CONCORD SHELL HEAP

Thoreau’s “Clamshell Bank,” just upstream from the “boat place” at which he habitually boarded his river craft, is gone now, having been in some unknown year bulldozed and built over during an expansion of the Emerson Hospital. This had been the site of a summer village dating to the middle Holocene, and had been the only large inland shell midden we found in New England. Who cares what colored people had been up to? Who cares about what has happened and been forgotten? Who cares for what vanished? Who’s sorry? Because, capitalism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

2,500 BCE

circa 2,500 BCE: Early pottery in the Americas.

Between 8 millennia and 1 millennium ago the Middle Archaic to Middle Woodland Hunters utilized the confluence of the Concord rivers. Clamshell Bank (Concord Shell Heap), thoughtlessly destroyed during the construction of an Emerson Hospital parking lot, was one of their seasonal camps, of which at various times there were more than 16 in the vicinity of brooks, rivers, and ponds. The intrusive humans collected fresh- water clams, made tools, cut with axes, hunted game with spears, ground food with stone pestles, cooked with soapstone pots, and presumably stored food in turtle shells. They journeyed on the rivers to obtain salt-water clams from the coast.

ONE OF THE PRIMARY FUNCTIONS OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO HELP US CONSTRAIN STORYTELLING. IF, FOR INSTANCE, A POLITICIAN PRESENTS HIMSELF AS THE MESSIAH, WE HISTORIANS CAN PULL UP ONE OR ANOTHER OF THE MANY THOUSANDS OF HISTORIES OF JESUS CHRIST AND GO “NO, HERE’S A MESSIAH, AND YOU WILL NOTE THAT ON THIS LIST OF THE VARIOUS MESSIAHS THAT WE HAVE PLACED ON RECORD, THE NAME OF JESUS IS PRECEDED BY THE NAMES OF 5 OTHER IDENTIFIED MESSIAH CLAIMANTS AND HAS BEEN SUCCEEDED TO DATE BY THE NAMES OF MULTIPLE OTHER IDENTIFIED AND RECORDED MESSIAH CLAIMANTS.” HISTORY IS NOT PRIMARILY ABOUT RECORDING WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, BECAUSE PRIMARILY IS ABOUT SETTING NEEDED LIMITS ON OUR CREDULOUS STORYTELLING. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1,000 CE

Between 8 millennia and 1 millennium ago the Middle Archaic to Middle Woodland Hunters had utilized the confluence of the Concord rivers. Clamshell Bank (Concord Shell Heap), thoughtlessly destroyed during the construction of an Emerson Hospital parking lot, had been one of their seasonal camps, of which at various times there were more than 16 in the vicinity of brooks, rivers, and ponds. The intrusive humans collected fresh-water clams, made tools, cut with axes, hunted game with spears, ground food with stone pestles, cooked with soapstone pots, and presumably stored food in turtle shells. They journeyed the rivers to obtain salt-water clams from the coast. Then between a millennium ago and 350 years ago the Late Woodland people came into this vicinity. They migrated annually from summer camps along the coast to winter camps perhaps in Marlborough. They established 6 seasonal farming camp areas from Concord’s Bedford Street and Monument Street to the Country Club and Warner Pond. They made brush weirs to catch fish in brooks. They planted corn, beans, and melons in Concord’s well-drained, fertile agricultural soils. Wild rice flourished in the wet meadows, cranberries flourished in the bogs, and nuts ripened in the woods in autumn. These occupants wore stone pendants, ground food with pestles, collected firewood, cooked with clay pots, cultivated crops with pointed sticks and hoes, cut trees, made dug-out canoes, and shot at game with bows and arrows. When about a dozen families of white intrusives would eventually arrive, Nashawtuc Hill would still have a tiny community of Algonquian people, Musketaquid, left over from the latest greatest 1612 outbreak of imported disease. There would still be a fish weir on Mill Brook in Concord Center. These whites would soon begin to smelt bog iron at the Damon Mill site.

There appears to have been during this period some population shifting from southwestward, possibly caused by hostile conflict with Iroquoians. During this Late Woodland period there was widespread adoption of horticulture in southern New England. The Wampanoag who were encountered by the European intrusives of HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” the 16th and early 17th centuries were in this phase of their culture.

NEW ENGLAND

During the Late Prehistoric tradition, several cultures arose in different parts of Ohio. People lived in large villages surrounded by a stockade wall. Sometimes they built their villages on a plateau overlooking a river. They grew different plants in their gardens. Maize and beans became the most important foods (squash, another important plant, had been being grown since the Late Archaic).

In what is now North Carolina, people of the Mississippian culture in what we describe as the Piedmont region, were continuing to construct earthwork mounds or add onto existing ones. In the five to seven centuries preceding the initial European contacts, this Mississippian culture would produce large, complex cities and maintain farflung regional trading networks.

YOU WILL UNDERSTAND MY GREEN-LETTER COMMENTARIES SUCH AS THIS ONE, AS SOON AS YOU GRASP THAT YOU ARE DEALING HERE WITH A COMMITTED BERGSONIAN. IN 1922 IN PARIS, WHEN ALBERT EINSTEIN AND HENRI-LOUIS BERGSON FACED OFF OVER THE NATURE OF TIME, EINSTEIN CONSIDERED BERGSON’S CONCEPTION OF TIME TO HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” BE UNSCIENTIFIC, AMOUNTING TO A MERE PIECE OF SUBJECTIVITY, WHEREAS BERGSON CONSIDERED EINSTEIN’S CONCEPTION OF TIME TO BE UNSCIENTIFIC, AMOUNTING TO A MERE PIECE OF PRESUMPTUOUS ILL-CONSIDERED METAPHYSICS. ILYA PRIGOGINE WOULD POINT OUT THAT “IT IS TRUE THAT BERGSON HAD NOT UNDERSTOOD EINSTEIN. BUT IT IS ALSO TRUE THAT EINSTEIN HAD NOT UNDERSTOOD BERGSON. BERGSON WAS FASCINATED BY THE ROLE OF CREATIVITY, OF NOVELTY IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE. BUT EINSTEIN DID NOT WANT ANY DIRECTED TIME. HE REPEATED OFTEN THAT TIME, MORE PRECISELY THE ARROW OF TIME, IS AN ‘ILLUSION.’ SO, THESE IDEOLOGIES SEEM TO BE IRRECONCILABLE.” AS LONG AS YOU ARE TRAPPED IN THE ILL-CONSIDERED EINSTEINIAN MINDSET, TRAPPED BY THE PRESUMPTUOUS ILL-CONSIDERED METAPHYSICS OF SPURIOUS METAPHORS THAT HAD TRAPPED HIS GREAT MIND — YOU WILL HAVE NO CLUE WHATEVER WHAT I AM RANTING AT YOU ABOUT. RATHER THAN BEING OF THE OPINION OF BOETHIUS, WHO WROTE IN 523AD THAT GOD, BEING ETERNAL, MUST BE “OUTSIDE” TIME AND ABLE TO VIEW THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE AS INDIFFERENTLY AND UNCHANGINGLY PRESENT IN HIS ONE WHOLE CREATION, I AM OF THE OPINION OF MAIMONIDES, WHO WROTE IN THE 12TH CENTURY THAT ACCORDING TO THE TALMUD FREE WILL IS GRANTED TO EVERY PERSON BY GOD SO THAT WE MAY BE JUDGED ACCORDING TO OUR ACTIONS. AS GERSONIDES POINTED OUT IN THE 14TH CENTURY, THERE ARE DECIDED LIMITS TO FOREKNOWLEDGE, AS GOD CANNOT KNOW IN ADVANCE WHICH CHOICE A FREE INDIVIDUAL, IN HIS OR HER FREEDOM, WILL MAKE: “I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH, BLESSING AND CURSE: THEREFORE CHOOSE LIFE.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1837

October 29, Sunday: Henry Thoreau to his journal:

DUCKS AT GOOSE POND

Oct. 29. Two ducks, of the summer or wood species, which were merrily dabbling in their favorite basin, struck up a retreat on my approach, and seemed disposed to take French leave, paddling off with swan-like majesty. They are first-rate swimmers, beating me at a round pace, and –what was to me a new trait in the duck character – dove every minute or two and swam several feet under water, in order to escape our attention. Just before immersion they seemed to give each other a significant nod, and then, as if by a common understanding, ’t was heels up and head down in the shaking of a duck’s wing. When they reappeared, it was amusing to observe with what a self-satisfied, darn-it-how-he-nicks-’em air they paddled off to repeat the experiment.

THE ARROWHEAD

A curious incident happened some four or six weeks ago which I think it worth the while to record. John and I had been searching for Indian relics, and been successful enough to find two arrowheads and a pestle, when, of a Sunday evening, with our heads full of the past and its remains, we strolled to the mouth of Swamp Bridge Brook. As we neared the brow of the hill forming the bank of the river, inspired by my theme, I broke forth into an extravagant eulogy on those savage times, using most violent gesticulations by way of illustration. “There on Nawshawtuct,” said I, “was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe, and yonder, on Clamshell Hill, their feasting ground. This was, no doubt, a favorite haunt; here on this brow was an eligible lookout post. How often have they stood on this very spot, at this very hour, when the sun was sinking behind yonder woods and gilding with his last rays the waters of the Musketaquid, and pondered the day’s success and the morrow’s prospects, or communed with the spirit of their fathers gone before them to the land of shades! “Here,” I exclaimed, “stood Tahatawan; and there” (to complete the period) “is Tahatawan’s arrowhead.” We instantly proceeded to sit down on the spot I had pointed to, and I, to carry out the joke, to lay bare an ordinary stone which my whim had selected, when lo! the first I laid hands on, the grubbing stone that was to be, proved a most perfect arrowhead, as sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator ! ! !

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 29th of 10 M / Our Morning Meeting was silent & solid — In the Afternoon we had unexpectedly the Company of Abijah Johnson & his companion Moses Greene from Ware N Hampshire who we had not heard were out on religious service — Abijah had a short but good little testimony, & his service was acceptable — They took tea at Henry Goulds, & after tea I went up to Henrys & set a while with them - having for some Years been acquainted with Abijah RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

I AM A NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHER, NOT A POSITIVE ONE: PHILOSOPHY NOT BEING ANY SORT OF SCIENCE, I WOULD HOLD THAT ANY PHILOSOPHICAL ASSERTION THAT TRAVELS UNDER THE PRETENSE THAT IT IS FACTUAL AND ACTUAL MUST BE, TO THE CONTRARY, NECESSARILY SPURIOUS AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. A GOOD EXAMPLE IS HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” THE OFT-HEARD SUPPOSITION “GOD KNOWS THE FUTURE.” AS A NEGATIVIST I NEGATE ANY AND ALL SUCH ASSERTIONS. THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE ME TO REPLACE THESE PSEUDOFACTUAL PHILOSOPHICAL ASSERTIONS WITH MY OWN COUNTERCLAIMS, SUCH AS A POSITIVE ASSERTION THAT IN ORDER TO ALLOW FOR FREE WILL AND FREEDOM OF DECISION “GOD CANNOT KNOW THE FUTURE.” I DO NOT INTEND TO TAKE YOUR GRITTY, GRIMY TEDDY BEAR AWAY FROM YOU AND PRESENT YOU WITH A CUTE CUDDLY PANDA. I WILL TAKE AWAY YOUR TEDDY LEAVING YOU EMPTY-ARMED. I HAVE SAID THAT RATHER THAN BEING OF THE OPINION OF BOETHIUS, WHO WROTE IN 523AD THAT GOD, BEING ETERNAL, MUST BE “OUTSIDE” TIME AND ABLE TO VIEW THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE AS INDIFFERENTLY AND UNCHANGINGLY PRESENT IN HIS ONE WHOLE CREATION, I AM INCLINED TO THE OPINION OF MAIMONIDES, WHO WROTE IN THE 12TH CENTURY THAT ACCORDING TO THE TALMUD FREE WILL IS GRANTED TO EVERY PERSON BY GOD SO THAT WE MAY BE JUDGED ACCORDING TO OUR ACTIONS. AS GERSONIDES POINTED OUT IN THE 14TH CENTURY, THERE ARE DECIDED LIMITS TO FOREKNOWLEDGE, AS GOD CANNOT KNOW IN ADVANCE WHICH CHOICE A FREE INDIVIDUAL, IN HIS OR HER FREEDOM, WILL MAKE: “I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH, BLESSING AND CURSE: THEREFORE CHOOSE LIFE.” HOWEVER, I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID THAT. ACTUALLY I HAVE NO PREFERENCE FOR THE PSEUDOPHILOSOPHICAL RANTINGS OF MAIMONIDES AND GERSONIDES OVER THE PSEUDOPHILOSOPHICAL RANTINGS OF BOETHIUS. I AM ENTIRELY NEGATIVE. THERE IS NOT A POSITIVE BONE IN MY BODY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1841

December 15, Wednesday: In protest of the racist Dorr constitution, Frederick Douglass lectured at the Regional Anti- Slavery Convention in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Charles Emerson was born at Castleton on Staten Island, New York to Judge William Emerson and Susan Woodward Haven Emerson (daughter of John and Ann Haven of Portsmouth, New Hampshire).

15. A mild summer sun shines over forest and lake. The earth looks as fair this morning as the Valhalla of the gods. Indeed our spirits never go beyond nature. In the woods there is an inexpressible happiness. Their mirth is but just repressed. In winter, when there is but one green leaf for many rods, what warm content is in them! They are not rude, but tender, even in the severest cold. Their nakedness is their defense. All their sounds and sights are elixir to my spirit. They possess a divine health. God is not more well. Every sound is inspiriting and fraught with the same mysterious assurance, from the creaking of the boughs in January to the soft sough of the wind in July. How much of my well-being, think you, depends on the condition of my lungs and stomach, - such cheap pieces of Nature as they, which, indeed, she is every day reproducing with prodigality. Is the arrow indeed fatal which rankles in the breast of the bird on the bough, in whose eye all this fair landscape is reflected, and whose voice still echoes through the wood. The trees have come down to the bank to see the river go by. This old, familiar river is renewed each instant; only the channel is the same.' The water which so calmly reflects the fleeting clouds and the primeval trees I have never seen before. It may have washed some distant shore, or framed a glacier or iceberg at the north, when I last stood here. Seen through a mild atmosphere, the works of the husbandman, his plowing and reaping, have a beauty to the beholder which the laborer never sees. I seem to see somewhat more of my own kith and kin in the lichens on the rocks than in any books. It does seem as if mine were a peculiarly wild nature, which so yearns toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in me but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I have to fall back on to this ground. This is my argument in reserve for all cases. My love is invulnerable. Meet me on that ground, and you will find me strong. When I am condemned, and condemn myself utterly, I think straightway, “But I rely on my love for some things.” Therein I am whole and entire. Therein I am God-propped. When I see the smoke curling up through the woods from some farmhouse invisible, it is more suggestive of HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” the poetry of rural and domestic life than a nearer inspection can be. Up goes the smoke as quietly as the dew exhales in vapor from these pine leaves and oaks; as busy, disposing itself in circles and in wreaths, as the housewife on the hearth below. It is cotemporary with a piece of human biography, and waves as a feather in some man’s cap. Under that rod of sky there is some plot a-brewing, some ingenuity has planted itself, and we shall see what it will do. It tattles of more things than the boiling of the pot. It is but one of man's breaths. All that is interesting in history or fiction is transpiring beneath that cloud. The subject of all life and death, of happiness and grief, goes thereunder. When the traveller in the forest, attaining to some eminence, descries a column of smoke in the distance, it is a very gentle hint to him of the presence of man. It seems as if it would establish friendly relations between them without more ado.

IT IS A PROBLEM, FOR A “PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY” SUCH AS MYSELF (AUSTIN MEREDITH), THAT PEOPLE WHO HAVE HEARD THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING AS “HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY” –PEOPLE WHO MAY EVEN HAVE GONE TO THE LENGTHS OF CONSULTING ONE OR ANOTHER “HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY” SUCH AS THAT CREATED BY UEBERWEG IN THE 19TH CENTURY– HAVE NEVER SO MUCH AS CONTEMPLATED THAT THERE MIGHT BE SUCH A THING AS ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY BASED ON DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURE OF TIME. THE GIST OF MY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, BASED ON MY OWN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF TIME, IS AS FOLLOWS: OUR SO- CALLED HISTORIANS ARE DOING IT EXACTLY WRONG. IN THEIR FABRICATIONS ABOUT HISTORY, THEY ARE CHRONIC ANTICIPATORS. THEY PERPETUALLY OFFER TO THEIR UNSUSPECTING AUDIENCES THAT ACCOUNTS THEY HAVE PATCHED TOGETHER IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS ILLUMINATE OUR PRESENT CONDITION. THEIR CONSTRUCTED PASTS BECOME OUR PREAMBLE FOR OUR PRESENT AGENDAS. THESE ACADEMIC PSEUDO-HISTORIANS WHO ENGAGE IN THIS ANTICIPATION AGENDA ARE WELL PAID BUT THEY OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. ANY HISTORY CONSTRUCTED IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS CAN AMOUNT TO NOTHING MORE THAN SPURIOUS MAKE-MAKE-BELIEVE, SPECIAL PLEADING. THE WARNING OF THE HIPPIE WAS “NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER 30!” THE WARNING I PROFFER IS: “DON’T CREDIT ANY HISTORY THAT IS CREDIBLE. WHEN ANY OF THIS BEGINS TO MAKE ANY SENSE, DOUBLE-BEWARE!” TO BE SPECIFIC, THIS KOUROO DATABASE IS JUST CHOCK-FULL OF “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGIES. IF ANY OF THESE PROFFERED HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGIES ARE MORE THAN MERELY ACCURATE, IF ANY OF THEM OVER AND ABOVE THEIR ACCURACY BEGIN TO APPEAR TO YOU TO PROVIDE ANY PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATIONS OF OUR PRESENT CONDITION, THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH TO MAKE YOUR SUSPICION- ANTENNAE BEGIN TO VIBRATE AND HUM. BIGTIME! I AM NOT CREATING THESE ACCURATE CHRONOLOGIES TO HELP YOU GROK YOUR PRESENT CONDITION. I AM CREATING THESE ACCURATE CHRONOLOGIES TO HELP YOU NON-GROK YOUR PRESENT CONDITION. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1844

July 15, Monday: Isaac Hecker wrote to the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson.

Judge William Emerson wrote to his brother Waldo, “Let me … thank you for sending me Dr. prescription for Charles. Thus far we have not been obliged to use it….”

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

December 22, Saturday: Frederick Douglass lectured again in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before the Ladies Anti- Slavery Society.

Judge William Emerson wrote to his brother Waldo expressing great joy about his 3-year-old son Charles. “Dear Waldo, Charley celebrated his 3d birthday last Sunday, has had the cough since, & is again the picture of health. The rest of us are well as usual.”

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1850

January 27, Sunday: A glimpse of Charles Emerson’s childhood on Staten Island can be obtained in a letter he wrote to 10-year-old cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson at the age of 8: “I found a little pine boat without rudder or masts, it sailes pretty well except turning over once in a while.” In that letter he also noted, “...on the bank of the river was a wheel with buckets on it which was drawn by a cow.”

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

July 16, Tuesday: In a watercolor showing scenes connected to the death of Prince Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge (a paternal uncle of Queen Victoria), a view of the funeral procession appears. A large crowd lines the route and buildings of the municipality of Kew are in the background:

July 16th 1850 I have not yet been able to collect half a thimble full of the pollen of the pine – on Walden, abundant as it was last summer. There is in our yard a little pitch pine 4 or 5 years old & not much more than a foot high with small cones on it but no male flowers & yet I do not know of another pitch pine tree within half a mile. Many men walk by day few walk by night. It is a very different season. Instead of the sun there are the moon & stars–instead of the wood thrush there is the whippoorwill – instead of butter flies fire flies winged sparks of fire–for every thing has wings set to it at last – instead of singing birds the croaking of frogs & the intenser dream of crickets– The potatoes stand up straight – the corn grows – the bushes loom – & in a moon-light night the shadows of rocks – & trees & bushes & hills – are are more conspicuous than the objects themselves. The “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” slightest inequalities in the ground are revealed by the shadows–what the feet find comparatively smooth appears rough & diversified to the eye. The smallest recesses in the rocks are dim & cavernous – the ferns in the wood appear to be of tropical size – the pools become as full of light as the sky. The roads are heavy & dark. Nature slumbers The rocks retain the warmth of the sun which they have absorbed all night– The outlines of the trees between {Three-fifths page missing} that that part which extends without interruption from Nauset Har. to Race should be called once for all Cape Cod Beach – and have so named it. Steering for fabulous ports or just arriving from them – whose very names are a mysterious music to our ears – Fayal & Babelmandel where the sky shuts down. & Chagres to Porto Praya Bound to the famous Bay of San Francisco & the Golden streams of Sacramento & San Joaquin. To Feather River & the american Fork where Sutter’s fort presides, looms up, Bound to California – to Colchis & the Golden Fleece.{Three-fifths page missing}

After July 16: The names of those who bought these fields of the Red men the wild men of the woods– are Buttrick Davis Barrett Bulkley &c &c v Hist. Here and there still you will find a man with Indian blood in his veins. An eccentric farmer descended from an Indian Chief– Or you will see a solitary pure blooded Indian looking as wild as ever among the pines–one of the last of the massachusett’s tribes stepping into a railroad car with his gun & pappoose Still here and there an Indian squaw with her dog – her only companion – lives in some lone house – insulted by school children – making baskets & picking berries her employment You will meet her on the highway – with few children or none – with melancholy face – history destiny – stepping after her race – who had stayed to tuck them up in their long sleep. For whom berries condescend to grow. I have not seen one on the Musketaquid for many a year And some who came up in their canoes and camped on its banks a dozen years ago had to ask me where it came from. A lone Indian woman without children – acompanied by her dog – weaving the shroud of her race – performing the last services for her departed race. Not yet absorbed into the elements again– A daughter of the soil – one of the nobility of the land – the white man an imported weed burdock & mullein which displace the ground nut. {One-fourth page missing} enough – it possesses but half the grandeur of Cape Cod & The imagination is not contented with its southern aspect The only other beaches of great length on our coast of which I have heard sailors speak – are those of Barnegat on the Jersey shore – & Currituck in Virginia & N. Carolina – but these like the last are low & narrow sand bars lying off the coast separated from the mainland by lagoons. Cape Cod is as yet a barrier to the ocean & not recently created by it. I have seen bars of castile soap rolled into perfect cylinders & spirally striped like a barbers pole. In a cargo of rags washed ashore I have noticed that every old pocket & bag like recess was filled to bursting with sand by the action of the waves rolling them on the beach – and the pockets in the {One-fourth page missing} the one hand and this little sea of ale on the other preserving their separate characters. Man too seemed to me like a half emptied bottle of pale ale yet stoppled tight for a while & drifting about in the sea of circumstances while the stopper held–erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves or spilld among the sands of the shore. That it had held its own so long & its individuality did not evaporate in that great presence It was still ale ale with smack of spruce and Juniper – in spite of barnacles & countless ocean waves man would not be man through such ordeal. As a proof that oysters do not move I have been told by a Long Island oysterman that they are found in large clusters surrounding the parent oyster in the position in which they must have grown – the young being several years old.

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, THAT A PARTICULAR INFANT WOULD INVENT THE SEWING MACHINE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE HISTORIAN IS SETTING CHRONOLOGY TO “SHUFFLE,” WHICH IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE OPTION BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD SUCH SHUFFLE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” THERE IS NO SUCH “BIRD’S EYE VIEW” AS THIS IN THE REAL WORLD, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD NO REAL BIRD HAS EVER GLIMPSED AN ACTUAL HISTORICAL SEQUENCE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1852

July 3, Saturday: Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Cyrus Stow, a Fair Haven Hill woodlot near the deep cut on the railroad line.

July 3: The yellow lily –Lilium Canadense is out rising above the meadow grass sometimes one sometimes 2. (From Deep Cut over Fair Haven back by Potters path 5 Pm.–) Young woodchucks sitting in their holes allow me to come quite near– Clover is mostly dried up. The chimaphila umbellata winter-green –must have been in blossom some time. The back side of its petals “cream colored tinged with purple” which is turned toward the beholder while the face is toward the earth –is the handsomest It is a very pretty little chandelier of a flower fit to adorn the forest floor. Its buds are nearly as handsome. (They appear long in unfolding) Polygonum persicaria just beginning. The pickers have quite thinned the crop of early blue berries where Stow cut off winter before last. When the woods on some hill side are cut off the vaccinium Pennsylvanicum springs up –or grows more luxuriantly being exposed to light & air –& by the 2nd year its stems are weighed to the ground with clusters of blue berries covered with bloom & much larger than they commonly grow –also with a livelier taste than usual as if remembering some primitive Mt side given up to them anciently. Such places supply the villagers with the earliest berries for two or three years or until the rising wood overgrows them and they withdraw into the bosom of nature again. They flourish during the few years between one forest’s fall and another’s rise. Before you had prepared your mind or made up your mouth for berries –thinking only of crude green ones –earlier by 10 days than you had expected some child of the woods is at your door with ripe blue berries –for didnt you know that Mr. Stow cut off his woodlot winter before last? It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good –& thus it happens that when the owner lays bare & deforms a hill side and alone appears to reap any advantage from it by a crop of wood –all the villagers and the inhabitants of distant cities obtain some compensation in the crop of berries that it yields– They glean after the wood chopper –not faggots but full baskets of blue-berries– I am surprised to see how suddenly when the sun & air & rain are let in these bushes which in the shade of the forest scarcely yielded the walker a berry –will suddenly be weighed down with fruit. Let alone your garden –cease your cultivation –& in how short a time will blue berries & huckleberries grow there! I have not noticed a violet for some time Bathed beneath Fair Haven. How much food the muskrats have at hand– They may well be numerous. At this place the bottom in shallow water at a little distance from the shore is thickly covered with clams –half buried and on their ends –generally a little aslant –sometimes there are a dozen or more side by side within a square foot –and that over a space 20 rods long and 1 wide– (I know not how much farther they reach into the river) they would average 3 to a square foot. which would give 16,335 clams to 20 rods of shore– (on one side of the river) and I suspect that there are many more. No wonder that muskrats multiply –& that the shores are covered with their shells left by the muskrats– In bathing here I can hardly step without treading on them –some times half a dozen at once –and often I cut my feet pretty severely on their shells– They are partly covered with mud & the short weeds at the bottom –& they are of the same color themselves –but stooping down over them when the roil has subsided I can see them now (at 5 1/2 Pm) with their mouths? open –an inch long & a quarter of an inch wide –with a waving fringe about it –& another smaller opening close to it without any fringe –through both of which I see distinctly into the white interior of the fish. When I touch one he instantly closes his shell & if taken out quickly spurts water like a saltwater clam. Evidently taking in their food & straining it with that waving motion of the ciliae– There they lie both under the pads and in the sun. Ceanothus Americanus New Jersey tea The last month has been very breezy & on the whole a cold one– I remember rippling leaves – showing their light undersides. Rubus strigosus Wild red Raspberry– I can hardly find a geranium now –The common carrot by the roadside Daucus carota –is in some respects an interesting plant –for its umbel as Big. says is shaped like a birds nest –& its large pinnatifid involucre –interlacing by its fine segments resembles a fanciful ladies-work-basket. Asclepias purpurascens. I find a Potamogeton to day over the clams which appears to correspond to the P. pulcher– I am not sure that it is what I have called the natans –but this cannot be the HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” natans fore the leaves are not all long petioled –but the lower ones waved & quite pellucid.

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1853

December 3, Saturday: Waldo Emerson wrote to the Reverend Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham about his mother Ruth Haskins Emerson:

My mother was born in Boston, 9 November 1768, & had therefore completed 85 years, a week before her death. Her father Captain John Haskins whose distillery on Harrison Avenue was pulled down not many years ago was an industrious thriving man with a family of thirteen living children. He was an Episcopalian & up to the time of the Revolution a tory. My mother was bred in the English church, & always retained an affection for the Book of Common Prayer. She married in 1796 and all her subsequent family connexions were in the Congregational Church[.] At the time of her marriage her husband was settled in Harvard, Masstts. In [1799] they removed to Boston on his installation at First Church. He died in 1812 and left her with six children & without property. She kept her family together & at once adopted the only means open to her by receiving boarders into her house & by the assistance of some excellent friends, she carried four of her five sons through Harvard College. The family was never broken up until 1826, when on the death of Dr Ripleys daughter (my fathers half-sister) she accepted the Doctor’s earnest invitation to make her home at his house. She remained there until my marriage in 1830, when she came to live with me. After my housekeeping was broken up in 1832, and on my return from Europe in 1833, she went with me to Concord, & we became boarders in Doctor Ripley’s family, until I bought a house & took her home with me in 1835. This was her permanent home until her death. I hardly know what to add to these few dates. I have been in the habit of esteeming her manners & character the fruit of a past age. She was born a subject of King George, had lived through the whole existence of the Republic, remembered & described with interesting details the appearance of Washington at the Assemblies in Boston after the war, when every lady wore his name on her scarf; & had derived from that period her punctilious courtesy extended to every person, and continued to the last hour of her life. Her children as they grew up had abundant reason to thank her prudence which secured to them an education which in the circumstances was the most judicious provision that could be made for them. I remember being struck with the comment of a lady who said in my family when some debate arose about my Mother’s thrift in her time, the lady said, “Ah, but she secured the essentials. She got the children educated.”

December 3. Up river by boat to Clamshell Hill. Saw two tree sparrows [American Tree Sparrow Spizella arborea] on Monroe’s larch by the waterside. Larger than chip-birds, with more bay above and a distinct white bar on wings, not to mention bright-chestnut crown and obscure spot on breast; all beneath pale-ash. They were busily and very adroitly picking the seeds out of the larch cones. It would take man’s clumsy fingers a good while to get at one, and then only by breaking HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” off the scales, but they picked them out as rapidly as if they were insects on the outside of the cone, uttering from time to time a faint, tinkling chip. I see that muskrats have next only erected cabins, but, since the river rose, have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank, pushing the sand behind them into the water. So they dig these now as places of retreat merely, or for the same purpose as the cabins, apparently. One I explored this afternoon was formed in a low shore (Hubbard’s Bathing-Place), at a spot where there were no weeds to make a cabin of, and was apparently never completed, perhaps because the shore was too low. The ranunculus is still a fresh bright green at the bottom of the river. It is the evergreen of the river, and indeed resembles the common running evergreen (Lycopodium, I think it is called). I see along the sides of the river, two to four inches above the surface but all at one level, clear, drop-shaped crystals of ice, either held up by some twig or hanging by a dead vine of climbing mikania. They are the remains of a thin sheet of ice, which melted as the river went down, and in drops formed around and ran down these cores and again froze, and, being thicker than the surrounding ice, have outlasted it. At J. Hosmer’s tub spring, I dug out a small bullfrog (?) in the sandy mud at the bottom of the tub — it was lively enough to hop — and brought it home. Probably they lie universally buried in the mud now, below the reach of frost. In a ditch near by, under ice half an inch thick, I Saw a painted tortoise moving about. The frogs then are especially to be looked for in the mud about springs. It is remarkable how much power I can exert through the undulations which 1 produce by rocking my boat in the middle of the river. Some time after I have ceased I am surprised to hear the sound of the undulations which have just reached the shores acting on the thin ice there and making a complete wreck of it for a long distance up and down the stream, cracking off pieces four feet wide and more. I have stirred up the river to do this work, a power which I cannot put to rest. The secret of this power appears to be in the extreme mobility, or, as I may say, irritability, of this element. It is the principle of the roller, or of an immense weight moved by a child on balls, and the momentum is tremendous. Sonic of the clamshells, freshly opened by the muskrats and left lying on their half-sunken cabins, where they are kept wet by the waves, show very handsome rainbow tints. I examined one such this afternoon. The hinge of the shell was not broken, and I could discover no injury to the shell, except a little broken off the edges at the broadest end, as if by the teeth of the rat in order to get hold, insert its incisors. The fish is confined to the shell by strong muscles at each end of each valve, and the rat must dissolve the union between both of these and one side of the shell before he can get it open, unless the fish itself opens it, which perhaps it cannot wide enough. I could not open one just dead without separating the muscle from the shell. The growth of the mussel’s shell appears to be in somewhat concentric layers or additions to a small shell or eye. The clam which I brought home the 30th ult., and left outdoors by mistake, I now find frozen to death. J. Hosmer told me the other day that he had seen a man eat many of these clams raw and relish them. It is a somewhat saddening reflection that the beautiful colors of this shell for want of light cannot be said to exist, until its inhabitant has fallen a presto the spoiler, and it is thus left a wreck upon the strand. Its beauty then beams forth, and it remains a splendid cenotaph to its departed tenant, symbolical of those radiant realms of light to which the latter has risen,—what glory he has gone to. And, by the way, as long as they remain in “the dark unfathomed caves of ocean,” they are not “gems of purest ray screne,” though fitted to be, but only when they are tossed up to light. Probably the muskrat inserts his incisors between the edges of the shells (and so crumbles them) in order to pry them open. Some of these shells at Clamshell Hill, whose contents were cooked by the Indians, are still entire, but separated. Wood has spread a great many loads over his land. People would be surprised to learn what quantities of these shellfish are annually consumed by the muskrat. Their shells help convert the meadow mud or river sediment into food for plants. The Indians generally—I have particularly observed it in the case of the Pcnobscots— make a very extensive use of the muskrat for food, and from these heaps it would seem that they used the fresh-water clam extensively also, — these two peculiarly indigenous animals. What if it `were calculated how often a muskrat rises to his stool on the surface of the ice with a mussel in his mouth and ejects the tenant, taking the roof? It is as if the occupant had not begun to live until the light, with whatever violence, is let into its shell with these magical results. It is rather a resurrection than a death. These beaming shells, with the tints of the sky and the rainbow cornc.iingicd, suggest what pure serenity has occupied it. Look at the trees, bare or rustling with sere brown leaves, except the evergreens, their buds dormant at the foot of the leaf-stalks. Look at the fields, russet and withered, and the various sedges and weeds with dry bleached culms. Such is our relation to nature at present; such plants are we. We have no more sap nor verdure nor color now. I remember how cheerful it has been formerly to sit around a fire outdoors amid the snow, and, while I felt some cold, to feel some warmth also, and see the fire gradually increasing and prevailing over damp, steaming and dripping logs and making a warm hearth for me. When I see even these humble clamshells lying open along the riverside, displaying some blue, or violet, or rainbow tints, I am reminded that some pure serenity has occupied them. (I sent two and a half bushels of my cranberries to Boston and got four dollars for them.) There the clam dwells within a little pearly heaven of its own. But even in winter we maintain a temperate cheer and a serene inward life, not destitute of warmth and melody. Only the cold evergreens wear the aspect of summer now and shelter the winter birds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” Layard discovers sculptured on a slab at Kouyunjik (Nineveh) machines for raising water which I perceive correspond exactly to our New England well-sweeps, except that in the former case the pole is “balanced on a shaft of masonry.” He observes that it is “still generally used for irrigation in the East, as well as in southern Europe, and called in Egypt a shadoof.” [Wilkinson exhibits it from the Egyptian sculptures].

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1854

In Toronto, Canada, following the ministry of the Reverend William Adam, who had been a Scottish missionary to India, the Reverend Charles Henry Appleton Dall had done quite well for several years — until coming into disagreement with the founder of the congregation, Joseph Workman, in regard to the financing of a new church building. Again he took to his bed in illness, and resigned.

The Emerson family of Staten Island relocated to Manhattan Island, renting living quarters from a cousin who had property at 33 East 14th Street. There are few resources shedding light on the early life of Charles Emerson prior to his years at Columbia College and then Harvard College. A letter from Charles’s uncle Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed to his father Judge William Emerson shows the affection between the families. In a letter Waldo wrote to his brother William about the gifts he sent for New Year’s, which included several items for the writing table of young son Charles. Once at Harvard College, Charles would visit his uncle Waldo and his family out in Concord.

Dr. John Snow, who had in 1849 investigated the Broad Street pump on Manhattan Island and suggested that cholera was being spread by way of contamination of the public water supply, was still having problems

getting his theory accepted in the medical community, as the disease centered in the India of the East India Company and as the forces there of colonialist denial were firmly in the saddle. The Indian Medical Service was still engaging in its usual blaming of the victims, alleging that cholera actually was afflicting only those HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” who were anyway predisposed to such infections, and so in this year the elder Dr. Snow charged that:

The alleged predisposition was nothing visible or evident: like the elephant which supports the world, according to Hindoo mythology, it was merely invented to remove a difficulty.

The Crimean War expanded, as Britain and France allied themselves with Turkey and declared war on Russia on March 28th. The city of Sevastopol was placed under siege. Florence Nightingale was given permission to take a group of 38 nurses to Scutari to look after the wounded Brits. She would find appalling conditions in the army hospital. The men, unwashed, were still wearing army costumes “stiff with dirt and gore.” There were no blankets and there was no decent food. With such conditions at the army hospitals, only one death in six was being caused by the wounds themselves. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery were the primary causes of the high death-rate. Nightingale overcame the opposition of the brass by using her contacts at The Times of London to inform the British public of how the Army treated its victims. Given the task of organizing the barracks hospital after the battle of Inkerman, she improved the sanitation and dramatically HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” reduced the death-rate.

Into the Valley of Death rode the 500, tra-la, tra-la....

In the Crimea, a typhoid fever epidemic spread from the Russian army to the French and the British. It spread throughout Russia and Turkey thanks to merchant ships. Florence Nightingale took nearly three dozen nurses from London to Scutari, and tried to use sanitary measures to block the spread of the disease. Still, disease would claim many more lives in the Crimean War than the battles.

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

August 26, Saturday: President Franklin Pierce appointed a proslavery Democrat, John Calhoun (1806-1859), as Surveyor General of the Kansas Territory so that land surveys might begin (during the frequent absences of the territorial governor, the surveyor general would hold the gubernatorial power). THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

The chair that had emptied at the Institute was granted to Antoine Clapisson, rather than Hector Berlioz.

A few days after a minor railway accident, Phoebe Elizabeth Hough Fowler Watts Carlyle gave birth. The infant was stillborn and the mother did not survive.

In San Francisco, under Commercial Street between Montgomery Street and Kearny Street, workmen discovered the coffin of city pioneer W.C. Rae. Thomas O. Larkin not only identified the body but related that Rae had committed suicide during January 1845 after having constructed the 1st 2-story house in the municipality. CALIFORNIA

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

The new USS Constellation was launched at the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia.

Henry Thoreau reported that he “Opened one of my snapping turtle’s eggs. The egg was not warm to the touch. The young is now larger and darker-colored, shell and all, more than a hemisphere, and the yolk which maintains it is much reduced.... These eggs, not warm to the touch, buried in the ground, so slow to hatch, are like the seeds of vegetable life.” Tortoise Eggs William M. White’s version of a portion of the journal entry in HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” regard to the eggs is:

We unconsciously step over the eggs of snapping turtles Slowly hatching the summer through. Not only was the surface perfectly dry and trackless there, But blackberry vines had run over the spot Where these eggs were buried And weeds had sprung up above.

If Iliads are not composed in our day, Snapping turtles are hatched and arrive at maturity.

It already thrusts forth its tremendous head, — For the first time in this sphere,— And slowly moves from side to side, — Opening its small glistening eyes For the first time to the light,— Expressive of dull rage, As if it had endured the trials of this world For a century.

A review titled “The Battle of the Ants” appeared in the Portland Transcript, 157:1.

From Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods,” we extract the following interesting account of a curious scene in insect life. [Reprints “Brute Neighbors,” pages 228.25-231.26.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

Also, a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, by the Reverend Thomas Starr King of the Universalist Church in Charlestown, Massachusetts, under the heading “New Publications” in the Christian Register, 135:5-6.

A young man, eight years out of college, of fine scholarship and original genius, revives, in the midst of our bustling times, the life of an anchorite. By the side of a secluded pond in Concord, he builds with his own hands a hut which cost him twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents; and there he lived two and a half years, “cultivating poverty,” because he “wanted to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and suck out all its marrow.” Here he found that the labor of six weeks would support him through the year; and so he had long quiet days for reading, observation, and reflection, learning to free himself from all the hollow customs and false shows of the world, and to pity those who by slavery to inherited property seemed to be doing incredible and astonishing penance. In the account he gives us of his clothes, house, food, and furniture, we find mingled many acute and wise criticisms upon modern life; while in his descriptions of all living things around him, birds, fishes, squirrels, mice, insects, trees, flowers, weeds, it is evident that he had the sharpest eye and the quickest sympathy. One remarkable chapter is given to the sounds that came to his ear, with suggestions, full of poetry and beauty, of the feelings which these sounds awakened. But nothing interested him so much as the Pond, whose name gives the title to his book. He describes it as a clear sheet of water, about a mile in circumference; he bathed in it every morning; its cool crystal depths were his well, ready dug; he sailed upon its bosom in summer, he noted many curious facts pertaining to its ice in winter; in short, it became to him a living thing, and he almost worshipped it. But we must not describe the contents of this book any farther. Its opening pages may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and sparkling thought appear on almost every page. We suppose its author does not reverence many things which we reverence; but this fact has not prevented our seeing that he has a reverential, tender, and devout spirit at bottom. Rarely have we enjoyed a book more, or been more grateful for many and rich suggestions. Who would have looked to Walden Pond for a Robinson Crusoe, or for an observer like the author of the Natural History of Selbo[u]rne, or for a moralist like the writer of Religio Medici? Yet paragraphs in this book have reminded us of each of these. And as we shut the book up, we ask ourselves,

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

will the great lesson it teaches of the freedom and beauty of a simple life be heeded? Shall this struggle for wealth, and this bondage to the impedimenta of life, continue forever? Will the time ever come when it will be fashionable to be poor, that is, when men will be so smitten with a purpose to seek the true ends of life that they will not care about laying up riches on the earth? Such times we know there have been, and thousands listened reverently to the reply, given in the last of these two lines, to the inquiry contained in the first; “O where is peace, for thou its path hast trod?” “In poverty, retirement, and with God.” Who can say that it is impossible that such a time may come round, although the fashion of this world now runs with such a resistless current in the opposite direction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

Also, on this date, a review of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS under the heading “New Publications” on the 2d page of the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, column 3:

We have, now and then, in this jostling, civilized world, an unmistakable human oddity, and the author of this strange, but interesting book, is one of that class. He is evidently a gentleman of educated and refined tastes; but, before he had attained to middle age, he appears—after having summed up and weighed the matter—to have come to the conclusion that Modern Civilization is a delusion and a sham. He, therefore, hied to the woods—a mile from any neighbor —on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass., where he had previously built himself a house—which house cost him not quite thirty dollars—and earned his living by the labor of his hands. Here he dwelt—(subsisting on rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, green corn, peas, a little salt pork, and less molasses and salt)—for two years and two months, and then returned to civilized life again, where he is at present a sojourner—probably a wiser, if not a better, man. While thus “alone in his glory,” our eccentric author worked a little, visited now and then, roamed about in the woods, (watching the ways of the birds, squirrels, and coons) by day, and in the evening gazed upon the moon and stars, until he chose to retire to his lonely rest. He does not like the restraints of social life, saying that “it is hard to have a Southern overseer— worse to have a Northern one—and worst of all, when you are the slave- driver of yourself.” In his humble dwelling, he had three pieces of limestone on his table—for ornament, we suppose— but finding, to his horror, that they wanted dusting every morning, he threw them out of the window. He is no believer in either expensive houses, furniture, clothes, food, or anything else—neither does he like to be crowded, and he is a little selfish, withal; for he remarks, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” He grieves for the good old days of Adam and Eve — yea, he sighs, not for the good time coming, but for the good time long since past and gone. He appears to envy the lot of the birds, beasts, and wild Indians, and to entertain strong doubts whether our boasted Civilization is a real advance in the condition of man. He would much prefer the tub of Diogenes to the palace of a monarch—the costume of a South Sea Islander to the robes of a Prince— the simplest and plainest repast to the most delicious and sumptuous banquet. Pity it is, that he was not born a turtle, that his shell might be his shelter, as he styles a house—or a bear, and then his furry hide would serve him both for shelter and raiment. Nevertheless, his ‘Life in the Woods’ is a most fascinating book.

Aug. 26. For a week we have had warmer weather than for a long tune before, yet not so warm nearly as in July. I hear of a great many fires around us, far and near, both meadows and woods; in Maine and New York also. There may be some smoke in this haze, but I doubt it.

P.M. — To Dugan Desert. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” I hear part of a phœbe’s strain, as I go over the railroad bridge. It is the voice of dying summer. The pads now left on the river are chiefly those of the white lily. I noticed yesterday where a large piece of meadow had melted and sunk on a sandy bottom in the Assabet, — and the weeds now rose above the surface where it was five feet deep around. It is so dry that I take the left of the railroad bridge and go through the meadows along the river. In the hollows where the surface of the meadows has been taken out within a year or two, spring up pontederias and lilies, proserpinaca, polygonums, Ludwigia palustris, etc., etc. Nasturtium hispidum still in bloom, and will be for some time. I think I hear a red-eye. Rudbeckia,—the small one,—still fresh. The Poa hirsuta is left on the upper edge of meadows (as at J. Hosmer’s), as too thin and poor a grass, beneath the attention of the farmers. How fortunate that it grows in such places and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are cut! With its beautiful fine purple color, its beautiful purple blush, it reminds me and supplies the place of the rhexia now about done. [Leaving off, though I see some pretty handsome Sept. 4th.] Close by, or held in your hand, its fine color is not obvious,—it is but dull,—but [at] a distance, with a suitable light, it is exceedingly beautiful. It is at the same time in bloom. This is one of the most interesting phenomena of August. [The name of the grass appears in Excursions as Eragrostis pectinacea.] I hear these afternoons the faint, cricket-like note of the Rana palustris squatting by the side of the river, easily confounded with that of the interrupted cricket, only the last is more ringing and metallic. How long has it been heard? The choke-cherry leaves the are, some of them, from scarlet inclining to crimson. Radical leaves of the yellow thistle spot the meadow. Opened one of my snapping turtle’s eggs. The egg was not warm to the touch. The young is now larger and darker-colored, shell and all, more than a hemisphere, and the yolk which maintains it is much re and are quite sweet, but have a large seed. Interesting for the various colors on the same bush and in the same cluster. Also the choke-berries are very abundant there, but mostly dried black. There is a large field of rhexia there now almost completely out of bloom, but its scarlet leaves, reddening the ground at a distance, supply the place of flowers. We still continue to have strong wind in the middle of the day. The sun is shorn of his beams by the haze before 5 o'clock P.M., round and red, and is soon completely concealed, apparently by the haze alone. This blue haze is not dissipated much by the night, but is seen still with the earliest light.

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1855

February 28, Wednesday: A census of the Kansas Territory counted 8,501 whites, 151 free blacks, and 192 black slaves. The majority of these intrusives were Missourians and other Westerners.

February 28. Still cold and clear. Ever since the 23d inclusive a succession of clear but very cold days in which, for the most part, it has not melted perceptibly during the day. My ink has frozen, and plants, etc., have frozen in the house, though the thermometer has not indicated nearly so great a cold as before. Since the 25th it has been very slowly moderating. The skating began again the 24th after the great freshet had gone down some two feet or more, but that part of the old ice which was broken up by the freshet and floated from its place, either on to the upland or meadow or on to the firm ice, made it remarkably broken and devious, not to be used by night. The deep bays and sides of the meadows have presented a very remarkable appearance, a stretching pack of great cakes of ice, often two or more upon each other and partly tilted up, a foot thick and one to two or more rods broad. The westering sun reflected from their edges makes them shine finely. In short, our meadows have presented and still present a very wild and arctic scene. Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered these great cakes of ice, the water having now gone down about five feet on the South Branch P. M.—To further railroad bridge and Ministerial Swamp. I see that same kind of icicle terracing about the piers of Wood’s Bridge and others that I saw, I think, last spring, but not now quite so perfect, as if where the water had stood at successive levels. The lower edge now about a foot or two above water Examined where the white maple and the apple tree were tipped over by the ice the other day at the railroad bridge. It struck them seven or eight feet from the ground, that being the height of the water, rubbed off the bark, and then bent flat and broke them. They were about ten inches in diameter, the maple partly dead before. I see where many trees have been wounded by the ice in former years. They have a hard time of it when a cake half a dozen rods in diameter and nearly two feet thick is floated and blown against them Just south of Derby’s Bridge lie many great cakes, some one upon another, which were stopped by the bridge and causeway, and a great many have a crust of the meadow of equal thickness — six inches to one foot — frozen to their under surfaces. Some of these are a rod in diameter, and when the ice melts, the meadow where they are landed will present a singular appearance. I see many also freshly deposited on the Elfin Burial-Ground, showing how that was formed. The greater part of those hummocks there are probably, if not certainly, carried by the ice, though I now see a few small but thick pieces of meadow four or five feet broad without any ice or appearance of its having been attached to them. This is a powerful agent at work. Many great cakes have lodged on a ridge of the meadow west of the river here, and suggest how such a ridge may be growing from year to year This North River is only partially open. I see where a bright gleam from a cake of ice on the shore is reflected in the stream with remarkable brightness, in a pointed, flame-like manner. Look either side you see it. Standing here, still above the Elfin Burial Ground, the outlines of Heywood the miller’s house in the distance against the pine and oak woods come dimly out, and by their color are in very pleasing harmony with this wood. I think it is a dull-red house against the usual mixture of red oak leaves and dark pines. There is such a harmony as between the gray limbs of an overshadowing elm and the lichen-clad roof We crossed the river at Nut Meadow Brook. The ice was nearly worn through all along there, with wavelike regularity, in oblong (round end) or thick crescent or kidney shaped holes, as if worn by the summits of waves, — like a riddle to sift a man through. These holes are hard to detect in some lights except by shaking the water. I saw some V cakes of ice, ten feet across and one foot thick, lodged with one end on the top of a fence-post and some seven or eight feet in the air, the other on the bottom. There is a fine pack of large cakes away in the bay behind Hubbard’s Grove. I notice, looking at their edges, that the white or rotted part extends downward in points or triangles, alternating with the sound greenish parts, thus:— Most, however, are a thin white, or maybe snow ice, with all beneath solid and green still Found a hangbird’s nest fallen from the ivy maple, composed wholly of that thread they wipe the locomotive with [“Cotton waste.”] and one real thread, all as it were woven into a perfect bag I have a piece of a limb (alder or maple?), say five eighths of an inch in diameter, which has been cut off by a worm boring spirally, but in one horizontal plane, three times round I observed how a new ravine is formed in a sandhill. A new one was formed in the last thaw at Clamshell Hill thus: Much melted snow and rain being collected on the top of the hill, some apparently found its way through the ground, frozen a foot thick, a few feet from the edge of the bank, and began with a small rill washing down the slope the unfrozen sand beneath. As the water continued to flow, the sand on each side continued to slide into it and be carried off, leaving the frozen crust above quite firm, making a bridge five or six feet wide over this cavern. Now, since the thaw, this bridge, I see, has melted and fallen in, leaving a ravine some ten feet wide and much longer, which now may go on increasing from year to year without limit, and thus the sand is ravished away. I was there just after it began [Audubon and Bachman think a ravine may sometimes have been produced HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” by the gallery of a shrew mole.].

THE AGE OF REASON WAS A PIPE DREAM, OR AT BEST A PROJECT. ACTUALLY, HUMANS HAVE ALMOST NO CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING, WHILE CREDITING THEIR OWN LIES ABOUT WHY THEY ARE DOING IT.

August 1, Wednesday: In New Bedford, on this anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves of the British West Indies, Frederick Douglass led the speaker’s list. EMANCIPATION DAY ABOLITIONISM

Aug. 1 P.M.— To Conantum by boat. Squirrels have eaten and stripped pitch pine cones. Small rough sunflower a day or two. Diplopappus cornifolius (how long?) at Conant Orchard Grove. In the spring there, which has not been cleared out lately, I find a hairworm, eight or nine inches long and big as a pin-wire; is biggest in the middle and tapers thence to tail; at head is abruptly cut off; curly in your fingers like the tendril of a vine. I spent half an hour overhauling the heaps of clamshells under the rocks there. Was surprised to find the anodon and the green-rayed clams there. Pennyroyal and alpine enchanter’s—nightshade well out, how long? Young Adams of Waltham tells me he has been moose-hunting at Chesuncook. Hunted with a guide in evening without horn, it being too early to call them out. Heard the water dropping from their muzzles when they lifted their heads from feeding on the pads, as they stood in the river.

TRALFAMADORIANS EXPERIENCE REALITY IN 4 DIMENSIONS RATHER THAN 3 AND HAVE SIMULTANEOUS ACCESS TO PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE. THEY ARE ABLE TO SEE ALONG THE TIMELINE OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE EXACT TIME AND PLACE AT WHICH AS THE RESULT OF A TRALFAMADORIAN EXPERIMENT, THE UNIVERSE IS ANNIHILATED. BILLY PILGRIM, WHILE CAGED IN A TRALFAMADORIAN ZOO, ACQUIRES THEIR ATTITUDE TOWARD TIME, AND SO WHEN HE RETURNS TO EARTH, HE BECOMES A HISTORIAN VERY LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HISTORIANS: ALTHOUGH HE CANNOT HIMSELF SEE INTO THE FUTURE THE WAY THE TRALFAMADORIANS DO, LIKE ALL OUR OTHER HUMAN HISTORIANS DO HE PRETENDS TO BE ABLE TO SEE ALL PERIODS OF OUR PAST TRAJECTORY NOT WITH THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE WHO WERE LIVING DURING THOSE PERIODS, BUT WITH THE OVERARCHING EYE OF GOD. THIS ENABLES HIM TO PRETEND TO BE VERY VERY WISE AND TO SOUND

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” VERY VERY IMPRESSIVE!

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1856

May 25, Sunday: Waldo Emerson’s 53d birthday.

Lysander Spooner wrote to George Bradburn about having filed for a patent: I have great confidence that it is going to be valuable. I wish I had the money for it now, that I might give my attention to other things. The world is “famishing for lack of knowledge,” which I could give them; and I every day reproach myself for being engaged in such commonplace business as making money, or getting a living.... If I should establish a good reputation for beds and chairs, that may prove such a stepping stone to public favor, that I may hope to resume my profession of author, philosopher, reformer, and oracle.

Edward Bridgman had grown up in Northampton and at age 22 migrated to “Bleeding Kansas”. He came simply to homestead but was soon caught up in the struggle over slavery. He described his arrival at

Osawatomie and the destruction of the town of Lawrence by proslavery forces, and the retaliation led by John Brown at Pottawatomie Creek, in which 5 men from the South had been killed. Several months after Lawrence was sacked, a group of proslavery men would attack Osawatomie and Bridgman would fight alongside Captain Brown. Several months later he would return to Massachusetts to sign up with the 37th Massachusetts infantry. In the early 1870s he would migrate again, this time to northern Wisconsin. In 1901 he would move into the city of Madison, where he would reside until his death in 1915. Dear Cousin Sidney I write now to let you know my present situation and a little about the affairs of Kansas.... In some small towns the men are called up nearly every HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” night to hold themselves in readiness to meet the worst as scouting parties of Alabamians Georgians and Missourians are around continually, plundering clothes yards, horses and cattle, and everything they can lay hold of. A few miles from Lawrence a man was plowing. A party of Southerners came along and being hungry killed his best ox, ate what they wanted, took away some and left the rest. Such like occurrences are almost daily taking place. Last Thursday, news came from Lawrence that she was in the hands of the Ruffians, and that they had demolished the free state Hotel, burned Robinson's house, and destroyed the two printing presses. Almost immediately a company of 30 was raised. There was no reason why I could not go for one, so I borrowed a rifle and ammunition and joined them. The thought of engaging in battle is not a pleasing one, but the free state men are compelled to. Why should I not do [so] as well as others, I have nothing to hinder me and my life is no dearer to me than the lives of others are to them. At sundown we divided into 2 divisions and took turns in walking. It was really affecting to see husbands and wives bid each other good bye. — not knowing as they would ever see each other again. yet the feeling and sympathies of the women are as much enlisted in the cause as the men. It is nothing uncommon to see them running bullets and making cartriges. One woman yesterday told me that she had often been called up nights to make them....

Tuesday, 27. Since I wrote the above the Osawatomie company has returned to O. as news came that we could do nothing immediately, so we returned back. On our way back we heard that 5 men had been killed by Free State men. the men were butchered — ears cut off and the bodies thrown into the river[.] the murdered men (Proslavery) had thrown out threats and insults, yet the act was barbarous and inhuman whoever committed by[.] we met the men going when we were going up and knew that they were on a secret expedition, yet didn't know what it was. Tomorrow something will be done to arrest them. there were 8 concerned in the act. perhaps they had good motives, some think they had, how that is I dont know. The affairs took place 8 miles from Osawatomie. The War seems to have commenced in real earnest. Horses are stolen on all sides whenever they can be taken....

Weds eve. Since yesterday I have learned that those men who committed those murders were a party of Browns. one of them was formerly in the wool business in Springfield, John Brown[.] his son, (Jn) has been taken today, tho he had no hand in the act, but was knowing to it, but when I write to Maria I will give further particulars[.] Osawatomie is in much fear and excitement[.] News came tonight that a co. of Georgains and Alibamians were coming to make this their headquarters. All work is nearly suspended, the women HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” are in constant fear[.] It was really pleasing to witness the reception of our co. by the women after they came in to O. [I]t was a little after dark. A long line of women and children stood by the roadside to greet us and joy was depicted on every countenance. hands were heartily shaken and congratulations offered[.] but I must close.... Yours truly, E It wont be best for me to write my name so you must guess who wote this[.] but very few now attach their full name to a letter THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

May 25. 10 A.M. — To Fair Haven Pond with Blake and Brown. I found five arrowheads at Clamshell Hill. Saw, just before, on the flat meadow on the right, feeding on the edge of the meadow just left bare, along with the peetweets, a bird a size larger with an apparently light-brown back, a ring or crescent of black on its breast and side of neck, and a black patch including the eye. Can it be the Charadrius semipalmatus? or else Wilsonius? It looks like the latter in Wilson's larger plates. It reminded me of the piping plover, but was not so white; and of the killdeer, but was not so large. Pyrus on side of Fair Haven Hill, yesterday at least. Huckleberry there, yesterday also at least. On the Cliffs, orobanche; Veronica arvensis, the little one on the rocks there, well out. Also low blackberry on the rocks a clay or two. B1ackburnian warbler and rose-breasted grosbeak. Lupines, apparently yesterday. Young phœbes in the Baker house. The bird flitted out as we entered. I reached to an old shelf and felt the warm but callow young. Azalea undiflora in garden. Polvgala, fringed, by path beyond Hubbard Grove; how long?

THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE HISTORIAN TYPICALLY SUPPOSES NOW TO BE THE WHY OF THEN. THE REALITY IS VERY MUCH TO THE CONTRARY, FOR NOW IS NOT THE WHY OF THEN: INSTEAD, THEN WAS THE HOW OF NOW. ANOTHER WAY TO SAY THIS IS THAT HISTORIANS WHO ANTICIPATE OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. A HISTORY WRITTEN IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS AMOUNTS TO SPURIOUS MAKE- BELIEVE. TO DO A GOOD JOB OF RECORDING HISTORY, ONE MUST BECOME IGNORANT (OR FEIGN IGNORANCE) OF EVERYTHING THAT WE NOW KNOW TO HAVE FOLLOWED.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1857

July 5, Wednesday: President Brigham Young preached at the Bowery of Great Salt Lake City about true happiness, etc.:

It rejoices my heart to hear the brethren testify of their faith and good feelings, and of their confidence in God and in their religion. It is a matter of rejoicing to me to see those who profess to love and serve the Lord live up to their professions. Brother Park very correctly observed that if this people will actually do the will of those who are placed to lead them, they will be owned, honored, and blest of their God who dwells in the heavens. I can say, for one, that I cannot be pleased, I cannot be satisfied, I cannot feel to fellowship this people as I wish to do, unless they live their religion and serve their God every day, every hour, and every minute of their lives. There is no time allotted to us to use outside of the limits of duty. But, in doing our duty, in serving our God, in living our religion, in using every possible means to send forth the Gospel of salvation to the inhabitants of the earth, to gather Israel, and establish Zion, and build up the kingdom of heaven upon the earth are incorporated all blessings, all comforts that men can desire. It is a mistaken idea in the inhabitants of the earth to conclude that it will not do for them to yield obedience to the commandments of heaven, lest it should abridge them in their comforts and in their enjoyments; for there is no real peace, there is no real happiness in anything in heaven or on the earth, except to those who serve the Lord. In His service there is joy, there is happiness; but they are not to be found anywhere else. In it there are peace and comfort; but when the soul is filled with joy, with peace, and with glory, and is perfectly satisfied therewith a person even then has but little idea of that which is in store for all the faithful. Thrust a man into prison and bind him with chains, and then let him be filled with the comfort and with the glory of eternity, HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” and that prison is a palace to him. Again, let a man be seated upon a throne with power and dominion in this world, ruling his millions and millions, and without that peace which flows from the Lord of Hosts—without that contentment and joy that comes from heaven, his palace is a prison; his life is a burden to him; he lives in fear, in dread, and in sorrow. But when a person is filled with the peace and power of God, all is right with him. I cannot be satisfied with myself, neither can I be satisfied with this people, unless they live in the enjoyment of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, having the testimony of Jesus within them. When they live in that manner, they are prepared to judge of all matters that come before them; they are then capable of discerning between truth and error, light and darkness. They can then readily discover the things that are not of God, and distinguish them from those that are. This is the only way for you to know that your leaders are leading you in the path that leads to heaven. Without taking this course, a people or nation is liable to be led astray by their leaders, and thereby be prepared to be destroyed; but when the people understand for themselves—when they know and understand the things of God by the Spirit of revelation, they are not only satisfied but safe. If this people will do as they are told—will please those who preside over them, they will do well for themselves. And if they will do this from morning to evening and from evening to morning, all will be right, and their acts will tend to promote the kingdom of God upon the earth. As brother Wells lately observed here, it is very little difference what comes or goes. If the world are angry at us, that only fits and prepares them for their destruction. If they afflict the Saints of God, it prepares them for their reward; it prepares the righteous for bliss and immortality, and the wicked are the sooner ripened for their doom. It is very little difference whether men come here as soldiers or as civilians, all will promote the interest of the kingdom of God. It will promote the interests of the Saints, inasmuch as they are united; and though the wicked, in their eagerness to destroy the Saints of God, do not see this, yet God will make it all turn for the good of His people. True, this people might have done better; but, considering all circumstances, they have done as well as could be expected. It might be shown to them, and perhaps this congregation will acknowledge it, that if this people had invariably been careful to observe counsel, they would have promoted the kingdom of heaven a great deal faster than they have. I will bring up a circumstance to illustrate this idea—one relating to us in these Valleys of the Mountains. It was just now observed by brother Feramorz Little that his feelings would be perfectly satisfied if he should never see another train of goods come in here for sale among this people. I would have been satisfied, if that could have been the case from the beginning. At a time here when a person could go with a sackful of gold and say to a man, “Can I hire you to do some work for me? I have a sackful of gold;” and the man would say, “No; I cannot do it;” and every man would say, “No; I am too busy; I cannot do it;” and the person still saying, “I have hats full of gold;” but it was so and used for the benefit of the kingdom of God, would it not have been much better than to pay it to the merchants to carry out of the Territory? One merchant, in a day-and-a-half, HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” received for sales a large kettle-full of money, and in two days he took a great deal more. Suppose that that money had been put into the hands of the Trustee-in-Trust and those associated with him, they would have laid goods down at your doors for from thirty to forty percent cheaper than you got them. But could the people see that? No; their eyes were dim, and they could not see their own interest. If the people had concentrated their means during the nine years past, they would now have been worth millions where they have only thousands. I know that now as well as I should have known it if the experiment had been tried, and that result proven. But no; the people would pay their money to others to carry out of the country. I will tell an anecdote relating to the feelings of some in those days. I stepped into a store at the time when money was so plentiful, and the store was crowded. Every man, woman, and child, had their pockets full of gold. A woman stepped up and said, “Mr. So and So, have you any soap?” He replied, “I do not think there is any.” She then asked, “Have you any sugar, or coffee?” He answered, “I do not know whether there is or not: there was some this morning; but I think it has been sold.” It was not long before a woman reached over and touched the one enquiring, and said, “President Young has bought everything of that kind that has been brought in.” I reached over and tapped her on the shoulder and said, “What do you tell that infernal lie for? President Young has not bought a pound of tea, a pound of sugar, or a pound of coffee, since these goods came in.” The people were then in such a state of mind that they would rather have given all they had to the Gentiles than for me to have had a pound of tea or the handling of their money. They were not all possessed of that feeling; but there were enough to influence the channel of trade and give it an unwise direction; and if there are not now too many of that class, I shall feel thankful, and we shall be able to hold the wheat and the cattle so that those who are passing through and temporarily sojourning in our midst will have to pay a fair price for those articles. But I presume, if the Gentiles come, some of you will run and sell your wheat and your cattle to them for a much less price than we would give you, and be perfectly satisfied with it. If there is not an influence and practice of that kind, I shall be glad of it; for it will prove to me that the people believe what they say. I am careful about touching anything that is the object of people's worship—the gold, the goods, and the things of this world, which please the eyes and entice the affections of the people. You who know me know that I have not been under the necessity of asking you to help me much. Instead of the Presidency's living upon the people, it is well known that they have sustained the people. Suppose that I had not launched forth in business, and that brother Kimball and others had not, what would have been the result? This community would have been living in their log huts, whereas they now have good houses and comfortable homes. I am decidedly in favor of practical religion—of everyday useful life. And if I today attend to what devolves upon me to do, and then do that which presents itself tomorrow, and so on, when eternity comes I will be prepared to enter on the things of eternity. But I would not be prepared for that sphere of action, HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” unless I could manage the things that are now within my reach. You must all learn to do this. If the people take a wise course and let a few have the handling of the wheat and other commodities that are for sale, and let those who wish to buy come to them to purchase, it would be much better for this people. By pursuing that course, our enemies would either be under the necessity of giving us a fair price, or have to purchase their supplies in the States, and haul them across the plains, through the hills, and over the mountains. How do you think they would prosper in that operation? I think they would soon become discouraged and want to leave these regions. It is an ignorant excitement which causes some people in the States to feel and act as they do. Who is there, of all who are really acquainted with our proceedings and will let good reason and good sense operate, that has one word to say against us? No one. But the priests have hallooed so much about these Latter- day Saints—the “Mormons” as they term us, that they have become excited; and what is the reason of their outcry? It is simply this—we have the words of eternal life, and they have not; we serve the God of heaven and they serve somebody, they know not whom. We have the true religion that the Bible gives an account of, and they seem to be entirely ignorant of it and of the God of heaven. Only let us leave God out of our religion, and all would be right. A great many have said to you and me, “Just leave out Joe Smith, the Book of Mormon, and modern revelations, and you will become popular.” Brother Clements said, last Sunday, that he told a priest that he could materially abridge that leaving out by saying, “Just leave God out of the question, and you will be 'Hail fellows well met.'” We are not going to leave out Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, nor the gathering, nor the building up of Zion. You hear brethren talk of coming to Zion to enjoy the blessings of this land; but do you not see that it is the shortsightedness of men which causes their disappointment when they arrive here? They read in the Bible, in the Book of Mormon, and Book of Doctrine and Covenants, about Zion, and what it is to be; but brother Park and others could not realize, before they came here, that they were the ones to help to build up Zion. They gather here with the spirit of Zion resting upon them, and expecting to find Zion in its glory, whereas their own doctrine should teach them that they are coming here to make Zion. We can make Zion, or we can make Babylon, just as we please. We can make just what we please of this place. The people can make Zion: they can make a heaven within themselves. When people gather here, they should come with a determination to make Zion within themselves, with the resolution that, “I will carry myself full of the Spirit of Zion wherever I go; and this is the way in which I will control evil spirits; for I mean that my spirit shall have control over evil:” and do you not see that such a course will make Zion? This American continent will be Zion; for it is so spoken of by the prophets. Jerusalem will be rebuilt and will be the place of gathering, and the tribe of Judah will gather there; but this continent of America is the land of Zion. The priests are angry because they are afraid that their religion is nothing but a sandy-foundationed fabric; and HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” whenever they meditate upon the subject and humble themselves, and the Spirit of the Lord finds its way to their hearts and convicts them, the truth then is made manifest before them, and they begin to learn the falsity of their systems; and when that spirit leaves them, they become angry. “Mormonism” is declared to be true by hosts of witnesses, and this makes the priests angry; for this Gospel bears its own weight and testimony, and they know not how to gainsay it. True, I have aimed to point out their errors; but it is not you or me that they are opposed to, although they throw their darts at us; but it is the spirit of conviction that goes with the report of this work; for wherever it goes it strikes conviction to the heart, and that is what disturbs the priests and the people. The foolish, and those who are controlled by the hissings of the priests, rage against the work of God, and corrupt politicians urge them on. There is not an honest man in the United States or in the world but what, if he could hear this doctrine taught without knowing that it was a “Mormon” who was teaching it, would drink down these principles. They would swallow every word and say, “That is true; you have more light than I have.” But if you say “Mormon,” that sends the fat into the fire, and arrays their prejudices against you. Do you know this, you Elders? [Voices, “Yes.”] As I have said before, I have often gone incognito, and taught persons the Gospel, and they would drink down its principles as eagerly as a thirsty ox would drink water; but an ignorant prejudice causes all the trouble. The excitement among the priests, and directed by politicians, raises this erroneous prejudice and hue-and-cry. You know that I have said that, if it was now my calling to go and preach the Gospel, I could make as many converts as I ever did; for I would go in such a manner that the bitterly prejudiced would have to labor hard to find out that I was a “Mormon,” until I had induced them to love the truth. Then they would say, “If that is ‘Mormonism,’ I want it.” Persons who are as ignorant as jackasses pass through this city, and they are so prejudiced that they cannot see and hear well enough to report things straight. But let persons of good understanding come here, and hear the Elders testify, and stop to investigate, and every honest heart among them will receive the Gospel. Do you not know that they would? The “Mormons” are trying to take care of themselves. Our enemies may come to kill us, but we know that there is a God in the heavens. I care no more about the threats that are made than I do about the floating of a board on the waters. They have kicked us and cuffed us about so much that I have got used to it. I have been driven, and had to leave my home five times on account of my faith in the Gospel of our Savior; but I have never until now been a conspicuous character; and I say to my enemies and to the enemies of righteousness, you have now got to fire long shots, unless you come much nearer to us than you are. I will say to all parties, If you come here and do not observe wholesome laws, we will introduce you to them. In regard to troops coming here, as has been rumored, should 1,500 or 2,000 come, what will you see? You will see that they will ask us to make their soldiers behave themselves, until they can get out of this place, which they will do as soon as possible. They are not coming here to fight us; though, if they were to, I should HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” pray that the Lord would bring those here that mobbed us in days gone by, and just let us look at them. But no; the priests, and some editors and politicians wish to have innocent soldiers sent here to fight us. Let them bring those priests, editors, and politicians who have howled so long about us, and we will attend to their cases. But I pray that I may never witness such scenes as I have in the midst of this people. If they will let us alone, we will preach the Gospel; and if they do not, we will do it, and we will build up Zion, if all the devils in hell howl. Let us know that we have to build up Zion until the Spirit of peace shall overrule our country. Do you ever reflect upon the matter? Look at St. Louis. More murders have been committed there in almost any few days than have been committed in this Territory since it was organized. It is customary there to have murders committed almost daily; but we, above all other people, ought never to have such a crime committed in our midst; and we never have had, so far as the Latter-day Saints are concerned. I will now tell you something. It is a secret; and I wish you to keep it to yourselves. There have been men here who have had their plans arranged for robbing; and I will take the liberty to say that, when we find them, “judgment will be laid to the line, and righteousness to the plummet.” Those are my feelings, and I express them plainly, that the good and honest may be able to pass from the Eastern States to California, and back and forth, in peace. And when a “Mormon” unlawfully disturbs anybody, I say, let him be overtaken by a “Vigilance Committee.” And when mobocrats come here, they will find a “Vigilance Committee.” Now, listeners, send that to the States, if you wish. I want the people in the States to know that there are a few poor curses here, and also to know that we do not want a gang of highwaymen here. And I say to all such characters, if you come here and practice your iniquity, we will send you home quick, whenever we can catch and convict you. I wish such characters would let the boys have a chance to lay their hands on them. If men come here and do not behave themselves, they will not only find the Danites, whom they talk so much about, biting the horses' heels, but the scoundrels will find something biting their heels. In my plain remarks, I merely call things by their right names. Brother Kimball is noted in the States for calling things by their right names, and you will excuse me if I do the same. We will build up Zion and establish the kingdom of God upon the earth, and the wicked cannot help themselves. I have not built up this kingdom, neither did Joseph Smith. What the Lord told brother Joseph to do, that he did. And what the Lord tells you and me to do we will do, by the help of God. May God bless us all. Amen.

July 5. A.M. — To Lee’s Cliff by boat. Potentilla arguta abundantly out. Partridges big as quails. At Clamshell I found three arrowheads and a small Indian chisel for my guests. Rogers determined the rate of the boat’s progress by observing by his second-hand how long the boat was going its length past a pad, calling the boat’s length so much. For some days I have seen great numbers of blackish spiny caterpillars stripping the black willows, some full- grown on June 30th and some now not more than three quarters of an inch long. When looking at a blackbird’s nest I pricked my hand smartly on them several times; in fact the nest was pretty well protected by this chevaux- de-frise. Are they the caterpillars of the Vanessa Antiopa?1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” That new ravine at Clamshell is so enlarged that bank swallows already use its sides, and I feel some young there. After leaving my companions at the Lee Bridge road, I pushed up Well Meadow Brook a few rods, through the weeds. I saw by the commotion that great numbers of fishes fled before me and concealed themselves amid the weeds or in the mud. The mud was all stirred up by them. Some ran partly ashore. Higher up, when I had left the boat and walked up the brook on the quaking shore, I found a bay and pool connected with the brook all alive with them, and observed two or three caught partly high and dry by their heedless haste, in a shallow and very weedy place. These were young pickerel two or three inches long. I suspect that all, or the greater part, were pickerel, and that they commonly breed in such still weedy basins in deep muddy meadows. Comara palustris apparently in prime. A phoebe’s nest with four eggs half hatched, at stone bridge. There has been, amid the chips where a wood-pile stood, in our yard, a bumblebee’s nest for ten days or more. Near it there was what I should have called a mouse’s nest of withered grass, but this was mainly of different material and perhaps was made by the bee. It was a little heap two inches high, six long, and four wide, made of old withered grass and small bits of rags, brown paper, cotton-wool, strings, lint, and whole feathers, with a small half-closed hole at one end, at which the [bee] buzzed and showed himself if you touched the nest. I saw the cat putting out her paw there and starting back, and to-day I find the remains, apparently, of the bee dead at CAT the entrance. On opening, I find nothing in the nest. There came out this morning, apparently from one of those hard stem-wound cocoons on a black birch in my window, a moth whose wings are spread four and a quarter inches, and it is about an inch and three quarters long. It is black, wings and body, with two short, broad feathery antennæ. The wings all have a clay-colored border behind, with a distinct black waving line down the middle of it, and, about midway the wings, a less distinct clay-colored line. Near the point of each forward wing, a round black spot or eye, with a bluish crescent within its forward edge, and beyond this spot, a purple tinge with a short whitish waving line continued through it from the crescent. The rear wings have a row of oblong roundish black spots along the clay-colored border, within the black line. There is a very faint light line on the fore wings on each side of the head. Beneath, on wings and body, dark purplish brown takes the place of the black above. It is rather handsomer and higher- colored beneath than above. There is a very small light or clay-colored triangular spot near the middle of wing beneath: also a row of brown spots on a white band along each side of the body. This is evidently the male Attacus Promethea. The rich purplish brown beneath — a sort of chocolate purple — makes the figure of a smaller moth of different form. The cocoon, about an inch long, is surrounded by the now pale withered leaf of the birch, which is wrapped almost quite around it and extends beneath, and it is very hard and firm, the light silk being wound thickly about the petiole, and also, afterward, the twig itself for half an inch or more both above and beneath the petiole. Sometimes there is no real petiole for a core, but the silky sheath can be slid up and down the twig.

IS HISTORY A SCIENCE? ASTRONOMY IS A SCIENCE, FOR IT IS A STUDY OF REAL OBJECTS CALLED “STARS” (AND SUCHLIKE) SITUATED AT VARIOUS REAL LOCATIONS IN THE DIMENSIONS OF SPACE. WERE HISTORY A SCIENCE LIKE ASTRONOMY, IT WOULD NEED TO BE A SCIENCE OF EVENTS (AND SUCHLIKE) AT VARIOUS REAL SITUATIONS IN THE DIMENSION OF TIME. HOWEVER, IT WOULD NEED TO PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF ALL SUCH EVENTS, NOT ONLY THOSE AT VARIOUS REAL SITUATIONS IN THE PAST PORTION OF TIME, BUT ALSO THOSE AT VARIOUS REAL SITUATIONS IN THE FUTURE PORTION OF TIME. AND NOTHING IN THE FUTURE NOW EXISTS, WHICH IS WHY WE REFER TO IT AS “FUTURE.” IT IS FUTURE NOT MERELY BECAUSE WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT IT YET, BUT BECAUSE IT IS INDEFINITE AND UNDEFINED. GOD HAS NOT YET CREATED IT, PROVIDING IT WITH ITS “DEFINITUDE.” 1. Yes; according to Harris’s description, they are. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” THEREFORE THIS WOULD BE A SPURIOUS METAPHOR: IN THE SENSE IN WHICH ASTRONOMY IS SCIENCE, HISTORY IS NOT. WHEN HISTORIANS PRETEND TO BE DOING SCIENCE, THEY ARE ATTEMPTING TO REMOVE REALITY FROM THE LAP OF GOD. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1859

Herman Melville was still lecturing on topics such as “Statues in Rome” and “The South Seas” when, in this year, a harpoon finally hit a vital area in Mocha Dick, an actual sperm whale that over the years had caused the actual deaths of more than 30 whaling men. During this year, also, the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows of All Souls Church in New-York, Unitarian minister of Herman and Elizabeth Melville, went to the Harvard Divinity School without a harpoon to lecture a select group of alumni about “The Suspense of Faith.”

In this year Harvard College hired, as its 1st director of physical culture, an African-American, Abraham Molineaux Hewlett.

Charles Emerson had spent a year at Columbia College and then studied for 6 weeks with a private tutor, James J. Lowell, Harvard class of 1858. He matriculated at Harvard College as part of the Class of 1863.

ESSENCE IS BLUR. SPECIFICITY, THE OPPOSITE OF ESSENCE, IS OF THE NATURE OF TRUTH.

May 2, Monday: According to The Daily Cleveland Herald, reporting the case of the federal trial of a couple of the Ohio rescuers of John Price, it seemed there was plenty of damning testimony against the mulatto defendant, Charles Henry Langston. Damning evidence such as: Langston had a gun.

In his journal Henry Thoreau described among other things the alderfly Sialidae sialis spp:

May 2: Small pewee and young lackey caterpillars. I see on the Salix rostrata by railroad many honeybees laden with large and peculiarly orange-colored pellets of its pollen. P.M. – Up Assabet. Those swarms of small miller-like insects which fly low over the surface of the river, sometimes constantly falling to and touching the surface and then rising again. When at rest they are seen to be blackish-winged, but “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” flying they look light-colored. They flutter low and continuously over the same place. Theirs is a sort of dance. A peetweet [Spotted Sandpiper Actitis macularia] and its mate at Mantatuket Rock. The river seems really inhabited when the peetweet is back and those little light-winged millers (?). This bird does not return to our stream until the weather is decidedly pleasant and warm. He is perched on the accustomed rock. Its note peoples the river, like the prattle of children once more in the yard of a house that has stood empty. I am surprised by the tender yellowish green of the aspen leaf just-expanded suddenly, even like a fire, seen in the sun, against the dark-brown twigs of the wood, though these leafets are yet but thinly dispersed. It is very enlivening. I heard yesterday, and perhaps for several days, the soft purring sound of what I take to be the Rana palustris, breeding, though I did not this time see the frog. I feel no desire to go to California or Pike’s Peak, but I often think at night with inexpressible satisfaction and yearning of the arrowheadiferous sands of Concord. I have often spent whole afternoons, especially in the spring, pacing hack and forth over a sandy field, looking for these relics of a race. This is the gold which our sands yield. The soil of that rocky spot on Simon Brown’s land is quite ash-colored – now that the sod is turned up – by Indian fires, with numerous pieces of coal in it. There is a great deal of this ash-colored soil in the country. We do literally plow up the hearths of a people and plant in their ashes. The ashes of their fires color much of our soil.

ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION).

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

August 2, Tuesday: Horace Mann, Sr. died at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He would be succeeded as president of the college not by the mathematics professor that the religious conservatives had been plumping for, Ira Allen, but by Thomas Hill, who would serve until 1862.

August 2. I try the current above Dodd’s. There is a southwest breeze. A loose board moves faster than one with a sunk box, but soon drifts diagonally across and lodges at fifty feet. The box, sunk fourteen inches below the board, floats one hundred feet in nine minutes; sunk two and a half feet, in nine and a quarter minutes; sunk five and a half feet, it is not half-way in thirteen minutes, or, allowing for its starting this time a little out of the wind and current, say it is twenty minutes in going a hundred feet. I should infer from this that the swiftest and most uninterrupted current under all conditions was neither at the surface nor the bottom, but nearer the surface than the bottom. If the wind is down-stream, it is at the surface; if up-stream, it is beneath it, and at a depth proportionate to the strength of the wind. I think that there never ceases to be a downward current. Rudely calculating the capacity of the river here and comparing it with my boat’s place, I find it about as two HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” to one, and such is the slowness of the current, viz. nine minutes to four and a half to a hundred feet. If you are boating far it is extremely important to know the direction of the wind. If it blows strong up-stream, there will be a surface current flowing upward, another beneath flowing downward, and a very feeble one (in the lake-like parts) creeping downward next the bottom. A wind in which it is not worth the while to raise a sail will often blow your sailless boat up-stream. The sluggishness of the current, I should say, must be at different places as the areas of cross-sections at those places. That fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is, methinks, an August sound and is very inspiriting. It is a certain maturity in the year which it suggests. My thoughts are the less crude for it. There is a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer. I think that clams are chiefly found at shallow and slightly muddy places where there is a gradually shelving shore. Are not found on a very hard bottom, nor in deep mud. All of the river from the southwest of Wayland to off the Height of Hill [SIC] below Hill’s Bridge is meadowy. This is the true Musketaquid. The buttonwood bark strews the streets, – curled pieces. Is it not the effect of dry weather and heat? As birds shed their feathers, or moult, and beasts their hair. Neat rolls of bark (like cinnamon, but larger), light and dark brown.

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

August 28, Sunday: Sultan Abd ar-Rahman of Morocco died and was succeeded by his son Mohammad II.

On this day, using a drilling technique he had observed in a salt mine, Drake brought up from a depth of 69 feet his 1st samples of crude petroleum — mineral oil, in small quantities already a valuable ingredient of the medications of the time, and with a recognized potential as convertible into kerosene that could be burned in lamps (the conversion process would also create gasoline, but the gasoline would need to be discarded as there was no use for it).

Once this technology had had an opportunity to age awhile, Robert Chesebrough, while walking around and about the oilfield equipment, would notice that there was a jelly-like residue accumulating on the metal surfaces. “That’s ‘rod wax,’” he was told by a worker, “and it’s a bitch to keep it cleaned off the equipment but it comes in sort of handy when we get cut or burned. Take some of it with you, and if you get a cut or a burn, smear some of it on.” Chesebrough would accumulate a keg of this “rod wax” and take it to New-York — and “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” pretty soon he would be marketing something he would be terming “Vaseline.”

In a letter to cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson, Charles Emerson provided some insights about his feeling towards his beloved uncle Ralph Waldo Emerson and Concord. “I write to acknowledge the receipt on Saturday of the College Bond with your father’s signature, may it not have been signed in vain, I am very glad that his powers are returning, when his foot is thoroughly restored, I shall feel as if I had a better right to the use of mine.... When my olfactory organs are next turned toward Concord, I shall imagine that they perceive the distant commingled odor of Blood — good [ ] and fresh baked bread prepared by the skillful hands of Edith.” He expressed his anticipation of a warm visit to Concord to enjoy conversation with family. “Game parties are all very well, nothing ever was more delightful, but talk is another great thing, and I am counting the days before a good talk will come with all of you once more in Concord.”

August 28. P. M.–To Walden. A cool day; wind northwest. Need a half-thick coat. Thus gradually we withdraw into winter quarters. It is a clear, flashing air, and the shorn fields now look bright and yellowish and cool, tinkled and twittered over by bobolinks, goldfinches, sparrows, etc. You feel the less inclined to bathing this weather, and bathe from principle, when boys, who bathe for fun, omit it. Thick fogs these mornings. We have had little or no dog-days this year, it has been so dry. Pumpkins begin to be yellow. White cornel berries mostly fallen. The arrowhead is still a common flower and an important one. I see some very handsome ones in Cardinal Ditch, whose corollas are an inch and a half in diameter. The greater part, however, have gone to seed. The flowers I see at present are autumn flowers, such as have risen above the stubble in shorn fields since it was cut, whose tops have commonly been clipped by the scythe or the cow; or the late flowers, as asters and goldenrods, which grow in neglected fields and along ditches and hedgerows. The rhexia in Ebby Hubbard’s field is considerably past prime, and it is its reddish chalices which show most at a distance now. I should have looked ten days ago. Still it is handsome with its large yellow anthers against clear purple petals. It grows there in large patches with hardhack. I hear that some of the villagers were aroused from their sleep before light by the groans or bellowings of a bullock which an unskillful butcher was slaughtering at the slaughter-house. What morning or Memnonian music was that to ring through the quiet village? What did that clarion sing of? What a comment on our village life! Song of the dying bullock! But no doubt those who heard it inquired, as usual, of the butcher the next day, “What have you got to-day?” “Sirloin, good beefsteak, rattleran,” etc. I saw a month or more ago where pine-needles which had fallen (old ones) stood erect on low leaves of the forest floor, having stuck in, or passed through, them. They stuck up as a fork which falls from the table. Yet you would not think that they fell with sufficient force. The fruit of the sweet-gale is yellowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

YOUR GARDEN-VARIETY ACADEMIC HISTORIAN INVITES YOU TO CLIMB ABOARD A HOVERING TIME MACHINE TO SKIM IN METATIME BACK ACROSS THE GEOLOGY OF OUR PAST TIMESLICES, WHILE OFFERING UP A GARDEN VARIETY OF COGENT ASSESSMENTS OF OUR PROGRESSION. WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP! YOU SHOULD REFUSE THIS HELICOPTERISH OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL PAST, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD THINGS HAPPEN ONLY AS THEY HAPPEN. WHAT THIS SORT WRITES AMOUNTS, LIKE MERE “SCIENCE FICTION,” MERELY TO “HISTORY FICTION”: IT’SNOT WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” November 18, Friday: Charles Emerson wrote from Harvard College in Cambridge to his cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson, who was becoming a personal family confidant: “Father has said that I may come home and as I have been away nearly 4 months, I am glad enough to go.”

Waldo Emerson spoke at a meeting to raise money to pay for the expenses of defending Captain John Brown and the other participants in the Harpers Ferry raid, held in the Tremont Temple in Boston and presided over by John Albion Andrew.

Henry Thoreau made an entry in his journal in regard to Brown:

November 18. A fog this morning and yesterday morning, lasting till about 10 A.M. I looked into the Church of England liturgy, printed near the beginning of the last century, to find a service applicable to the case of Captain Brown. The only martyr recognized and provided for by it was King Charles the First!! Of all the inhabitants of England and of the world, he was the only one whom that church made a martyr and saint of!! And now for more than half a century it had celebrated his martyrdom by an annual service! What a satire on the church is that! An apothecary in New Bedford told R. [RICKETSON WAS IN CONCORD FROM NOV. 19TH TO 24TH. HE WALKED AND SUPPED WITH THOREAU ON THE 20TH AND WENT TO VISIT HIM THE NEXT DAY.] the other day that a man (a Mr. Leonard) of Springfield told him that he once attended a meeting in Springfield where a woman was exhibited as in a mesmeric state, insensible to pain,–a large and fleshy woman,–and the spectators were invited to test her condition with pins or otherwise. After some had tried, one among them came forward with a vial of cowage, and, after stating to the company that it would produce intolerable irritation in the skin, he proceeded to rub a little on the woman’s bare arm and on her neck. She immediately winced under it, whereupon he took out another vial containing sweet oil, and, applying a little of that, relieved her. He then stated that any one present might apply to his skin as much as he pleased. Some came forward and he laid bare his breast and when they applied it sparingly and hesitatingly, he said, “Rub away, gentlemen,–as much as you like,” and he betrayed no sign of irritation. That man was John Brown.

[THOREAU WOULD MAKE NO ENTRIES IN HIS JOURNAL FOR NOVEMBER 19th-21st]

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1860

August 22, Wednesday: Some newspapers on the East Coast were reporting that, in Ellis County, Texas, where numerous reports of poisoning by strychnine were being circulated, something like 22 to 25 black men were under arrest, suspected of having attempted to set several dozen structure fires, and were scheduled to be lynched at Waxahachie on that Saturday, July 28th. According to this report the only thing that had intercepted this act of race-based destructiveness was that a woman who was sitting up with a sick friend had witnessed the starting of these blazes.

August 22, Wednesday: P.M. — Row to Bittern Cliff. Now, when the mikania is conspicuous, the bank is past prime, [Vide Sept. 5.] for lilies are far gone, the pontederia is past prime, willows and button-bushes begin to look the worse for the wear thus early,–the lower or older leaves of the willows are turned yellow and decaying, – and many of the meadows are shorn. Yet now is the time for the cardinal-flower. The already, methinks, yellowing willows and button-bushes, the half-shorn meadows, the higher water on their edges, with wool-grass standing over it, with the notes of flitting bobolinks and red-wings of this year, in rustling flocks, all tell of the fall. I hear two or three times behind me the loud creaking note of a wood duck which I have scared up, which goes to settle in a new place. Some deciduous trees are now at least as dark as evergreens, the alders are darker than white pines, and as dark as pitch, as I now see them. I try the temperature of the river at Bittern Cliff, the deep place. The air over river at 4.30 is 81; the water at the top, 78; poured from a bottle (into a dipper) which I let lie on the bottom half an hour, 73, – or 5 difference. When I merely sunk the thermometer and pulled it up rapidly it stood 731, though not in exactly the same place, – say two rods off. When I used to pick the berries for dinner on the East Quarter hills I did not eat one till I had done, for going a- berrying implies more things than eating the berries. They at home got only the pudding: I got the forenoon out of doors, and the appetite for the pudding. It is true, as is said, that we have as good a right to make berries private property as to make grass and trees such; but what I chiefly regret is the, in effect, dog-in-the-manger result, for at the same time that we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field, we exclude them from gathering health and happiness and inspiration and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries, which yet we shall not gather ourselves there, nor even carry to market. We strike only one more blow at a simple and wholesome relation to nature. As long as the berries are free to all comers they are beautiful, though they may be few and small, but tell me that is a blueberry swamp which somebody has hired. and I shall not want even to look at it. In laying claim for the first time to the spontaneous fruit of our pastures we are, accordingly, aware of a little meanness inevitably, and the gay berry party whom we turn away naturally look down on and despise us. If it were left to the berries to say who should have them, is it not likely that they would prefer to be gathered by the party of children in the hay-rigging, who have come to have a good time merely? I do not see clearly that these successive losses are ever quite made up to us. This is one of the taxes which we pay for having a railroad. Almost all our improvements, so called, tend to convert the country into the town. This suggests what origin and foundation many of our laws and institutions have, and I do not say this by way of complaining of this particular custom. Not that I love Cæsar less, but Rome more. Yes, and a potato-field is a rich sight to me, even when the vines are half decayed and blackened and their decaying scent fills the air, though unsightly to many; for it speaks then more loudly and distinctly of potatoes than ever. I see their weather-beaten brows peeping out of the hills here and there, for the earth cannot contain them, when the creak of the cricket and the shrilling of the locust prevail more and more, in the sunny end of summer. There the confident husbandman lets them lie for the present, even as if he knew not of them, or as if that property were insured, so carelessly rich he is. He relaxes now his labors somewhat, seeing to their successful end, and takes long mornings, perchance, stretched in the shade of his ancestral elms. Returning down the river, when I get to Clamshell I see great flocks of the young red-wings and some crow blackbirds on the trees and the ground. They are not very shy, but only timid, as inexperienced birds are. I do not know what they find to eat on this half bare, half grassy bank, but there they hop about by hundreds, while as many more are perched on the neighboring trees; and from time to time they all rise from the earth and wheel and withdraw to the trees, but soon return to the ground again. The red-wings are almost reddish about the throat. The crow blackbirds have some notes now just like the first croaks of the wood frog in the spring. Sorghum nutans well out (behind the birch); how long? Paspalum ditto. The recent heavy rains have washed away the bank here considerably, and it looks and smells more mouldy with human relics than ever. I therefore find myself inevitably exploring it. On the edge of the ravine whose HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” beginning I witnessed, one foot beneath the surface and just over a layer some three inches thick of pure shells and ashes, – a gray-white line on the face of the cliff – I find several pieces of Indian pottery with a rude ornament on it, not much more red than the earth itself. Looking farther, I find more fragments, which have been washed down the sandy slope in a stream, as far as ten feet. I find in all thirty-one pieces, averaging an inch in diameter and about a third of an inch thick. Several of them made part of the upper edge of the vessel, and have a rude ornament encircling them in three rows, as if pricked with a stick in the soft clay, and also another line on the narrow edge itself. At first I thought to match the pieces again, like a geographical puzzle, but I did not find that any I [GOT] belonged together. The vessel must have been quite large, and I have not got nearly all of it. It appears to have been an impure clay with much sand and gravel in it, and I think a little pounded shell. It is [OF] very unequal thickness, some of the unadorned pieces (probably the bottom) being half an inch thick, while near the edge it is not more than a quarter of an inch thick. There was under this spot and under the layer of shells a manifest hollowness in the ground, not yet filled up. I find many small pieces of bone in the soil of this bank, probably of animals the Indians ate. In another part of the bank, in the midst of a much larger heap of shells which has been exposed, I found a delicate stone tool of this form and size:

of a soft slate-stone. It is very thin and sharp on each side edge, and in the middle is not more than an eighth of an inch thick. I suspect that this was used to open clams with. It is curious that I had expected to find as much as this, and in this very spot too, before I reached it (I mean the pot). Indeed, I never find a remarkable Indian relic – and I find a good many – but I have first divined its existence, and planned the discovery of it. Frequently I have told myself distinctly what it was to be before I found it. The river is fifteen and three quarters inches above summer level. [And about the same the 25th.] HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE AUGUST 22D, 1860 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, THURSDAY, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1862

May: The Reverend Daniel Foster brought his wife and their 4 children back from Centralia, Kansas to Boston so that he might enlist in the Union army as a Chaplain. US CIVIL WAR

Charles Emerson left Harvard College at the beginning of this year’s Recess, enlisting as a private with the 7th Regiment of the New York State Militia at Baltimore, Maryland. He would serve 3 months on garrison duty and then be appointed as a 2d Lieutenant in the 174th New York Volunteer Infantry.

Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, commanding forces in the Shenandoah Valley, had attacked Union forces during late March, forcing them into a retreat across the Potomac River. As a result, during this month Union troops were being rushed into the protection of the federal capital, Washington DC.

Wang T‘ao had written, under the pseudonym Wang Wan, to a Taiping Christian leader, proposing tactics against the Qing military and suggesting that the westerners were not the enemy of the Taiping Kingdom. He had proposed that the real enemy of the Chinese Christians was the Buddhist Qing government in Beijing. If the Christian army could achieve victory over the Buddhist army led by Zeng Guofan, then the westerners might side with the Taiping Kingdom. When the Qing army captured Shanghai, this letter fell into the hands of the Qing government and Emperor Tongzhi ordered his arrest. Wang took refuge in the British Consulate of Hong Kong, and would remain there for more than 4 months.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” June 24, Thursday: Nicolae Cretulescu replaced Apostol Arsache as Prime Minister of Romania.

During his period at Harvard College Charles Emerson was stimulated by the conflict between the states. He wrote to his cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson from Baltimore that “My intention is to prepare myself by every means during these three months for the duties of a soldier. Then (if I am fortunate enough to keep clear of typhoid fever & consumption & dysentery) to urge to the utmost my right to go the war in earnest…. My mother and father will feel very badly about it, and how many have been pleased at sending off their children? Why not say thus, it is no worse for my father & mother than it has been for thousands of other!” He wrote about the personal sacrifice he envisioned by enlisting for active duty, viewing military service as a higher calling: “Socrates says that we are to give up father and mother and all for our country.” He wrote also that “I am very glad that you think it right for me to go into the army. I am selfish enough to be glad also that I am to report at Concord before bidding goodbye.”

Confederate President Jefferson Davis visited the headquarters of newly appointed commander General Robert E. Lee just north of Richmond as Lee was initiating the Seven Days battle at Mechanicsville, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” Summer: The slaves of Washington DC were freed by Act of Congress (not by the President’s Emancipation Proclamation, which declared in its fine print that it had nothing whatever to do with them) with full “compensation” being awarded to their owners.2

When, during the Civil War, the federal government voted in this manner to purchase all the slaves of all the approximately 900 slavemasters residing in the nation’s capital, and issue emancipation papers to these former slaves — do you suppose that to have been merely benevolence mingled with fear? Or do you suppose that it was not only benevolence mingled with fear, but also pork-barrel politics as usual? Is there a remote possibility that such compensations issued during the Civil War to the slavemasters of the Washington area, “purchasing” from them their slaves and “manumitting” those slaves without following mandated procedures for providing such freed individuals with any mode of independent subsistence, amounted in actuality to some sort of payola scheme for the white federal executives and white federal legislators and white federal judiciary? It has occurred to me that such white officials of the federal government would have been among the primary beneficiaries of this government funding arrangement, and that among the beneficiaries, they were the ones who held all the political influence, influence over such decisionmaking. Is this thought, that payment represented a way for them to dip into the war-tax coffers and take themselves out a handful or two, a Vulgar Marxist thought? Or, was this money intended to neutralize these officials, to get them to stand aside while the martial law pronunciation known as the Emancipation Proclamation was later implemented? Do you suppose that these folks could have moved all their slaves from their homes in other states into the DC area, in order to dispose of them for compensation and thus ensure that they themselves would not be financially impacted by any later freedom scheme that might be imposed by the federal government?

President Lincoln attempted to make a covenant with God and asked for a sign. If God would allow him to win

2. In “It’s a Family Affair” in Larry Hudson, ed., WORKING TOWARD FREEDOM (1994), Mary Beth Corrigan has pointed out that generally, when free black Americans in border states owned slaves, it was as a step toward freeing a relative of theirs. For instance, during the 1850s, approximately 10% of the slaves who had been freed by manumissions in deeds (by way of contrast with manumission in wills) had been freed by a member of their own family who had specifically purchased them in order to free them. Of approximately 900 former slavemasters who in 1862 petitioned the US Congress for compensation upon the manumission of their Washington slaves, about a dozen were free black Americans. All but one of these had merely “owned” members of their own families — for instance a man “owning” his wife or his children. Such cases may have been created by the fact that getting a certificate of manumission was expensive: the government was charging $50 for each such pieces of paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” the battle at Antietam, he pledged, he would understand this to be an instruction to free the slaves of America.

When the news of the success of this battle arrived in Washington, the president initiated the process which would lead to the Emancipation Proclamation, a proclamation that all the slaves whom he lacked the power to free, became free, while all the slaves whom he possessed the power to free, remained slaves. (Isn’t that nice? He wasn’t just setting out to fool all the people all the time — as part of this he was going to play a sleight-of- hand trick on God! “Oh Jeez,” God is going to say, “I just didn’t notice that the Prez only freed the ones he couldn’t free! Hey, they got me again!”)

Charles Emerson first served in the 7th regiment of New York. He then joined the Metropolitan Brigade in New-York City at the age of 21. The Metropolitan Brigade was organized under the direction of the Metropolitan Police of New-York City and police commissioner, at the time, James Brown. His length of service was for a 3-year tour as a 2d lieutenant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

With black Americans being enlisted in the US Army, most black physicians who enlisted were assigned to work in hospitals in Washington. This included Dr. James McCune Smith of New-York.

F.A.P. Barnard went to Washington DC and was given direction of the map and chart department of the coast Survey under Alexander Dallas Bache. This included the preparation and publication of war maps. While thus engaged he would publish a “Letter to the President of the United States by a Refugee” in which he would denounce slavery, the “giant conspiracy” of southern leaders to leave the Union, and the northern Copperheads who favored the South.

In about this timeframe Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, faced during the civil war with a shortage of male pupils, was finding it necessary to shut down his school in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

October 22, Wednesday: Private Charles Emerson was appointed as a 2d Lieutenant of the 174th New York Volunteer Infantry (this regiment would be consolidated with the 162d New York Volunteers).

There was fighting at Old Fort Wayne / Beaty’s Prairie. US CIVIL WAR

November 15, Saturday: Charles Emerson wrote to his cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson from New-York about the Metropolitan Brigade, “I have wanted to be able to write you something definite about myself. On the 2nd of November I was mustered into the United States Service as a 2nd Lieut in the regiment recruiting as the 5th Metropolitan. On Thursday last this regiment was mustered in as the 174th N.Y.V.” US CIVIL WAR

In the Minnesota territory, the column of race hostages reached a camp west of Mankato. RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” November 20, Thursday: Charles Emerson was commissioned a 2d lieutenant in the New York 174th Infantry, Company I. US CIVIL WAR

The date of November 20, 1861 specified in Chapter XIX of Part I of LITTLE WOMEN, OR,MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY was a blunder. Louisa May Alcott was trying to write as if the described events had begun during the Christmas season of 1861 and were continuing into that of 1862 — so this should have been November 20, 1862:

MY LAST WILL AND TESTIMENT …

And now having disposed of my most valuable property I hope all will be satisfied and not blame the dead. I forgive every one, and trust we may all meet when the trump shall sound. Amen. To this will and testiment I set my hand and seal on this 20th day of Nov. Anni Domino 1861.

AMY CURTIS MARCH

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” November 29, Saturday: Quartet for piano and strings no.2 by Johannes Brahms was performed for the initial time, in the Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, the composer at the keyboard in his initial solo concert in the city. The positive reviews create a reputation for Brahms in Vienna.

Charles Emerson wrote a letter of thanks to his cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson for her father Waldo Emerson’s letter to General Banks in support of his military capabilities. “Please to thank Uncle Waldo for the 2nd letter to General Banks.” US CIVIL WAR

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1864

President Abraham Lincoln called for 500,000 more enlistments, to serve 3 years or the duration of civil war.

New-York photographer Mathew Brady traveled through the war-torn South to record scenes of the conflict — including for some reason lots and lots of people lying down on the ground holding very still.

Charles Emerson was transferred to the New York 162d Infantry, Company B with the rank of 2d lieutenant. During the period he served in the 162nd, the brigade saw action in the Red River Campaign in Louisiana. “We are on our way to New Orleans to report to Gen. Banks.”

James Redpath published a series of cheap paperbound books categorized as BOOKS FOR THE CAMPFIRES, books he himself characterized as “quality dime novels,” principally intended for sale at 10¢ to Union soldiers.

The authors he republished, without any payment of royalties of course, would include Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Jonathan Swift. On April 15th he would abandon this venture and late in the year, a cat that always landed on its feet, he would begin to serve as a war correspondent with the armies of General George Henry Thomas and General William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina.

1st Lieutenant and Adjutant Richard Realf served during part of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s advance to Atlanta, Georgia while writing poetry.

Adam Gurowski’s DIARY, FROM NOVEMBER 18, 1862, TO OCTOBER 18, 1863 (more notes on the civil war). 11/18/1862 TO 10/18/1863

The 1863 regulation uniform for chaplains in the Union Army was again revised: General Orders 247 August 25 1864. The Uniform for Chaplains in the Army, prescribed in General Order No 102, November 25, 1861, is hereby republished with modifications, as follows: Plain black frock coat with standing collar, one row of nine black buttons on the breast, the “herring bone” of black braid around the buttons and button holes. Plain black pantaloons. Black felt hat, or forage cap with a gold embroidered wreath in front, on black velvet ground, encircling the letters U.S. in silver, old English characters. On Occasion of ceremony, a plain chapeau de bras many be worn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” BY ORDER OF THE SECRETARY OF WAR.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

July 2, Saturday: 2d Lieutenant Charles Emerson became a 1st Lieutenant of the 162d New York Volunteers, Company K. US CIVIL WAR

Documentation of the international slave trade, per W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: “Message of the President ... communicating ... information in regard to the African slave trade.” –SENATE EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT, 38 Cong. 1 sess. No. 56.

By United States statute, the coastwise slave-trade was prohibited forever (§9 of Appropriation Act repeals §§8 and 9 of Act of 1807; STATUTES AT LARGE, XIII. 353).

The Wade-Davis Bill passed with only one dissenting Republican vote. However, President Abraham Lincoln refused to sign it. Lincoln defended his decision by telling Zachariah Chandler, one of the bill’s supporters, that it was a mere matter of timing: “this bill was placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns. It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.” Six days later Lincoln would issue a proclamation explaining his dissent. Senator Benjamin Wade would argue that the President had rejected it, not for the reasons which he was stating, but simply because he did not wish “to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration.”

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project “Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1865

February 10, Friday: Parker Pillsbury wrote to give Charles Wesley Slack permission to print an item.

1st Lieutenant Charles Emerson of the 162d New York Volunteers, Company K was promoted to Captain. He would see service in Louisiana and Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

May 21, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Saw General Sheridan and his cavalry to-day; a strong, attractive sight; the men were mostly young, (a few middle-aged,) superb-looking fellows, brown, spare, keen, with well-worn clothing, many with pieces of water-proof cloth around their shoulders, hanging down. They dash’d along pretty fast, in wide close ranks, all spatter’d with mud; no holiday soldiers; brigade after brigade. I could have watch’d for a week. Sheridan stood on a balcony, under a big tree, coolly smoking a cigar. His looks and manner impress’d me favorably.

US CIVIL WAR Captain Charles Emerson resigned from the US Army. He most likely returned to live with his parents. He would become a stock broker in New-York City, at the firm Smyth & Emerson, for nearly 2 years. During this period he would serve as treasurer of the Harvard Club in New-York. He served as Treasurer of the Albany and Boston Mining Company implying that he went to live in Massachusetts after being a stock broker.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1866

September 10, Monday: Edward Elgar attended the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester for the 1st time.

Charles Emerson wrote to cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson on stationary from the Albany and Boston Mining Co. at 22 Broad Street in New-York that he had managed to stops smoking, “So far reasserted the power of mastery over self as to knock off smoking entirely for this the sixth (6) day.” He signed that letter, however, as the company’s secretary based in Boston.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

“Clamshell Bank” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1867

The Reverend Professor James Kendall Hosmer belatedly received the A.M. degree in theology from Harvard University.

Charles Emerson received the degree of A.B. from Harvard College.

Léopold Trouvelot, a Massachusetts researcher associated with Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, was experimenting with various silk-producing moths including the “European” gypsy moth Porthetrea dispar or Lymantria dispar.3 The investigator reported that he had put five acres of woodland in Medford, Massachusetts within an 8-foot fence, and covered this area over with nets adequate to keep out all birds in order to experiment with these silk-producing moths.4 He was intending to breed a disease-resistant silkworm (and do good and do well). He would accidentally release a very small number of European gypsy moths into the vacant lot next door, which is to say, into the ecosystem. Oops.5

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS Dr. Samuel Kneeland, Jr. began to serve as an instructor in zoology and physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An avid collector, he would venture on collection expeditions to Brazil, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Iceland (he does not seem to have brought back with him anything quite as devastating as the gypsy moth). He would contribute over 1,000 articles, mostly on zoological and medical subjects, to APPLETON’S AMERICAN CYCLOPÆDIA. THE SCIENCE OF 1867

August 1, Thursday: The 4th and final instar of Richard Wagner’s grosse romantische Oper Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf Wartburg (Tannhäuser and the Singers' Contest at Wartburg Castle) to his own words was performed for the initial time, in the Königliches Hof-und Nationaltheater, München.

Charles Emerson became treasurer of the Albany and Boston Mining Company with offices in Boston, that would later remove to New-York City.

3. “Dispar” referred to the fact that the males and females are of different colors. 4. This risk was entirely unnecessary as it was run due to the fact that at that time the “European” gypsy moth (which actually had originated in Japan) was incorrectly being classified by entomologists and taxonomists as in the same genus with the silkworm Bombyx mori. No, it was all a stupid Harvard mistake, folks, and we’re sure embarrassed about that. 5. We may well note that there is no monument in Medford, Massachusetts to mark the “Forefathers Tree” in which the progenitors of the gypsy moths of America “stepped ashore” in 1867 or 1868 in this New World. Is this or is this not discrimination between one kind of intrusive, highly honored, and another kind, decidedly unwanted? –And why do we continue so gratuitously to insult Gypsies, after we have learned that it is so very wrong to insult Jews? HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1868

February 6, Thursday: Demetrios Georgiou Voulgaris replaced Aristides Moraitinis as prime minister of Greece.

Susan Woodward Haven Emerson died at the age of 61.

March 6, Friday: Fantaisie (III) in C for organ by César Franck was performed for the initial time, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris by the composer.

After the death of his mother, Charles Emerson relocated with the Albany and Boston Mining Company from Boston to New-York City (however, in less than a year he would sail for Europe).

September 13, Sunday: William Emerson died at the age of 67 after having suffered over several months from a wasting disease. Probably he had tuberculosis, and perhaps in addition some form of cancer. Upon his death, the body was sealed immediately in lead and shipped overnight to Concord, Massachusetts for burial.

Charles Emerson had had a difficult year, since his mother Susan had died in February and then his father William in September. He would soon depart for Europe. He may have desired to mimic his father, for he would be a student of medicine in Germany and Austria (although it would seem that he did not complete a course of study or practice as a physician). HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1871

September 18, Monday: Charles Emerson got married at the American Consulate in Berne, Switzerland with Theresia Keveschi or Steiner or Weiner of Veszprém, Hungary. Initially the couple would live at a vineyard of St. Aubin, Canton Neuchâtel, Switzerland but later the couple would relocate to Paris.

Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau wrote from Concord to her cousin Marianne or Mary Anne Mitchell Dunbar of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, telling of Concord friends, describing her current poor health, and her current reading: “My mother is greatly blessed in retaining with rare vigor, all her faculties.... I managed to spend a week with a friend in Cohasset, in Aug.”6 CYNTHIA DUNBAR THOREAU

6. Would this visit to Cohasset perchance have been with Mrs. Ellen Sewall Osgood? HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1874

February 16, Monday: HMS Challenger, on a scientific mission, made itself the 1st steamship to penetrate the Antarctic Circle.

In the Battle of Las Guásimas, the Cuban rebel army was again victorious against larger Spanish forces. Antonio Maceo, with 200 cavalry and 50 infantry, attacked a column of 2,000 men sent from Camagüey. In all, the Spaniards poured 6,000 men and six pieces of artillery into the battle, but were obliged to retreat.

Between this date and May 25th, Charles Emerson would write to cousin Ellen Tucker Emerson from Paris describing his feelings for his wife Theresia Keveschi or Steiner or Weiner of Veszprém, Hungary, “Now that you know how Teresi is called by her name we have adopted the true Magyar spelling. She is very sorry to have left your letter to her so long unanswered but finds it hard to bring herself to letter writing although since she has taken up her French again her enthusiasm is such that the inkstand is seldom off the table.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1879

“The Wayside” was owned by Mr. and Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop (Mrs. Lathrop was Rose Hawthorne), who would make it their home until their redheaded little son, Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, would die in 1881. OLD HOUSES

In all likelihood, by this point Charles Emerson and his wife Theresia Emerson had returned from Paris to Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1882

May 1, Monday: According to the New York Times, nephew Charles Emerson had been a pallbearer in the funeral procession for his uncle Waldo and at the cemetery: “The Concord Social Club led off, and then came the following, acting as pall-bearers all relatives of Mr. Emerson: Charles Emerson and Haven Emerson, his nephews, William H. Forbes, his son-in-law; ….” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1883

Henry C. Wheeler purchased the Thoreau farmhouse at 215 Virginia Road. THOREAU RESIDENCES

By this period, definitely, Charles Emerson and Theresia Emerson had returned from Paris to Concord, Massachusetts, and had taken up residence on the edge of town: land records indicate the sale of a newly constructed house at 26 Elm Street, by a Mr. Emery, to Charles Emerson, who would be listed as the occupant of that house along with his wife Theresia Emerson from 1901 to 1909.

Bronson Alcott’s Lectures and Remarks in Concord Lectures on Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass., Moses King, 1883, 13 f., 31 f., 109 f., 129 f.

Bronson Alcott’s Autobiographical Collection, IV. (All the reviews of Conversations with Children on the Gospels are preserved in this volume.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” Dr. Edward Jarvis, who had been a physician in Concord from 1832 into 1837, drew, from memory, the “Map of Concord Mass Central Village as it was 1810 to 1820,” at a scale of 115 feet to the inch, with an inset showing a profile of the Mill Dam stores on each side of this street as of that period, which now is on display at the Concord Free Public Library. To my understanding, this depiction has never been evaluated for accuracy.

Louis A. Surette donated the weathervane that had served atop Concord’s 2d meetinghouse, constructed between 1667 and 1673, and had then continued in service atop Concord’s 1st courthouse in 1719, to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” Concord Free Public Library.

The metal, although of course corroded, indicates “1673.” Although we are unable to document this, it is reported as the earliest American-made weathervane known to be still in existence — you can make it out, just barely, more or less, as an ambiguous mark in Amos Doolittle’s 1775 “A View of the Town of Concord”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1889

November 1, Friday: The New England Deaconess Association was incorporated as the New England Deaconess Home and Training School of Boston, Massachusetts. According to the articles of organization, its purpose would be “to train Evangelistic workers in both home and foreign fields and to utilize the energies of Christian women in active religious work” (in 1901 the name of the corporation would change to “New England Deaconess Association”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1901

The New England Deaconess Home and Training School of Boston, Massachusetts became the “New England Deaconess Association.”

Boston’s Elevated Railway opened from Sullivan Square to Dudley Square.

The 1st engine-powered farm tractors had been introduced in 1868. These had been constructed as small road locomotives and burned wood or coal. Gasoline had 1st successfully been used as an engine fuel in 1887. In this year Charles W. Hart and Charles H. Parr of Charles City, Iowa created the 1st gasoline-powered tractor, thus creating what would be after a lag period of slightly more than a century an enormously dangerous situation for the human species. In 1903 Hart and Parr would erect a factory devoted to the manufacture of their device. Half a century later there would be more fossil-fuel-powered tractors than horses on American farms. This series of inventions therefore forever forced the cost of enough calories to avoid starvation to vary proportionally with the price that crude oil could command per barrel on the commodities markets — at the end of this lag period of one century, the production of grain would have become so utterly dependent upon farm machinery fueled by nonrenewable fossil fuels that a spike in the commodities price of crude per barrel at the World Trade Mart in Chicago in 2008 would cause poor people in Haiti to descend upon town dumps in a frantic search for discarded food.

The Reverend James De Normandie, D.D.’s HARRIET RYAN ALBEE; A MEMORIAL SKETCH (Boston: G.H. Ellis, printer). Harriet Ryan Albee had been born on March 5, 1829 in Boston and grew up on Brewster’s Island in Boston Harbor, in a Roman Catholic family of straited circumstances. She had come to manage a charitable refuge for destitute and incurable women that was at first on Channing Street in Boston (hence the name “Channing Home”) and later on South Street. While visiting her friends at Chicopee, Massachusetts she had met Mr. John Albee, who was preaching at the time in the Unitarian church there (evidently a job as a temporary replacement preacher while a minister was on vacation), and they had married in 1864. The Albee home was a historic one known as Jaffrey Cottage, by the sea in Newcastle, New Hampshire. The marriage was childless. Eventually she succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis and, becoming an inmate of the Channing Home for destitute and ill women that she had for so long managed, had died in Boston in 1873. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1910

Peter Chardon Brooks (1831-1920) of West Medford (son of Judge Gorham Brooks and grandson of “the wealthiest man in New England,” the first Peter Chardon Brooks, who had descended from Caleb Brooks a son of Thomas Brooks, one of the first settlers at Concord) paid for a plaque on the site of the graves at Concord Battle Ground. The Army soldiers who were killed there were not to be permitted to rest in peace, for their grave could be made to bear a fraught stony identity-politics message: HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” In Concord, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was conceding that the area leading toward Walden Pond had been considered by Concordians, rather than as a favored spot for picnics and recreations or for vacation cabins and fishing shanties, to have been “of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters.”

A modestly annotated edition of WALDEN with introduction and thumbnail biography of author was produced by Raymond Macdonald Alden, PhD, of Leland Stanford Junior University in California: TIMELINE OF WALDEN

VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

It was this Associate Professor of English’s considered opinion that the strictly literary value of the work was very uneven. Thoreau had written freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes Thoreau’s pencil seemed to linger and amble when a critic might have preferred for it to have proceeded more directly to some point. In his considered opinion this writing was certainly longer than it needed to be and it would be perfectly all right for a busy undergrad to flip past chapters six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen — although “by no means omitting” the final, eighteenth chapter.

(This volume contains what perhaps was the first attempt at annotations and notes to the text. One of Associate Professor Raymond Macdonald Alden’s suggestions was that implicit in the pages of Thoreau’s WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” might have been a reference to the American woman poet, Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney — but alas, it seems the good professor was mistaken here as well!)

November 23, Wednesday: The Concord Enterprise ran a small advertisement: “Registry for Nurses at Concord Hospital. Graduate and Experienced nurses will be furnished by telephoning 206 Concord.”

“Dr.” Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American-born homeopath, was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London. He had been one of the 1st murderers captured with the help of the wireless telegraph. Following the January 1910 murder of his wife Corrine “Cora” Henrietta Turner Crippen (known onstage as “Belle Elmore”) at their home in London, “Dr.” Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve, a young typist, had attempted to escape aboard the Canadian Pacific liner SS Montrose from Antwerp to Quebec, but had been spotted among the saloon passengers by the ship’s captain, Henry George Kendall, who had sent a telegram to Scotland Yard just before his vessel went out of range: “Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.” Chief Inspector Walter Dew had boarded a faster White Star liner, SS Laurentic, at Liverpool and was waiting to board the SS Montrose in the St. Lawrence River and confront “Dr.” Crippen: Dr Crippen killed Belle Elmore Ran away with Miss le Neve Right across the ocean blue Followed by Inspector Dew Ship’s ahoy, naughty boy!

December 7, Wednesday: Mrs. Theresia Weiner Emerson died at the age of 63 (the body would be interred in Lot #88 & 89 on the Ridge Path, Location 13, in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the spot alongside being reserved for her husband Charles Emerson who had some 5 years of life remaining).

Bolivian troops ambushed a garrison of Peruvian guards in a battle at the disputed border region at Guayabal.

December 18, Sunday: The Concord Enterprise reported that on the basis of a gift of land and money to the New England Deaconess Association there would be a new hospital opening in Concord: “The gift comes through Mr. [Charles] Emerson, whose wife [Theresia “Terche” Keveschi Steiner Emerson] was recently as inmate of the Brookline hospital, and who made an offer to the institution before her death which recently occurred [she had died on December 7th], the hospital will be known as the Concord hospital and will be run on much the same principles as the Deaconess Hospital in Longwood, where patients who cannot afford to pay are taken free, and those who are able to pay do so.”

December 31, Saturday: Charles Emerson granted to the New England Deaconess Association of Boston 6 tracts of land in Concord, totaling more than 80 acres, in a deed recorded in the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds in Cambridge (Book 3574. page 147), asserting that this was “a token of my appreciation in providing a home for those needing refuge, care or shelter, and receiving payment for the same from such as are able to pay therefore, and in devising and carrying out plans for the pro[], relief, education and training of neglected, poor, sick or unfortunate persons, being desirous of assisting in said works….” (He signed the deed as, legally, a man “having no wife” and, as we can see, did not refer explicitly to the fact that the New England Deaconess Association had been involved in his own wife’s illness and care prior to her death). This deed is recorded in Book 3574 on page 143 and lists one of the tracts as consisting of 23.18 acres, another as 2½ acres, another as 4 acres, another as 12.8 acres, another as 26.45 acres, and the final one as 12.0 acres. Mr. Emerson reserved for himself a portion of the 1st tract land granted, “for my life, a part of said premises knows as the “Cottage Lot” with the buildings thereon, containing about one and one-half (1½) acres…” Mr. Emerson also directed the New England Association to permit “the well-behaved public to pass and repass between dawn and dusk HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” from said road to said river over said part of said granted premises as may be convenient to said Deaconess Association or such succeeding corporation … and also if not inconsistent with the purposes for which said premises are used as aforesaid by said Deaconess Association or such succeeding corporation or association to permit, subject to such reasonable regulations as aforesaid, the said public between dawn and dusk to stroll upon the knolls and on the river’s bank in said granted premises.” This language acted much like a zoning ordnance preserving the use of the land for certain purposes should the New England Deaconess Association stray from it core mission. He stipulated that “this conveyance is also made upon condition that said Deaconess Association or such succeeding corporation or association shall not mortgage or otherwise encumber the granted premises or any part thereof, then I hereby grant the above described premises to the said Inhabitants of Concord and its assigns for any public purpose in fee simple forever.…”7

7. At the time of the gift of land from Charles Emerson, the New England Deaconess Association had been in existence for 21 years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1911

Daniel Chester French sculpted the seated figure of Waldo Emerson that is in the Concord Free Public Library. (He had done a clay model from life, of this friend of his father Henry Flagg French, and from this clay model in 1879 had already created two busts and a head. We may note that although as a young sculptor he had done portrait work of local people he knew personally –among them Simon Brown who was married to Henry Flagg French’s sister Ann, and Elizabeth Rockwood Hoar– since he had been only twelve when Henry Thoreau had died, he had never had a chance to get to know him.)

Charles Emerson donated 80 acres of land along the Sudbury River in Concord, including Clamshell Hill, and $20,000, to create a 14-bed cottage hospital. A portrait of this donor, specially presented to the institution by Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, would hang in a corridor of the original hospital building.

Allen French’s THE SIEGE OF BOSTON.

VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

Moorfield Storey’s and Edward Waldo Emerson’s EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR: A MEMOIR (Houghton Mifflin) made a passing mention of the Concord mass-murderer Lieutenant Daniel Hoar. EBENEZER ROCKWOOD HOAR

The two daughters of Joanna Hoar [the 1st American ancestress], by marriage with Henry Flint and Edmund Quincy, became the sources of the Adams and Quincy families. Her youngest son, Leonard Hoar, was educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1650, and of which he became the President in 1672, the first who was a graduate of the college. Thus early was the relation established between Harvard College and the Hoar family. The eldest son who accompanied her to this country, John Hoar, when he grew up settled in Concord, which was then “the extreme western frontier town of English settlement in New England.” Thenceforward the family dwelt in Concord, Lincoln, Lexington, Waltham and Watertown, within a circle of six miles’ radius. John Hoar was a lawyer and a citizen, whose thought, speech, and action were fearlessly independent of others in a day when magistrates and ministers were formidable. His humane and brave conduct in sheltering and protecting the poor group of “Praying Indians” of Nashobah, when, in King Philip’s War, a cruelty begotten of fear took momentary possession of Concord, is recorded in Walcott’s “Concord in the Colonial Period.” In 1 HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” 676, he went into the wilderness and redeemed Mrs. Rowlandson from captivity, a very dangerous expedition. His independence in the matter of church-going, and his remarks on the preaching of Rev. Edward Bulkeley, proved “an expensive luxury” to him, as Mr. Walcott says, for he was fined and temporarily disbarred; but his life reflected honor on his name. John Hoar’s son Daniel was a lieutenant and presumably had some military experience, but Daniel’s son John “was a soldier in the old French War and was a prisoner among the Indians for three months,” serving also as selectman of Lexington. From him came Samuel Hoar of Lincoln, who, as a Lieutenant of the Lincoln Company, was at Concord bridge on April 19, 1775, where also were two great-grandfathers and three great-uncles of Judge Hoar. Lieutenant Hoar served in the Provincial and Continental forces, and fought at Saratoga. Later he was a magistrate and sat in the Legislature of Massachusetts, first, as a representative from Lincoln, and afterwards as senator. He married Susannah Pierce, whose father was Colonel Abijah Pierce of Lincoln, one of the town’s Committee of Safety in the days preceding the outbreak of the Revolution, and colonel of a regiment of Minute-men. Their first-born son was Samuel, who through a long life sustained and advanced the simple and brave ideals of Massachusetts.

October 7, Saturday: Karl Albert Staaff replaced Solomon Arvid Achates Lindman as Prime Minister of Sweden.

One may well presume that Charles Emerson had been residing in the cottage he had reserved on the “Cottage Lot” on the bank of the Sudbury River in Concord in the deed of December 31st, 1910 to the New England Deaconess Association, and that during this period he had been able to view the ongoing construction of the Concord Deaconess Hospital. The construction was nearing completion, scheduled for opening during November. On this day he deeded to the New England Deaconess Association in addition that reserved 1½- acre “Cottage Lot,” with buildings. For unexplained reasons, he would relocate himself for the remainder of his existence to Southhold, near the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1913

Rose Standish Whiting of Plymouth, daughter of William Whiting of Concord, donated a portrait of her father by Henry S. Shubbell to the Concord Free Public Library.

According to the REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE CLASS OF 1863 OF HARVARD COLLEGE, JUNE, 1903, TO JUNE, 1913, NO. VIII (Printed for the use of the class; Cambridge: The University Press, John Wilson and Son): CHARLES EMERSON. His address now is Southold, Suffolk County, New York, near the eastern end of Long Island. He writes last July: “I could wish all the world over seventy might be so placed as I am by the sea — which, really a shallow bay (Sag Harbor) is iced up and peopled only by wild fowl in winter.” And again in January: “You poor dwellers in t he city don’t know the charm of winter in the country. This afternoon a chilly south wind has been blowing, and now the wavelets in the bay are making music. Last year the bay was tight closed with ice all January and February.” His mother’s name was Susan Haven Emerson.... He was married Sept. 18, 1871, at the American Consulate, Berne, Switzerland, to Theresia Steiner of Veszprém, Hungary. He bought a small property with vineyard in St. Aubin, Canton Neuchâtel, Switzerland.... His wife died Dec. 7, 1910. Oct. 31 to Nov. 3, 1911, he made a journey from Concord, Massachusetts, to his present abiding place by wagon, taking his household goods with him, bringing out all the small boys and the rest of the population to see the caravan as it toiled over the hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Worcester, Putnam, Central Village, Norwich, to New London. Good roads, but heavy grades for a team. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” 1915

1915 The New England Deaconess Association Executive Committee Minutes from this year’s meetings of the Executive Committee reported on the proposed expansion of Emerson Hospital in Concord as a result of a private donation. The architect, Mr. Stevens was called upon to draw up plans for the new wing which would add ten beds to the hospital. In April, “That this Executive Committee express through Mrs. William Wheeler of Concord their great appreciation to the donor of the proposed extension of a private room building to be added to the Concord Hospital: that they accept the tender most gratefully as filling an expressed need of that Hospital.” The Executive Committee formed a building committee with the task of drafting plans and creating construction plans. By August of the same year, the Executive Committee received a report concerning the acceptance of construction plans for the new private ward extension. The Committee accepted the recommended bids of J.E.Warren and Company of $12,514.00 for general construction and an additional $538.00 for construction of the solarium. Pierce and Cox would install the heating and plumbing for a total of $2733.00. Barnes would install the electrical works for $425.00. The total construction cost of the new private ward annex was $16,392.00. The architect and engineer would each receive commissions in unspecified amounts totaling $1200.00. In only four years of operation, the hospital had nearly doubled in size in order to meet the growing demands for medical services. Mrs. William Wheeler was in charge of signing contracts and making payments for the new annex construction. “The type of construction is like that of the present building, being fire proof to the second floor, with slate roof. It is have two balconies and a sun parlor or solarium. The building will stand at a distance of about fifty feet from the present building and be connected by a corridor made of glass and frame construction. The heating will be from the boiler in the present building which will be enlarged.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1916

In this year’s Annual Report, the New England Deaconess Association included a testimonial about their benefactor Charles Emerson. The testimonial noted that the Association wanted to name the new Concord facility for Mr. Emerson — but he was not inclined to accept such a gesture. “He lived a secluded life made necessary by the health of his wife. In her last illness, Mrs. Emerson was for a short time a patient in the Deaconess Hospital in Boston. She became so interested by the kind treatment of patients she observed that she with Mr. Emerson volunteered the gift of a forty-acre plot of land.”

The Harvard Graduates Magazine, Volume 24 reported on Charles Emerson, Class of 1863.

Terman’s revision of the Binet-Simon test at Stanford; “I.Q.,” was introduced.

Eugenical News.

Paul Robeson matriculated at Rutgers College.

During the First World War, Professor Robert Yerkes of Harvard University would persuade the US Army to let him administer Alpha and Beta IQ tests to nearly 2,000,000 recruits, in order to select candidates for officer ranks. This would help the IQ movement build up a statistical record that could be used for general comparisons. The goal of the IQ testers did not necessarily have to do with any reform of the educational process, but was to identify the most innately intelligent people of our society, so they could be helped to take charge of affairs. One of Professor Yerkes’s assistants was a young psychologist, Carl C. Brigham, who had become interested in mental testing while a student at Princeton University. Brigham would become a psychology professor there, and an enthusiastic member of the pernicious eugenics movement. After WWI, Professor Brigham would begin adapting the Army Alpha Test for use as an objective admissions test for students applying to Princeton, primarily by making it more and more difficult. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” April 1, Saturday: Charles Emerson died, and would receive a short obituary in the New York Times, “Died: On Saturday, April 1 1916, at Southold, N.Y., Charles Emerson, son of the late Judge William Emerson and Susan Haven Emerson, in his 75th year. Interment at Southold” (there seems to be every reason to infer that the newspaper was inaccurate in the location of burial).

German Navy airships raided England, and would continue this raid for the following 5 nights.

The initial US Coast Guard aviator, 3d Lieutenant Elmer F. Stone, began training at the Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida.

July 1, Saturday: At 7:28AM a huge mine blew up the German positions near Beaumont-Hamel.

At 7:30AM the week-long bombardment of the Germans, consuming over 1.7 million shells, stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then 60,000 British and some French soldiers went over the top across a 25- kilometer front along the Somme River, north of Paris and just east of Amiens. 40,000 more would join the attack later in the day. They captured Montauban, several kilometers past the German line, but lost 60,000 casualties on the 1st day of battle, the greatest number of losses in any single day in the history of the British army (Germans loses totaled 8,000). British attacks at Gommecourt, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiepval, and La Boiselle were repulsed with extremely heavy casualties. The offensive would last 5 months. WORLD WAR I

Turkish forces captured Kermanshah.

Lord Bryce submitted to Lord Grey, British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, his book on THE TREATMENT OF THE ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE.

The State of Georgia granted a new charter to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” The new private room annex opened at Emerson Hospital in Concord. Years later, it was reported that the annex was built by a gift from Harvey Wheeler. [Concord Enterprise. Harvey Wheeler grew up in Concord but had gone to California for a period of time before returning to Concord in 1880. He bought an interest in a harness company and moved the business to West Concord. He built a new factory in West Concord including worker homes such that in 1892, the business became incorporated as the Boston Harness Company. He served on the Concord Board of Selectmen as well as having served three terms in the State legislature. Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle, VI, 126-137.] “Throughout the first six months, in addition to that spent in the regular work of the Hospital, much time was given to preparation for the opening of our new private-room annex. July 1 we welcomed our friends to inspect the building and later on the same day we admitted our first patient.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1924

April: Publication of Robinson Jeffers’s TAMAR AND OTHER POEMS by Peter G. Boyle of New York.

The property donated in 1911 by Charles Emerson, 80 acres of land along the Sudbury River, including Clamshell Hill, was deeded to the Concord community. A corporation was organized for the purpose “establishing and maintaining a hospital in the Town of Concord in Massachusetts and neighboring towns thereto and also any training school for nurses and any other auxiliary enterprise.”

June 7, Saturday: The articles of incorporation were formally accepted and the corporation previously known as the Concord Deaconess Hospital became the Emerson Hospital in Concord. 7 men signed the articles of incorporation: Berkeley Wheeler of Concord, George M. Weed of Concord, Frederic C. Dumaine of Concord, Arthur F. Blanchard of Acton, George F. A. Mulcahy of Concord, Paul B. Webber of Bedford, and Oswald C. Dreschsler of Maynard. Berkeley Wheeler became the President. There were 7 named directors: 4 from Concord, 1 from Acton, 1 from Bedford and 1 from Maynard. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1931

May 12, Tuesday: On National Hospital Day, the Emerson Hospital in Concord opened a 2-story annex to the original 1916 structure. The annex had, on the 1st floor, a sun parlor decorated for the patients by the Catholic Daughters of America “with attractive wicker furniture, colorful curtains and cushions; and a new radio.” The annex also featured an “attractive room for the use of the doctors with its comfortable blue chairs and maple sofa, masculine-looking cretonnes and adjoining shower-bath, invaluable to the overworked physician in bad weather” (clearly, they expected that all their physicians would be masculine-looking — every bit as masculine-looking as those masculine-looking cretonnes). HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1934

In the process of installing Route 2 from Cambridge to the Concord Reformatory, the State of Massachusetts acquired by eminent domain a portion of the property deeded to the Concord community in 1924 (80 acres of land along the Sudbury River, including Clamshell Hill), reimbursing Emerson Hospital $6,500 for this acreage and farm buildings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1949

According to Ruth Robinson Wheeler’s A THOREAU HERBARIUM, among the treasures kept for 50 years in the Thoreau Museum at Middlesex School in Concord had been a set of 75 pressed flowers, ferns, and leaves mounted on paper ranging in size from 8"x 10" to 12"x 17" marked, “A part of the working Herbarium of Henry D. Thoreau given by Miss Sophia Thoreau after her brother’s death to Miss Eliza Hosmer and now presented to the Thoreau Museum of Natural history of Middlesex School by her nephew George S. Hosmer of Detroit Michigan through the kindness of the Misses Jane and Abby Hosmer.” All but a few of these pressed flowers were purchased by the Thoreau Society and after each sheet had been encased in a plastic envelope, were deposited at the Concord Library. In the collection are a number of sheets of autumn-tinted maple, sumach, and oak leaves arranged in patterns, and some of Thoreau’s favorite flowers such as the andromeda. Who but Henry, Wheeler asked, would have picked and kept three small lily-pads which showed curious tunnels burrowed by insects? Who but Henry, she asked, would have printed the word “poke” in the juice of the berry to discover whether it really made good ink?

The East Wing of Emerson Hospital in Concord was constructed, near Clamshell Hill, to include an obstetrical unit and 2 operating rooms. In some unknown period this archaeological site would be bulldozed into a parking lot for the facility. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1950

February 15, Wednesday: According to the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Emerson Hospital in Concord, “bids were opened for the construction of the new wing and remodeling of the old building. J.J. Powers Company was found to be the low bidder” (the low bid was $465,000).

March 1, Wednesday: The Board of Directors of Emerson Hospital in Concord signed papers for State of Massachusetts and federal government approval of their construction project.

Chiang Kai-shek resumed the presidency of the Republic of China on Taiwan. He took it back from acting President Li Tsung-jen who was receiving medical treatment in New York.

After a trial of 90 minutes, Klaus Fuchs was found guilty of handing atomic secrets to the USSR and was sentenced to the maximum 14 years imprisonment.

Poland withdrew from the International Monetary Fund.

Sonata for cello and piano op.119 by Sergei Prokofiev was performed for the initial time, in Moscow.

Gian Carlo Menotti’s musical drama The Consul, to his own words, was performed for the initial time, in the Shubert Theater, Philadelphia.

Sinfonietta in E by Paul Hindemith was performed for the initial time, in Louisville, the composer himself conducting.

March 14, Tuesday: The FBI began its “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list. Since everybody wants to be wanted, the list was an immediate hit with the American people.

The Board of Directors of Emerson Hospital in Concord awarded a construction contract to the J.J. Powers Company, in the amount of $586,490, and its Aid Society launched a Building Fund Drive to obtain that level of funding. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK”

1958

Americans purchased 100,000,000 hula hoops. Boston’s Central Artery was completed.

The City of Philadelphia certified Eastern State Penitentiary as historic property.

The new West Wing of Emerson Hospital in Concord opened.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2018. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 23, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

CONCORD SHELL HEAP “CLAMSHELL BANK” the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.