mode of life, and actually to live among them” (103).  Another important aspect of Thoreau’s research that Sattelmeyer notes is that it included not only historical and cultural accounts given by the missionaries, but it extended to include botanical and material more scientific in nature such as Jacob Bigelow’s American Medical Botany and Charles Darwin’s account of the voyage of the Beagle.

1. Ninteenth-Century American Culture

Important scientific and social debates concerning the explanation and treatment of primitive peoples characterized America in the nineteenth century.  These debates began when scientific questions about the origin of man arose.  Sattlemeyer explains that the response to these scientific questions only led to more questions such as

Were the Indians a separate variety of humans, and if so, how had they gotten that way, and when?  Were their differences to be ascribed to the external conditions of environment or the hand of Providence? (Sattelmeyer 103).

The question of the origin of man, therefore, incorporated religious and scientific elements-it spanned all across the social context.
        A key scientific study that spurred these debates was Samuel G. Morton’s “Crania Americana” which “was a massive comparative study of aboriginal skulls from the Americas” (Sattelmeyer 104).  Essentially, this study suggested that each race was predestined by a divine force to excel in certain areas and that they were hand-placed in a geographical area that would at once balance and suit their capacities.  In other words,

Each race was adapted from the beginning to its particular local destination…it is assumed that the physical characteristics which distinguish the different Races, are independent of natural causes (Sattlemeyer 104).

In this scenario, as Sattelmeyer says,

Caucasion race, not unexpectedly, is “distinguished for the faculty with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments,” and the Indian, as one might also predict from the foregoing, is characterized as “averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war” (Sattelmeyer 104).

These views had permeated very deeply throughout nineteenth century American culture.  As Sattlemeyer writes,

even the most ardent advocates of an ‘enlightened’ policy toward the Indian-and perhaps the most eminent authorities on the subject before the Civil War-still assumed that the Indians were a lapsed race who might by herculean efforts on the part of whites make some progress toward civilization (Sattlemeyer 105).

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, from whom Thoreau extracted vast amounts of material for his Indian notebooks was an example of one whose “enlightened” policy was still savagist.  In The Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States Schoolcraft writes that one of the aims for which he urged people to strive was “to reclaim such a race [the American Indian] to the paths of virtue and truth; to enlighten the mind which has been so long in darkness” (Sattlemeyer 105).  Like many of his contemporaries, Schoolcraft saw the Indians’ barbarism as a “lapsed state” (since God had provided all men with the capacity for agriculture in antediluvian times) to be accounted for by the seductiveness of the wilderness in which they lived.  Schoolcraft thinks that the American Indians’ “wandering in the attractive scenes of the temperate and tropic zones…must have proved a powerful stimulus to erratic and barbaric notions”  (Sattelmeyer 105). 
        There were many motives surrounding these social debates concerning the treatment of American Indians.  For the most part, the motives were closely aligned with justifying western expansion.  Sattlemeyer writes that the debates concerning the origins and ancestry of primitive peoples, including the American Indian spanned all disciplines of interest-including religious, academic and even political disciplines for the debates

Were sometimes used to justify social and political decisions (the removal of Indian tribes to the West, for example) affecting the lives and the very survival of so-called primitive peoples (Sattelmeyer 101).

Sattelmeyer asserts that Thoreau was not entirely removed from these sentiments.  He writes “Thoreau carried with him to some extent the unquestioned assumption of his era that the Indian was a “savage” and that there existed an almost unbridgeable gap between him and the “civilized” person (Sattelmeyer 107). 

2. “The Unbridgeable Gap”

Sattelmeyer compares a passage that obviously contains savagist ideas with a passage of Thoreau’s to support his idea that Thoreau was influenced by his culture and perhaps was not entirely exempt from their beliefs.  Apparently, Thoreau, while young, Sattelemeyer says, read several books on Indian lore that viewed Indians as primitive and idealistic. The passage comes from B.B. Thatcher’ Indian Traits

But generally they lived in circumstances of health, security and ease.  The woods and the waters supplied them with their abundant livelihood, almost without effort.  The hunter’s game was all around him, and above him, in the streams, forests, and skies of his native land.  And, above all, he was not only hardy, patient and brave, able to encounter the elements, and fearless to meet his foe in the field of battle, but he was a free man.  The mountain eagle that screamed over the slow-soaring smoke of his wigwam, was not freer than him who dwelt beneath that humble room…
        We find the cellars of their wigwams in our old pastures, mossgrown and yawning.  We decipher their rude inscriptions on the rocks of the forest.  The farmer’s plough, perhaps, turns up the mouldering relics of their ancient dead…
        The time will come but too soon, we fear, when the history of the Indians will be the history of a people of which no living specimen shall exist upon the earth;-- too soon will the places that now know them know them never again.  Their council-fires will have gone out upon the green hills of the South.  Their canoes shall plough no more the bosom of the Northern Lakes.  Even the prairies and mountains of the far West will cease to be their refuge from the rushing march of civilization (Sattelmeyer 102).

Sattelmeyer finds in this passage a “typical mixture of Rousseau-like admiration for the noble savage in the unfallen natural state and an almost gothic taste for melancholy reminders of the Indian’s decline” (Sattlemeyer 102).  Sattelmeyer also may be suggesting that this view of the American Indian as having only a child-like intelligence because B.B. Thatcher’s passage refers to the Indian’s scriptures as “rude”.  Nevertheless, Sattlemeyer detects this Rousseau-like admiration in Thoreau’s A Week.

In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles he dips his way along.  He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau….He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space.  So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man (Thoreau 46).

Sattlemeyer theorizes that this passage of Thoreau’s was influenced by the earlier passage by Thatcher, or, at least, it was reminiscent of its tone and shows no advancement by Thoreau. He suggests that Thoreau had a typical Rousseau-like admiration for the American Indian just like his contemporaries.
        This admiration is what Sattelmeyer cites as the cause of Thoreau’s failure to write a book about the American Indian from his vast amount of research.  Although Sattelmeyer notes that Thoreau’s intentions were “to humanize the discipline” of studying American Indian culture, he says that “Thoreau was never able to completely overcome his predisposition to divide humanity into “civilized” or “savage” or “barbarian” categories. Thoreau’s large amount of research material on the American Indian culture included the history, prehistory, and natural history of the culture.  Sattelmeyer remarks that this material proved to be “relatively unmalleable as far as his own literary pursuits were concerned” (Sattelmeyer 100).
        Robert Sayre also feels that Thoreau had savagist notions about primitive culture, the same notions that Sattelmeyer believes may have stifled his ability to write a book about the American Indian that he would be comfortable with.  Sayre explores Thoreau’s savagist ideas in his book Thoreau and the American Indian.  Sayre looks to Thoreau’s relationship with Joe Polis as an indicator of Thoreau’s savagist views. Joe Polis was the American Indian whom Thoreau got to know best during his trips to Maine. Sayre writes in “Lessons of the Forest”, a chapter of the book, “I think that Thoreau overcame savagism in his recognition of Polis as a person, and as a person who illustrated the depth and diversity of the Indians”.  Sayre suggests that despite this experience Thoreau may have never overcome his savagist views for he also wrote, “but Thoreau, it must be considered, wrote of Polis as ‘the Indian’, even after addressing him as ‘Polis’” (Sayre 184). 

3. The Gap “Bridged”?

If we look more closely at certain passages in which Thoreau is considered a savagist, we find that this may not be true.  For example, in the passage of Thoreau’s that Sattlemeyer finds savagist notions similar to B.B. Thatcher’s we find that Thoreau may actually be commenting on stereotypes and criticizing the notions for which Sattlemeyer cites him.  The passage, again, is

In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with horn-beam paddles he dips his way along.  He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the aeons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau…He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space.  So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man (Thoreau 46).

 In an acute sense of self-consciousness, (very much a characteristic of Thoreau) he says that the Indian is but “dim and misty to me”.  The word “dim” with its connotations of “dim-witted” may actually call upon the fact that someone may not be “dim-witted” but seem “dim” to someone because of a lack of understanding.  They are metaphorically “misty” and “far away.  So he is actually saying that the Indian seems “dim” to him because he is far away from him; he doesn’t know enough about him, but if he were close to him he would be “starry” and “bright”.  Thoreau attempts to revise the savagist notions that the Indian has only a child-like intelligence.  He suggests that the Indian may seem this way because culture is so separate from the Indian and does not have a full understanding of him.
        We can see another break in Thoreau’s relationship with his contemporaries and with their savagist notions when we consider Thoreau’s intentions with the American Indian. His intentions are clearly different from Lewis Morgan’s, a writer from whom Thoreau extracted material for his Indian Notebooks.  Morgan’s League of the Iroquois (1851) whose effort was to “encourage a kinder feeling toward the Indian…and of his capabilities for future elevation”.  Robert D.Richardson recounts that John Wesley Powell called this book “the first scientific account of an Indian tribe” (Richardson, A Life, 223). Even Schoolcraft’s sentiments are comparable with Thoreau’s: “to reclaim such a race to the paths of virtue and truth; to enlighten the mind which has been so long in darkness”.  Although Thoreau did not necessarily care to “reclaim” the race “to paths of virtue and truth” for he found much virtue in them as they were, he did want to “enlighten the mind which has been so long in darkness”.  He wanted to grab the “dim” Indian from out of the recesses and extract their secrets for the progress of society.

Thoreau: An Aim for New Terra Firma

In comparing Henry David Thoreau’s and William Wordsworth’s experiences traveling to the tops of mountains we find some interesting similarities and differences in their accounts.  It is in the similarities and differences that we discover how each writer relates to the literary term “Romanticism”—how they relate to its values and speak for its philosophy.
        The term Romanticism in its most academic terms can be described as the “chief emphasis on the freedom of individual self-expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became the new standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical models favoured by the 18^th-century neoclassicism.  Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration”.   Of course, there are sociopolitical and economical reasons why Romanticism was born and how it developed into what it was (or is), but it is not important to consider these reasons in Thoreau’s and Wordsworth’s relations with mountain tops.  The most important aspect of Romanticism to note is its dependence on the belief in “boundless individual imagination and aspiration”. 
        It is a loss of individual imagination and aspiration that Wordsworth “grieves” in “The Prelude”.  In Book Sixth of “The Prelude”, called “Cambridge and the Alps”, Wordsworth traverses the Alps with a companion.  When they “first beheld /Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved/To have a soulless image on the eye/That had usurped upon a living thought/That never more could be”. (ll. 524-528).  Wordsworth grieves that he is relating this experience, or writing it, without the “soul” of the mountain, or the actual mountain, in front of him.  He is writing about it from memory.  This suggests a lack of imagination that he obviously feels uneasy about.
        Both Wordsworth and Thoreau have similar experiences with nature.  They both feel the voice of Mother Nature protests their journeys.  For example, as Wordsworth and his companion “cut/A winding passage with majestic ease/Between (the mountain’s) lofty rocks” (ll. 379-380) he remembers nature saying to him

“Stay, stay your sacrilegious hands!”—The voice
was Nature’s, uttered from her Alpine throne;
I heard it then and seem to hear it now—
“Your impious work forbear, perish what may,
Let this one temple last, be this one spot
Of earth devoted to eternity!”

It is interesting that he says he “heard it then and seem(s) to hear it now”.  What does he mean by this? The power of memory is strong here; it provokes the imagination to form the voice of Nature in the present time; the time that Wordsworth is writing this.  Wordsworth is showing the reader how imagination can conjure powerful sensory experiences.
        Similarly, in Thoreau, nature is personified and presented as admonishing the traveler to leave her mountain tops alone.  At the top of Mount Ktaadn in Maine, Thoreau, while alone, says he feels that nature

seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time?  This ground is not prepared for you.  Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind.  Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?  Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear (Thoreau, “Ktaadn” 640).

In both instances, we have Mother Nature gently chastising the human for traveling to the tops of the mountain.  These writers both feel in opposition to Nature and that they are violating it.  
        Both Thoreau and Wordsworth address the topic of imagination in their accounts.  Thoreau writes that as he was “perched upon” the top of the observatory tower on Mount Greylock, he discovered around himself an “ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth” putting him in a situation “which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive”(Thoreau, A Week 153).  Thoreau admits that he uses the imagination to render some parts of nature impressive.  Alternately, it is only through imagination that Wordsworth can render the Alps impressive.  Wordsworth is grieved to hear that he has already crossed the Alps without knowing it.  He writes

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant’s lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,--‘that we had crossed the Alps’ (ll. 586-591).

It is at this point that Wordsworth invokes “Imagination”.  It is easy to sense how Thoreau and Wordsworth hold imagination in different degrees of importance and significance when comparing these passages.  For example, Wordsworth refers to imagination as “the Power” that is only “so called/Through sad incompetence of human speech” (ll. 592-593).   Imagination is given a much more exalted significance than Thoreau has given it in his Tuesday chapter of A Week.  First, it is referred to as “the Power”.  The phrase “the Power” has a religious significance—especially because the word “Power” is capitalized.  Here it is being associated with something like a deity.  Second, there is a failure on the part of humans to express the quality of language.  The power of language is sadly inferior; “sad incompetence of human speech” (l. 593).   Imagination has a redemptive force for Wordsworth because it is through imagination that he can say “I recognise thy glory:” and render the Alps’ landscape impressive.  Thoreau does not need to do this- he can render the landscape impressive without the help of imagination in the “Tuesday” chapter of A Week.
        Wordsworth and Thoreau display different reactions to the real, material world on their excursions.  For Wordsworth, it seems that the reason why he did not realize that he had already finished crossing the Alps was because the “dumb cataracts and streams of ice,/A motionless array of mighty waves,” and “Five rivers broad and vast, made rich amends,/And reconciled them to realities” (ll. 530-533).  The “realities” that he goes on to describe are domestic and tame:

There small birds warble from the leafy trees,
The eagle soars high in the element,
There doth the reaper bind the yellow sheaf,
The maiden spread the haycock in the sun,
While Winter like a well-tamed lion walks,
Descending from the mountain to make sport
Among the cottages by beds of flowers (ll. 534-540).

These are a list of images that have ties to civilization.  The small birds are what are present and close to Wordsworth, while the larger eagle “soars high” and far away; there is a reaper binding a yellow sheaf which is another image of civilization and harvest, and most significantly, Winter is a “well-tamed lion” that “walks”.  In his image of spring, Winter becomes tamed and joins the cottages down below in the form of melting snow.  This is quite different from the realities that Thoreau discovers on top of Mount Ktaadn.  Thoreau writes

Occasionally, when the windy columns broke in to me, I caught sight of a dark, damp crag to the right or left; the mist driving ceaselessly between it and me.  It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus.  Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound.  Aeschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this (Thoreau, “Ktaadn” 640).

The rocky landscape of the top of Mount Ktaadn inspires a sense of epic grandeur in Thoreau.  He finds the landscape at an opposition to himself-he is not reconciled with the landscape like Wordsworth, in the sense that he has made it his own by associating it with the world “down below” or civilization.  Thoreau is only reconciled to the landscape by associating it with the pinnacles of Western culture.  They both associate the mountaintop with the pinnacle of culture. 
        In the Tuesday chapter, Thoreau is more associated with the real earth.  He writes “as the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma.  Here, we have a blend of eastern and western influences in the new terra firma, for the light that “reveals” comes from the east, and the words terra firma are Latin and therefore of a Western origin.  Perhaps Thoreau is saying that we need to incorporate eastern influences in order to rise Western culture to new terra firma.

Thoreau and the Language of the American Indian

In The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks there is a section entitled “Language”.  In this section, Richard Fleck compiles passages from the Indian Notebooks pertaining to the language of the American Indian culture.  These passages contain direct transcriptions of other sources on the topic, and personal notes and written reactions to the transcriptions by Thoreau.  This section contains comparably more notes written by Thoreau himself than the other sections in The Indians of Thoreau.  It is obvious that Thoreau had a special interest in the topic of American Indian language. 
        There seem to be many important reasons why the topic of the American Indian language was of special interest with Thoreau.  It exemplifies first a personal interest that in turn reflects the process by which Thoreau writes and what quality he aims for in his own writing.  It also exemplifies how the Transcendental philosophy in its relation to Thoreau’s writing style is closely aligned with how the American Indian formulates language patterns.  Finally, it shows how Thoreau’s most profound interests in the American Indian culture was in one of the most sophisticated aspects of human culture; language.  Thoreau, then, can be viewed as comfortable with accepting the American Indian culture as having an equally civilized status as his own European-American culture. 
        One of the qualities of the American Indian language that Thoreau was attracted to was its power to evoke strong mental images as simply as possible.  We know that Thoreau was attracted to this quality because he extracts a passage from Heckwelder’s “History of the Indian Nations” that exemplifies this quality of the American Indian language.  The passage that Thoreau copied explains that

“The first name given by the Indians to the Europeans who landed in Virginia was Wapsid Lenape (white people;) when, however, afterwards they began to commit murders on the red men, whom they pierced with swords, they gave to the Virginians the name Mechanschicau (long knives,) to distinguish them from others of the same color.  They never apply it [murderer] to the Quakers-They call them Quakels, not having in their language the sound to express your letter R” (Fleck 45).

This method of formulating language is remarkable for several reasons.  First, the American Indian uses only the most fundamental characteristic of the Virginians in order to formulate an expression by which to refer to them.  This expression, “Mechanschicau (long knives)” uses an object, and not an adjective to describe or express “danger”.  Using an object evokes in the listener’s mind a powerful mental image—the listener does not have to construct a mental picture out of a mess of adjectives; the mental picture is already constructed.  The American Indian formulation of language, then, is very powerful.  It uses simplicity and compression in its expression.  Fleck summarizes some of the appeal of the American Indian language:

The implications of the American Indian language, particularly its naming system, are very understandably appealing to Thoreau.  He writes in his journal “how much more conversant was the Indian with any wild animal or plant than we are, and in his language is implied all that intimacy, as much as ours is expressed in our language.  How many words in his language about a moose, or birch bark, and the like!  The Indian stood nearer to wild nature than we (Fleck 1).

        In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he writes that the white man

Comes with a list of ancient Saxon, Norman, and Celtic names, and strews them up and down this river,-Framingham, Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford,-and this is New Angle-land, and these are the New West Saxons, whom the red men call, not Angle-ish or English but Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees (Thoreau, A Week, 1).

Here he is suggesting two important ideas.  He suggests that the Indian naming system has more permanence than the English names.  More unnerving is that he is suggesting that the American Indian culture has a power that may not be apparent to his audience; for the act of naming is an act that expresses a certain power or dominance.  This can be understood when the fact that the Indian’s choice of name has not become extinct; New Englanders are still referred to as “Yankees” even today.  Thoreau shows how the American Indian’s naming system was powerful and indicative of their sophistication. We can infer that Thoreau did not feel that it was necessary, at least in this respect, to help civilize the Indians; they were already civilized.
        The idea of permanence in the American Indian language is something that Thoreau scatters thickly throughout A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  The most prominent example occurs on the first page. Here is another example of the American Indian’s method of using the most fundamental characteristics of a subject in order to express it.  Thoreau writes

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.  It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks (Thoreau, A Week, 1).

In this passage Thoreau notes the Concord River was first called the “Musketaquid” or “Grass-Ground” river.  The American Indians obviously felt that the river’s most identifiable characteristic was its grassy shores, possibly in its relationship to the ground surrounding it.  Whatever the relation, the name “Musketaquid” (in translation, of course) evokes a more vibrant and lively picture of the river than the name “Concord”, which is fitting because it is expressing a “living” subject.  In this way, the Indian naming system is, again, not only more permanent, as Thoreau suggests, but also more appropriate.  This appropriateness was probably very appealing to Thoreau also.
        Robert Sayre, in Thoreau and the Indian pushes this idea of permanence in the Indian language further.  He writes that

The savagely poetic name Musketaquid has more permanence (the other, we might reflect, having been temporarily disproven by the battle in 1775), and ingeniously embodies the phrase used in Indian treaties, in Thoreau’s time and before, as an expression for the furthest imaginable future: “as long as the grass grows and the water runs” (Sayre 30).

which, he explains, is how “the words epitomized his ideal of an ‘out-of-doors’ sort of book, one which will come to life even when English is a dead language, because the words are for living things” (Sayre 30). 
        Thoreau’s own writing style and ideals of communication are very similar to those of the American Indian.  This explains in a large part why Thoreau was so interested in studying the American Indian culture.  We can see how his personal reasons were so closely aligned with his civic reasons.  Thoreau’s commitment to developing a clear, strong writing style that would retain permanence was motivated by his other civic projects; one being the attempt to revitalize the civilized man.
        The philosophy behind Thoreau’s writing style is similar to the philosophy behind the American Indian language system.  The most fundamental of them Thoreau explains himself when he writes “my thought is a part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought” (Fleck 63).  The language of the Indians, Thoreau finds, is based upon a similar process and nature:

The eloquent savage indulges in tropes & metaphors--he uses nature as a symbol…his metaphors are not far fetched-they are not concealed in the origin of language—but he translates entire phenomena into his speech.  He looks around him in the woods…to aid his expression.  His language though more flowery is less artificial (Fleck 63).

Thoreau expresses this idea simply as “what they [the Indians] have a word for, they have a thing for” (Fleck 63).  Both Thoreau and the American Indian use language that relies on concrete objects as a means to expression.
        Perhaps a more interesting and maybe even more illuminating way to examine the relationship between American Indian language and Thoreau’s writing style is by wading through studying a myth central to the American Indian culture.  In The Indians of Thoreau, Thoreau copies an Indian myth that he later includes in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  The myth is as follows

God was Ketan-gave man fair weather.  Powows caused sickness-Passaconaway made them believe that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man; that in winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dying one, and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one’ (Fleck 53).

In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau explains more about what this myth means and its historical referents:

In these parts dwelt the famous Sachem Passaconaway, who was seen by Gookin at Pawtucket, when he was about one hundred and twenty years old.”  He was reported a wise man and a pow-wow, and restrained his people from going to war with the English.  They believed “that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man; that in winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dry one, and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one, and many similar miracles” (Fleck 53).

This myth not only appealed to Thoreau’s interest in Indian religion and mythology; it seemed to provide a much deeper resonance for him.  Thoreau seemed to apply the essential ideas and philosophy of this myth to his own study and execution of language and communication.
        One can sift through Thoreau’s published writings and find many examples of Thoreau’s assimilation of the American Indian language style in his own writing.  His poetry provides a good example.  Thoreau’s poetry in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers seems to revive the more earthy and simple aspects of our nature.  We see this mostly in the sounds and images of his poetry.  The poems occur in A Week as interruptions to his prose and therefore have no titles.  They are constructed to seem as spontaneous bits of expression; as if taking the time to give them titles would separate them from the whole of the text and be superfluous.  One poem begins with a “sound”

Dong, sounds the brass in the east,
As if to a funeral feast,
But I like the sound best
Out of the fluttering west.

The steeple ringeth a knell,
But the fairies’ silvery bell
Is the voice of that gentle folk,
Or else the horizon that spoke.

Its metal is not of brass,
But air, and water, and glass,
And under a cloud it is swung,
And by the wind it is rung.
When the steeple tolleth the noon,
It soundeth not so soon,
Yet it rings a far earlier hour,
And the sun has not reached its tower (Thoreau, A Week, 42).

This poem relies on the sense of sound as most reflective of what it would like to express. The word “dong” alludes to the sound of a funeral bell, or a bell associated with religious tradition.  Thoreau writes the bell “sounds the brass in the east/As if to a funeral feast” (ll.2-3).  The words that continue in the line reflect the harsh, jarring sound of “dong”.  The word “brass” picks up the “s” sound in the “sounds” and heightens its own intensity with its own “s” sound.  The alliteration of the “f” sound in “funeral feast” draws attention to the sounds of these words also. 
        Thoreau uses sound as a metaphor to subvert the staid tradition of funeral practices.  The subject matter that the poem deals with is a funeral feast.  This might be one of the points at which he though civilized society needed to be revived.  Further support for this idea occurs in his Indian Journals.  We learn from Thoreau’s notes that a central element of the American Indian funeral was the wailing of women.  Fleck suggests that Thoreau had a special interest in this subject because he writes

Thoreau must have taken a keen interest in the exhaustive dictionary of the Huron language Gabriel Theodat’s Le Grande Voyage du Pays de Hurons (Paris, 1632).  However, it was observations on the manners and customs and, in particular, funeral customs of the Hurons that he extracted.

Fleck then continues with the extract

Envelope them in their finest robe—always attended by some one till carried out—Make a “feast of souls.”  They women & children only lament aloud—beginning & ending to the command of the master of ceremonies.  The men only wear a sad countenance with their head in their knees…The friends & relations & a great crowd collect—being notified—and carry the body to the cemetary “usually at a league or short distance from the town (Fleck 20-21).

Another passage that Thoreau extracted contains a similar theme

On the death of a principle chief, the village resounds from one end to the other with the loud lamentations of the women, among whom those who sit by the corpse distinguish themselves by the shrillness of their cries and their frantic expression of their sorrow.  The scene of mourning over the dead body continues by day & by night until it is interred, the mourners being relieved from time to time by other women.”  The poor have fewer mourners, perhaps only their relatives.  Women treated with as much respect as men—particularly the wives of great warriors (Fleck 21).

Thoreau began compiling these notes in 1847, at the same time he was drafting A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  It is therefore safe to suggest that this poem may have been written partially in response to these customs.  Even if this is not true, we see that Thoreau is responding in this poem to the solemnity and quietness of the funeral practices of his culture.  By manipulating sound in his poem to be harsh and jarring he transforms the funeral feast into something with more liveliness.  The sounds are real; they are not artificial and pleasing to the poem-a point Thoreau seems to be preoccupied with getting across.  It seems as though Thoreau is trying to remind the reader of the depth and strength of the human response to mortality, a response that is expressed without restraint in American Indian funeral customs.
        Thoreau’s prose also reflects an assimilation of American Indian communicative style, perhaps in a slightly different way than his poetry.  One passage demonstrates this assimilation well

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement.  By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature.  He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers.  The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles (Thoreau, A Week, 46).

The use of metaphor in this passage is typical of Thoreau’s concrete style.  His metaphors become memorable and attain permanence because they are full of concrete images that resound in the reader’s mind.  Both Thoreau and the American Indian use concrete images as a means to create language that is permanent.  Thoreau compares the Indian’s perceptions to a “starry” quality, which is rarely found in “saloons” of 19^th-century American society.  The metaphor of the star is extended further as he characterizes the Indian genius by the “dim,” “faint,” light of stars.  Thoreau finds the light of stars satisfying because it is “constant” and eternal.  We can see here how Thoreau has successfully conjured a strong image of the Indian genius by comparing it to the light of a star. He returns to this image throughout A Week; driving home the idea that the American Indian has a genius that needs to be recovered. 

Thoreau’s Meetings With American Indians

Robert Sayre believes that “in the beginning Thoreau’s conception of the Indian was a literary construct, derived from the Romantic conceptions of savagism and primitivism prevalent in his time,” but that “through contact with actual Indians, notably Joseph Aitteon and Joe Polis on his second and third trips to Maine…he began to see Indians as individuals, even though his more conventional early notions were never altogether thrown off” (Wagenknecht 137-138).  Thoreau saved some of his credibility and avoided being labeled as an overly Romantic idealist by writing about his actual meetings with American Indians.
        In the essay “Ktaadn,” Thoreau recounts a trip that he and his cousin took to Maine to climb Mount Ktaadn.  They decided to secure Indian guides to bring them to the top of the mountain since climbing it was rarely successful and dangerous without maps.  Thoreau’s Indian guides were not the able, “noble” savages.  These Indians were particularly interested in hunting and rum.  Thoreau gives a clear picture of them

A stalwart, but dull and greasy-looking fellow, who told us, in his sluggish ways, in answer to our questions, as if it were the first serious business he had to do that day, that there were Indians going ‘up river,’—he and one other—to-day, before noon (Thoreau, “Ktaadn”, 598).

Thoreau characterizes them as lazy; saying that they acted like answering his questions was “the first serious business” they may have had. 
        Thoreau also hints that these men were drunkards.  Thoreau knew that the Indians had mountain god on top of Ktaadn named Pomola that was angered whenever anyone climbed to the tops of Ktaadn.  Thoreau explains that

When I asked if he [Louis] thought Pomola would let us go up, he answered that we must plant one bottle of rum on the top; he had planted a good many; and when he looked again, the rum was all gone (Thoreau, “Ktaadn,” 598).

Thoreau not only paints these men as less-than-noble drunkards, but also, in a moment of self-parody, paints himself as a fool.  These Indians could care less about their own god, Pomola, while Thoreau obviously reveres this god seriously.  It seems as though Thoreau realizes that he may have come to Maine and to these Indians with too many idealistic notions. 

And who was the other? Louis Neptune, who lives in the next house.  Well, let us go over and see Louis together.  The same doggish reception, and Louis makes his appearance-a samll, wiry man, puckered and wrinkled face, yet he seemed the chief man of the two (Thoreau 10).

In this passage we see how Thoreau takes a bored tone.  He leaves out words such as “we get” to introduce “the same doggish reception” properly.  It is almost as if Thoreau took this passage straight from his notebook and did not feel its worth deemed it necessary to develop its style.  These lines do not reveal a starry-eyed Thoreau, but a Thoreau that is observing the reality of a precarious situation. 
        This interaction between Thoreau and the Maine Indians show more than Thoreau’s disappointment and self-parody.  In this meeting, Thoreau is able to meet with the Indians on an equal level through commerce.  Thoreau hires these men as his guides, and in doing so, finds that they are shrewd businessmen, clamoring for rum.  Their business transaction forces them to meet at an equal level: Thoreau must leave his idealistic notions aside for he is not buying anything more than their leadership. Thoreau’s discussion of commerce in the chapter “Tuesday” shows that Thoreau may see commerce as a point of contact at which there is honesty and vibrancy that may redeem the relationship between the American Indian and the Anglo-American.
        In “Tuesday,” nature is first characterized as being antagonistic.  The chapter begins “Long before daylight we ranged abroad, hatchet in hand in search of fuel, and made the yet slumbering and dreaming wood resound with our blows” (Thoreau, A Week, 146).  At this point of contact between man (Thoreau) and nature, nature and man come together in the sharp blow of man’s hatchet.  Man is conducting his first order of business at this moment.  In this scene, nature is at rest; the wood is “dreaming,” the night is “loitering,” and the birds are “asleep upon their roosts”.  Thoreau is picturing himself in an antagonistic stance with nature because it is night and he is conducting his business of the day early.
        In the same chapter, while Thoreau is resting at the top of a mountain after a climb, he comes across a newspaper that was previously used to wrap a sandwich.  He writes that the “business” section of the paper is the “best, the most useful, natural, and respectable” (Thoreau, A Week, 151).  He writes that, in contrast, the opinions and sentiments of the newspaper are “little considered, so shallow and flimsy, that (he) thought the very texture of the paper must be weaker in that part and tear more easily” (Thoreau, A Week, 151).  Here, again, we have nature and man at a point of contact in the form of the material of the newspaper and words written by man on it.  At this point of contact, nature and man blend best in discussions of commerce. Thoreau writes; “commerce is really as interesting as nature.  The very names of the commodities were poetic, and as suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing poem,-Lumber, Cotton, Sugar, Hides, Guano, Logwood” (Thoreau, A Week, 151).  Thoreau has obviously found an aspect of American culture in which he finds a kernel of integrity.  The names of the commodities that he chooses, interestingly, have different ethnic connotations.  The words “Guano” and “Cotton” come from two different ethnic regions, but come together, for Thoreau, “poetically” when used in the language of commerce.  It seems as though Thoreau finds business an act of exchange between people that has the most redemptive quality.  Although his meetings with the Maine Indians were anything but “poetic,” Thoreau still sees commerce as the most honest way that people from different ethnic backgrounds can deal with each other.

Thoreau’s goals in studying the American Indian can be attributed to many things, all of which are probably true.  He may have wanted to study them to restore American culture, he may have wanted to study them to help improve his writing style.   It is obvious that he saw in the American Indian culture truths that were slowly being obliterated before his eyes, prompting him to keep many journals of writings about their culture, giving them permanence.  Ultimately, Thoreau’s relationship with the American Indian culture proved to be more than just a self-directed study.  He was able to work through his more Romantic and idealistic nature to find truths about American Indian culture that were worth preserving.