The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods The Maine Woods HENRY D. THOREAU A FULLY ANNOTATED EDITION Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer Y ale University Press New Haven and London Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Sonia Shannon. Set in Adobe Garamond type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. The Maine woods : a fully annotated edition / Henry D. Thoreau ; edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-12283-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Piscataquis County (Me.)—Description and travel. 2. Maine—Description and travel. 3. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Travel—Maine. 4. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. I. Cramer, Jeffrey S., 1955–. II. Title. f27.p5t43 2009 917.4'1043—dc22 2009015161 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of Ansi/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Greg Joly Often on bare rocky carries the trail was so indistinct that I repeatedly lost it, but when I walked behind him I observed that he could keep it almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he paused a moment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign which would have escaped me. —“The Allegash and East Branch” Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Permissions xiii Introduction xv t h e m A i n e w oo d s Ktaadn 1 Chesuncook 76 The Allegash and East Branch 146 Appendix 278 Supplement 305 Choice of Copy Text 307 Textual Notes and Emendations 309 Bibliography 343 Index 351 Preface My purpose in editing The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edi- tion has been twofold: to examine the text of The Maine Woods in light of the research and commentary that has appeared in the 135 years since it was first published, and to present a reliable text with a comprehensive series of annotations. While paying tribute to and honoring the work that has come before, I have tried to correct errors and omissions of previous editions without creating new ones. Preface ix Acknowledgments The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition could not have been made without the help of literally hundreds of people, known and unknown. Many are acknowledged below, but there are some who, I regret, have become anonymous, and for these omissions of credit I apologize. There is generosity and enthusiasm in the world for which I am appreciative, and it is rewarding to know that such dedication and passion exists. I am grateful to previous editors of The Maine Woods, particu- larly Joseph J. Moldenhauer, and to the work of William Howarth and J. Parker Huber. Their work has contributed greatly to this new edition of The Maine Woods. No work such as this could be completed without the indispensable work and dedication of librarians who, with the advent of the Internet, have each become my local librarian wherever they may sit. In particular I would like to thank the State of Maine Law and Legislative Reference Library; the Old Town (Maine) Public Library; the Caribou (Maine) Public Library; Raymond H. Fogler Library, University of Maine; Maine Folklife Center; Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress; Moosehead Histori- cal Society; Monson Historical Society; Bangor (Maine) Public Library; American Museum of Natural History; Kansas City Pub- lic Library; Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress; Boston Public Library; Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California; and the Pierpont Morgan Library. In addition, the following have been indispensable in offering help in various ways: Everett Parker; John Neff; Tom Kelleher, Acknowledgments xi Old Sturbridge Village; Micah A. Pawling; Zip Kellogg; Cliff Bart on Marm Howard; David Gamage on the Whitehead Light; Stanley F. Lombardo on Homer; Mark Griffith and Michael Lloyd on Aeschylus; Melanie Mohney and Scott Michaud on Waite’s Farm; Philippe Charland, Université du Quebec a Montreal, for his help with the Abenaki language; Debbie (Pelletier) Tajmajer on the Sawyers of Greenville; Glen Blouin on Native American medicinal uses of alder bark; Tony L. Nette, Arthur R. Rodgers, and Mike Schrage on moose horns; Ray Angelo on spruce trees; Rick Sisco on snakes; and Jan Hokes. I am indebted to Don Henley, Founder and President of the Walden Woods Project, and to Kathi Anderson, its Executive Di- rector, for their vision of a center for Thoreau studies, and to the many scholars who have donated their research to the collections of the Walden Woods Project, the Thoreau Society, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. These collections, housed at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, Lincoln, Massachusetts, and managed by the Walden Woods Project, constitute an invaluable and un- paralleled resource, without which this book could not have been completed. I would also like to express gratitude to Jennifer Banks, my editor at Yale University Press, for her support, and to Dan Heaton for his masterful editing of the manuscript. Thanksto my daughters, Kazia and Zoë, for again sharing time with this dead nineteenth century Transcendentalist. And finally, always and forever, Julia—as Thoreau wrote, “Till we have loved we have not imagined the heights of love.” xii Acknowledgments Permissions Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Thoreau Society and the Walden Woods Project’s Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods for permission to quote from the unpublished correspondence of Fanny Eckstorm to Walter Harding, October 1840, in the Walter Harding Collection (Thoreau Society Collections), Thoreau Insti- tute at Walden Woods. Permissions xiii Introduction Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff of mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess of Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea? —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature” (1841) The Maine woods were present in Thoreau’s consciousness for more than half his life. He is known to have made six excursions to Maine: in May 1838 to search for a teaching position; in 1846 to climb Mount Katahdin; in 1849 and 1851 to lecture on econ- omy and Cape Cod, respectively; in 1853 to observe a moose hunt; and in 1857 to travel the Allegash and Penobscot Rivers. In his journal are numerous references to Maine, to Indians, and to the life it represented. Thoreau’s last recorded intelligible words were “moose” and “Indian.” Thoreau made his Ktaadn excursion during his second year at Walden Pond, despite his statement at the end of Walden that his “second year was similar” to the first. Thoreau was invited to accompany his cousin George Thatcher, who was in the lumber business in Maine and would be traveling to look at some prop- erty. During this time Thoreau made one of the few early ascents of Mount Katahdin by a non–Native American, finding a primor- dial landscape in which he felt like an intruder. “For what canst thou pray here,” he wrote in his journal, “but to be delivered from here.” Introduction xv It was this feeling, expanded and manipulated in the published essay, which led to one of Thoreau’s most powerful comments on man’s place in nature: “Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” Thoreau lectured about his Ktaadn excursion in Concord in January 1848, and published his account, begun while at Walden, in five installments in Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, from July through November 1848. “Chesuncook” describes a moose-hunting expedition Thoreau took in September 1853. It was his object to accompany Thatcher on a hunt. Thoreau distanced himself from the actual hunt by ex- plaining that he “had not come a-hunting, and felt some com- punctions about accompanying the hunters.” He had gone to see a moose, confessing at the same time that he “was not sorry to learn how the Indian managed to kill one.” Thoreau went as a “reporter” to the hunt, and his description of “that still warm and palpitat- ing body pierced with a knife,” of the “warm milk” that streamed “from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe,” rivals, in less epic proportion, scenes of whale hunting in Moby-Dick. Almost equally well known as the essay itself, however, is the incident regarding its publication in the Atlantic Monthly. A sen- tence about the pine tree—“It is as immortal as I am, and per- chance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still”— had been expurgated. Thoreau was outraged at this liberty, writing to James Russell Lowell, then editor of the magazine, on 22 June 1858: “The editor has, in this case, no more right to omit a senti- ment than to insert one, or put words into my mouth. I am xvi Introduction not willing to be associated in any way, unnecessarily, with parties who will confess themselves so bigoted & timid as this implies.

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