THOREAU AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT

To my knowledge, the prehistory of the Environmental Impact Assessment is at present limited to hand-waving, and vague remarks about the enormous influence on the general public of Rachel Carlson’s SILENT SPRING. To my knowledge, at present the fabrication of a corporation’s Environmental Impact Report is an exercise in “cut and paste from what has been previously acceptable, substituting ‘walrus’ for ‘sea cow’ and ‘Pacific’ for ‘Atlantic,’ and do this without spending any actual money.” To my knowledge, the prehistory of learning how to conduct an actually adequate Environmental Impact Assessment is a topic yet to be studied in college classrooms. But, what do I know?

The flowage controversy climaxed five decades worth of lawsuits, providing an opportunity for a longitudinal case study of environmental law. To my knowledge, it is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 32 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.” Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Indeed, on June 26, 1775, Washington appointed Colonel Richard Gridley of Massachusetts to be the army’s first chief engineer. At the time, the principal concern was military fortification. This remained the case in 1802, when Thomas Jefferson stationed a corps of engineers at West Point, creating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1824, when Thoreau was a happy barefoot boy, the Corps broadened its scope into civil affairs, beginning a war against America’s rivers that intensified as the Corps became the default federal agency for river management. Initially the technical know-how came largely from the French School of hydraulic engineering. Not until 1835, midway through Thoreau’s college years, did Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York grant the first civilian American engineering degree. “Even up to the 1850s,” wrote Corps historian John Chambers, “nearly all of the engineers –military and civilian– had received their scientific education at West Point.” During peacetime, rivers dominated their mission. Charles Ellet Jr.’s THE MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RIVERS (1853) and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’s REPORT UPON THE PHYSICS AND HYDRAULICS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER (1867) summarized river civil engineering in their times. Everything was about control. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 239-240

FLOWAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

WALDEN: The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, in the summer of ’52, is just five feet higher than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs. This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint’s Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond. The rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have known the high-blueberry bushes about the shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances.

FLOWAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1811

October: A sister of John Edleston informed George Gordon, Lord Byron that her brother had died.

The Shelleys arrived at York, where Thomas Jefferson Hogg promptly attempted to seduce Harriet.

In the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, the river flowage case of the meadow grass farmers along the Concord River and Sudbury River was heard, with David Heard seated as a plaintiff. He would report that: The verdict was given against us, and judgment entered up for costs to the defendants.

(It would be abundantly evident, at least to the plaintiff, that the reason why the case had gone against them was that while their river level survey had been being accomplished, those in charge of the dam had trickily allowed water to escape. They pointed out that the tops of slimy rocks had become visible above the dam, that obviously had not for many years seen the light of day!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1838

September 15, Saturday: Jones Very’s brother Washington, a Freshman, was asked to escort him home to Salem. Very wanted to go through Concord and speak with Waldo Emerson, but this was disregarded. His younger brother allowed him, however, to post a letter to Emerson with a promised manuscript on William Shakespeare:

My Brother

I am glad at last to be able to transmit what has been told me of Shakespeare ’tis the faint echo of that which speaks to you now. That was the utterance of the soul still in its travail but the hour is past of which I have often spoken to you and you hear not mine own words but the teachings of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice with me my brother and give thanks with me to the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who have now taken me to themselves and will not let me go any more from them. I feel that the day now is when “the tabernackle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.” The gathering time has come and the harvest is now reaping from the wide plains of earth. Here, even here the will of the Father begins to be done as in heaven. My friend I tell you these things as they are told me and hope soon for a day or two of leisure perhaps in two or three weeks when I may speak with you face to face as I now write....

Edwin Gittleman glosses Very’s “Shakespeare” of the December 1837-September 1838 period as a “Poetics of Revelation” and as an “omnium-gatherum of his basic attitudes ... both a spiritual autobiography and a blueprint for action.” He characterizes both Very’s “Shakespeare” and his “Hamlet” as “more revealing as autobiography than as literary criticism.” I will attempt the feat of glossing Gittleman’s gloss: HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

In [“Shakespeare”] Very contrasted the man of [mere] genius (exemplified by Shakespeare) with the man of virtue (clearly Very himself, but figured as Christ).... Very [had] once told Emerson that if he could first “move Shakespeare” he could then “move the world.”... Shakespeare’s mind functioned spontaneously, without deliberate control. Its actions were not willed but reflexive and automatic ... in harmony with Nature ... childlike.... The child, like Nature, just is and automatically loves whatever else is. The man of genius, with his undifferentiated love of activity and existence, is thus a child-man, retaining his prelapsarian heritage through unwitting obedience to the Divine Will.... [However, b]ecause the obedience of the virtuous man is conscious, his greatness is superior to that of genius[,] ... moral rather than [merely] innocent.... Since man’s mind is so constituted by nature that it is not his own, he sins whenever he acts as if it were. He must therefore learn from genius and revelation that his “highest glory” consists of “conscious submission” to the Divine Will.... If ... the poet ... depicts “what ought to be, his teaching is false and ineffectual; it is then merely the handiwork of his own mind. But if “what is” is seen and understood “with a spirit more nearly allied to Him who sees all things as they are,” then poetry will exhibit God’s presence.... The only proper subject ... is “what is” — the “ever new, ever changing aspect of nature and of man.” ... [V]irtue need not be “brightened” nor vice “darkened” by the poet’s independent judgment.

Evidently, at about this point, although the promise was not publicized, Very was pledging to his mother and siblings that whatever the outcome of this Jesus-Christ venture of his, he would “come out of it” before a year had passed.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 7th day 15th of 9th M / This evening Steam Boat bore away our dear Son & daughter with our interesting & truly lovely grandchild, we regretted they could not stay to the funeral of their Grandfather Clarke Rodman, which is to be tomorrow After Meeting in the Afternoon but their child not being well, & having staid one day longer than they expected to, they were anxious to return to their home, & under the considerations we were reconciled to their going being truly thankful for their company as long as we have had it, & in particular that they came while their Grandfather was living & could know they were with him. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Sep. 15. FLOW OF SPIRITS IN YOUTH How unaccountable the flow of spirits in youth. You may throw sticks and dirt into the current, and it will only rise the higher. Dam it up you may, but dry it up you may not, for you cannot reach its source. If you stop up this avenue or that, anon it will come gurgling out where you least expected and wash away all fixtures. Youth grasps at happiness as an inalienable right. The tear does no sooner gush than glisten. Who shall say when the tear that sprung of sorrow first sparkled with joy? HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

His journal often dealt with the three rivers. The entry for September 16 [sic], 1838 contains an omen of his future involvement in the flowage controversy, which was then twenty- one years in the future. It contains his first complaint about damming rivers: “Dam it up you may, but dry it up you may not, for you cannot reach its source. If you stop up this avenue or that, anon it will come gurgling out where you least expected. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 77 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1848

Spring: Henry Thoreau walked through the “Deep Cut” of the railroad: HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

WALDEN: Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms PEOPLE OF which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, WALDEN a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank its spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, –for the sun acts on one side first,– and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, –had come to where he was still at work, sorting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat, , labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; , globus, lobe, globe, also lap, flap, and many other words,) externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals of lobe lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed,) with a liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils. When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and every and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip (labium from labor (?)) laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent drippings of the face. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet farther. Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls springs from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit, –not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS CHAMPOLLION

Perry Miller had concluded that “all WALDEN is an adroit suspended anticipation of the climax of thawing sand and clay in the railroad cut.” More recently, Lawrence Buell dubbed this the “end point in Thoreau’s epic” because it “breathed life into the biblical formula of humankind’s earthy origins” by assigning priority to the life-giving role of the mineral kingdom over the descendant dukedoms of plants and animals.... Thoreau was mesmerized by streams of sediment giving rise to lobes, heaps, levees, and fans resembling foliage, leopard’s paws, lichen thalli, bowels, and brains.... “Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village.” So begins Thoreau’s 2,500-word buildup to the climax of WALDEN. Flowing mixtures of water and sand exhibit “a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. Flowing, it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines.” Scholars have traced this inspiration back to Goethe’s ITALIAN JOURNEY, which Thoreau read and described in his 1837 JOURNAL.... By the time Thoreau left the pond in September 1847, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY he had walked past the unstable Deep Cut countless times, had extended Goethe’s idea to its flowing sand, and had incorporated this extension into Version I of WALDEN, albeit with very limited scope: “As I go back and forth over the rail-road through the deep cut I have seen where the clayey sand like lava had flowed down when it thawed and as it streamed it assumed the forms of vegetation ... unaccountably interesting and beautiful.” This one sentence was all he wrote before dropping his WALDEN for several years.... By June 13 [1851] he had credited the artistry to the work of the universal potter, working with human clay ... during the last three consecutive days of December [1853], he watched the “artist” at work in his laboratory with deeper insight than ever before: “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me. She is not dead, but sleepeth ... this fundamental fertility near to the principle of growth ... So the poet’s creative moment is when the frost is coming out in the spring ... Even the solid globe is permeated by the living law. No doubt all creatures that live on its surface are but parasites.” Robert Richardson credits this final JOURNAL entry as the inspiration for Thoreau’s return to the WALDEN manuscript after his long hiatus. But Thoreau was not done yet, returning to the Deep Cut on March 1852 to write his most physically exacting observations of sand flowage, and to broaden the scale to the deltas of rivers. Motivating his return may have been the search for physical causes, because only now does he explore the fluid mechanics of what’s taking place, detailing: the thermally driven phase change from ice to liquid; the capillary tension of water; granular liquefaction; the control of slurry viscosity in causing either lobation or channelization; its shear strength as a function of water content; the flow rate as driven by slope; and the conditions fostering meandering. The difference between his symbolic descriptions of early 1851 and the rheological descriptions of early 1852, for the same phenomenon in the same place, exemplify his continuing shift toward physical science during this crucial year of his transition.... Thoreau was ... enthusiastic on February 2, 1854, when the phenomenon returned with a vengeance. “That sand foliage! It convinces me that Nature is still in her youth, -that florid fact about which mythology merely mutters, -that the very soil can fabulate as well as you or I. It stretches forth its baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring forth from its bald brow. There is nothing inorganic. This earth is not, then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata upon strata, like the leaves of a book, an object for a museum and an antiquarian, but living poetry, like the leaves of a tree, — not a fossil earth, but a living specimen.... The very earth, as well as the institutions upon it, is plastic like potter’s clay in the hands of the artist. These florid heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that nature is in full blast within....” “There is nothing inorganic.” Surely, this is WALDEN’s most important line. Life springs from non-life. Walden Woods springs from the sand, which springs from the stone, which springs from the “slag” of Earth’s crust. The English writer Robert Chambers had proposed this controversial idea as early as 1844 in his VESTIGES OF CREATION, published just as Thoreau began his famous experiment in deliberate living. The idea that every living HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY thing on earth –including its human institutions– is the consequence of the planet’s “great central life,” its geothermal “furnace” running “full blast within,” still running steadily after four billion years worth of heat-driven tectonism and life-driven evolution. Thoreau’s insight regarding this origin of life and its corollary of continuous creation stood in direct diametric opposition to the “dead history” of catastrophism, then the prevailing paradigm. Earth itself, he saw, was a single “living specimen.” A week later, on February 8, 1854, Thoreau linked the sand foliage to the rebirth of spring: “This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology does ordinary literature and poetry.” Noticing on March 1 that “the sand foliage is now in its prime,” he returned for one last look on March 2. That evening, he hurdled over the final technical details to reach the core of his philosophy of Nature: the spontaneous emergence of order from disorder, of cosmos from chaos, of life from non-life: “How rapidly and perfectly it organizes itself! ... The atoms have already learned the law ... No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, which labors with the idea inwardly.” Earth’s crust, Thoreau now plainly saw, was not the residue of something that has happened. It is the ultimate raw material for everything that is happening in the present moment. Ancient rock must be destroyed so that new rock can rise again. This was James Hutton’s central idea: that creation is a never-ending loop of construction and destruction. The pitch pines of Walden Woods may seem parasitic upon its mineral soil, but only in the sense of having come later in time. In the grand scheme of things, the rocks need the plants to make the residues needed to make new rock. Pines are players on par with minerals. And the growth of every oak tree branching upward and outward from its acorn is analogous to the growth of the tree of life bifurcating from its first microbial ancestor to the amazing biodiversity on Earth today. During the passage of deep time, the branching was always toward a “higher and higher level of complexity, order, and information,” concluded Sven Jørgensen in his review of evolutionary thermodynamics, a book I found especially helpful. Thoreau’s merger of the ceaseless annual cycle of rebirth at the yearly scale with the ceaseless cycles of Huttonian revolutions at the billion-year-scale, turned his planet into living poetry. In every moment, its rocks are giving rise to unconsolidated earth, which is giving rise to primary producers (plants), which are supporting consumers (animals), which are supporting individual human lives and their societies. These last two cycle one after another, as every cemetery and archaeological site reveals. The same is true of the fossil record, as every fossiliferous outcrop shows. The whole Earth and everything it contains was, is, and will be forever coming and going. Thoreau worked on this sand foliage section of WALDEN from his first to last draft.... Thoreau’s challenging question about the “invisible fluid” was answered by Ilya Prigogine, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his ideas about the spontaneous emergence of order, seemingly from nowhere. In decreasing complexity, Thoreau’s flock of birds, the sand foliage at the Deep Cut, and whirlpools HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY in the Sudbury River were all what Prigogine called “dissipative structures,” because they survive by dissipating the ambient energy field around them. More loosely, they are called “emergent phenomena.” Conceptually, each is a local island of order within the greater sea of growing disorder that surrounds and nourishes them. Mathematically, each is a discrete, nonlinear, dynamical system that thresholds into and out of existence when the ambient energy flux falls within certain limits: its domain restricted in some way. A stream whirlpool, for example, is a local island of order drawing energy from the river’s loss of gravitational potential energy, which is a manifestation of increasing disorder. The whirlpool disappears when the current becomes either too strong or too weak, a frothing rapid or a tranquil laminar flow, respectively. Thoreau’s sand foliage at the Deep Cut was also driven by the loss of gravitational potential energy, and was present only when the slurry energetics were just right. The fern frond he must have seen in the ditch below the Deep Cut was also a dissipative burning up its fuel. This thermodynamic commonality links the actual foliage of the fern with the pseudo foliage of the sand. Energetically, the fern, being more complex, is further from the common equilibrium state to which both must eventually fall: to death on the one hand and to destruction on the other. Fundamentally, both are heading toward the same place of renewal.... By the time WALDEN was submitted, Thoreau was beginning to see the emergent properties of nature everywhere: “The free, bold touch of Nature,” he called it. “Give any material, and Nature begins to work it up into pleasing forms, even the ugliness of gray scum on the ice.” Writer Joyce Carol Oates once reflected on the emergence of the sand foliage at the Deep Cut. Through its “fantastical designs on the embankment we are led to see how mysticism is science, science mysticism, poetry merely common sense.” At this point we have fathomed to the bottom of Thoreau’s bathymetric inductions to reach his ur-theory of nature, that it makes sense on its own terms. And at the Deep Cut, we have fathomed down through the hierarchical complexity of life to its HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY inorganic geothermal origin, to the living rock.

Thoreau’s firm grasp of paleontology laid the groundwork for the climax of WALDEN, which describes the emergence of complexity and beauty from the simple flow of muddy sand at the Deep Cut.Cut. It also was the taproot of his lifelong frustration with Christian supernaturalists, who insisted on a fairly brief history of life. Paraphrasing Lyell’s PRINCIPLES, he jested [in AWEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS]: “It took 100 years to prove that fossils are organic, and 150 more, to prove that they are not to be referred to the Noachian deluge.” Not everyone believes this, even today. Modern “young Earth” creationists still insist that the Elizabethan-era Mosaic chronology of Archbishop Ussher is the correct one, and that we twenty-first century scientists are in error. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, WALDEN’S SHORE, pages 60-61

Friendship has this peculiarity that it can never be talked about. It is never established –as an understood relation– Friends are never committed. What it would say can never be expressed. All words are gossip– what has speech to do with it. When a man approaches his friend who is thus transfigured to him, even his own hoarse salutation sounds prosaic and ridiculous and makes him least happy in his presence. –It is an exercise of the purest imagination and the rarest faith– I will be so related to thee– I will spend truth on thee– the friend responds through his nature and life and treats his friend with the same divine civility– There is friendship –but without confession –in silence as divine – If the other is dull or engrossed by the things of the world and does not respond to this lofty salute –or from a lower platform –hears imperfectly– That friendship is by necessity a profound secret which can never be revealed– It is a tragedy that cannot be told. None ever knows what was meant. There is no need that a man should confess his love of nature –and no more his love of man.– In any case what sentence is it indispensable should be framed and uttered Why a few sounds. True love does not quarrel for slight reasons –such mistakes as mutual friends can explain away –but alas only for adequate & fatal & everlasting reasons, which can never be set aside. That person is transfigured is God in the human form –henceforth– The lover asks no return but that the beloved will religiously accept & wear and not disgrace this apotheosis Whatever virtue or greatness we can conceive we ascribe to that one –of that at least his nature is capable –though he may {leaves missing} Yet a fault may appear greater than it is in many ways. I have never seen a person –who could bear criticism –who could not be flattered who would not bribe his judge.– Who would bear that truth should be loved always better than themselves —— Mythology is ancient history or biography The oldest history still memorable becomes a mythus– It is the fruit which history at last bears– The fable so far from being false contains only the essential parts of the history– What is today a diffuse biography –was anciently before printing was discovered – –a short & pithy tradition a century was equal to a thousand years. To day you have the story told at length with all its accompaniments In mythology you have the essential & memorable parts alone –the you & I the here & there the now & then being omitted– In how few words for instance the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard & Heloise instead of a volume They would have made a mythus of it among the fables of their gods and demigods or mortals –and then have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament– And who knows what Greeks may come again at last to mythologize their Love.– and our own deeds. How many Vols folio must the life and labors of Prometheus have filled if perchance it fell in days of cheap printing!– What shape at length will assume the fable of Columbus –to be confounded at last with that of Jason –& the expedition of the Argonauts –and future Homers quoted as authority. And Franklin there may be a line for him in the future Classical dictionary recording what that demigod did.– & referring him to some new genealogy – I see already the naked fables scattered up & down the history of modern –Europe– A small volume of mythology preparing in the press of time– The hero tell –with his bow –Shakspeare –the new Apollo –– Cromwell –napoleon. The most comprehensive the most pithy & significant book is the mythology HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Few phenomena give me more delight in the spring of the year than to observe the forms which thawing clay and sand assume on flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the rail road through which I walk. The clay especially assumes an infinite variety of forms– There lie the sand and clay all winter on this shelving surface an inert mass but when the spring sun comes to thaw the ice which binds them they begin to flow down the bank like lava – These little streams & ripples of lava like clay over flow & interlace one another like some mythological vegetation –like the forms which I seem to have seen imitated in bronze– What affects me is the presence of the law –between the inert mass and the luxuriant vegetation what interval is there? Here is an artist at work – as it were not at work but –a-playing designing – – It begins to flow & immediately it takes the forms of vines –or of the feet & claws of animals –or of the human brain or lungs or bowels– Now it is bluish clay now clay mixed with reddish sand –now pure iron sand –and sand and clay of every degree of fineness and every shade of color– The whole bank for a quarter of a mile on both sides is sometimes overlaid with a mass of plump & sappy verdure of this kind– I am startled probably because it grows so fast –it is produced in one spring day. The lobe of these leaves –perchance of all leaves –is a thick –now loitering drop like the ball of the finger larger or smaller so perchance the fingers & toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body –& then are congealed for a night. –Whither may the sun of new spring lead them on– These roots of ours– In the mornings these resting streams start again and branch & branch again into a myriad others– Here it is coarse red sand & even pebbles –there fine adhesive clay– –And where the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank on either side it spreads out flatter in to sands like those formed at the mouths of rivers –the separate streams losing their semicilindrical form-and gradually growing more and more flat –and running together as it is more moist till they form an almost flat sand –variously & beautifully shaded –& in which you can still trace the forms of vegetation till at length in the water itself they become the ripple marks on the bottom The lobes are the fingers of the leaf as many lobes as it has in so many directions it inclines to flow –more genial heat or other influences in its springs might have caused it flow farther. –So it seemed as if this one hill side contained an epitome of all the operations in nature. So the stream is but a leaf What is the river with all its branches –but a leaf divested of its pulp – – but its pulp is intervening earth –forests & fields & town & cities– What is the river but a tree an oak or pine –& its leaves perchance are ponds & lakes & meadows innumerable as the springs which feed it. I perceive that there is the same power that made me my brain my lungs my bowels my fingers & toes working in other clay this very day– I am in the studio of an artist. This cut is about a quarter of a mile long –& 30 or 40 feed deep –and in several places clay occurs which rises to within a dozen feet of the surface.– Where there is sand only the slope is great & uniform –but the clay being more adhesive inclines to stand out longer from the sand as in boulders –which are continually washing & coming down. Flowing down it of course runs together and forms masses and conglomerations but if flowed upward it would disperesed itself more –& grow more freely –& unimpeded In the next 9 miles which completed the extent of the voyage for this day We rowed across several small lakes –poled up numerous rapids & thoroughfares, and carried over 4 portages– I will give the names and distances for the benefit of future tourists 1st after leaving Ambejijis lake –a a quarter of a mile of rapids to the Portage or carry of 90 rods around Ambejisjis Falls. —— Than a mile & a half through Passamagamet lake, which is narrow & river like to the falls of the same name – Ambejisjis stream coming in on the right —— Then 2 miles through Katepskonegan lake.– to the carry of 90 rods around Katepskonegan Falls –which name signifies “carrying place” –Passamagamet stream coming in on the left —— Then 3 miles through Pockwockomus lake –a slight expansion of the river to the carry of 40 rods around the falls of the same name Katepskonegan stream coming in on the left —— The 3/4 of a mile through Aboljacarmegus lake, similar to the last to the portage of 40 rods aroud the fall of the same name —— Then 1/2 mile of rapid water to the Sowadnehunk dead water & the Aboljacknagesic stream. This is generally the order of names as you ascend the river &c v 81 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1850

November 16, Saturday: An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF NOVEMBER 16

[I]n the lead-up to his role in the flowage controversy in 1859, Thoreau realized that his own particular genius was also a manifestation of wildness. For an analogy, he turned to the chicken-thieving hen-hawk. “That bird will not be poultry of yours,” he told his townsmen in his mind. “Though willed, or wild, it is not willful in its wildness.” True wildness is never intentional. It simply is. It is an inherent property of all nature, including human nature. “It has its own way and is beautiful” in and of itself. In the human context, wildness is the true source of “any surpassing work of art,” the impulsiveness of genius itself. “No hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than genius,” he concludes. Indeed, it was Thoreau’s wild genius that most endeared him to his contemporary Walt Whitman, who referred to “his lawlessness — his dissent — his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” This was consistent with Thoreau’s own views on literature: “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness.” “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” This is arguably Thoreau’s most famous quote, at least for bumper stickers. In the context of his hen-hawk epiphany above, it could be rendered as “In genius is the preservation of the world.” By “genius,” he meant his own instinctive, intuitive, individualistic, impulsive being. By “world,” he was referring to the one we create with our minds. This was transcendentalism in its purest sense. In the process, Thoreau could easily convert his flooded meadows into the wild waters of an inland sea. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 119

November 16th I found 3 good arrowheads to-day behind Dennises. The season for them began some time ago as soon as the farmers had sown their winter rye –but the spring after the melting of the snow is still better. I am accustomed to regard the smallest brook with as much interest for the time being as if it were the Orinoco or Mississippi –what is the difference I would like to know but mere size– And when a tributary rill empties in it is like the confluence of famous rivers I have read of. When I cross one on a fence I love to pause in mid- passage and look down into the water –& study its bottom its little mystery– There is none so small but you may see a pickerel regarding you with a wary eye –or a pigmy trout glance from under the bank –or in the spring perchance a sucker will have found its way far up its stream. You are sometimes astonished to see a pickerel far up some now shrunken rill where it is a mere puddle by the road side. I have stooped to drink at a clear spring no bigger than a bushel basket in a meadow from which a rill was scarcely seen to dribble away and seen lurking at its bottom 2 little pickerel not so big as my finger, sole monarchs of this their ocean –and who probably would HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY never visit a larger water In literature it is only the wild that attracts us –dulness is only another name for tameness– It is the untamed uncivilized free & wild thinking in Hamlet –in the Iliad –and in all the scriptures and mythologies that delights us –not learned in the schools –not refined & polished by art– A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive –mysterious & marvellous ambrosial & fertile –as a fungus or a lichen– Suppose the muskrat or beaver were to turn his views to literature what fresh views of nature would he present The fault of our books & other deeds is that they are too humane, I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of muskrats & skunk cabbage as well as of men –not mearly to a pining & complaining coterie of philanthropists. I discover again about these times that cranberries are good to eat in small quantities as you are crossing the meadows. I hear deep amid the birches some row among the birds or the squirrels where evidently some mystery is being developed to them– The jay [Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata] is on the alert –mimicking every woodland note – what has happened –? who’s dead? The twitter retreats before you & you are never let into the secret –some tragedy surely is being enacted –but murder will out– How many little drama’s are enacted in the depths of the CHAUCER woods at which man is not present! When I am considering which way I will walk my needle is slow to settle –my compass varies by a few degrees and does not always point due south west –and there is good authority for these variations in the heavens– It pursues the straighter course for it at last –like the ball which has come out of a rifle or the quoit that is twirled when cast. To day it is some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture in that direction, that is my south- west I love my friends very much but I find that it is of no use to go to see them– I hate them commonly when I am near them. They belie them selves & deny me continually. Somebody shut the cat’s tail in the door just now & she made such a catewaul as has driven two whole worlds out of my mind. thoughts I saw unspeakable things in the sky & looming in the horizon of my mind –and now CAT they are all reduced to a cat’s tail. Vast films of thought floated through my brain like clouds pregnant with rain enough to fertilize and restore a world –and now they are all dissipated. There is a place whither I should walk today though oftenest I fail to find when by accident I ramble into it, great is my delight. I have stood by my door sometimes half an hour irresolute as to what course I should take– Apparently all but the evergreens & oaks have lost their leaves now. It is singular that the shrub-oaks retain their leaves through the winter, why do they? The walnut trees spot the sky with black nuts.– Only catkins are seen on the birches. I saw the other day a dead limb which the wind or some other cause had broken nearly off, which had lost none of its leaves though all the rest of the tree which was flourish had shed them There seems to be in the fall a sort of attempt at a spring –a rejuvenescence as if the winter were not expected by a part of Nature –violets –dandelions –and some other flowers blossom again –and mulleins & innumerable other plants begin again to spring & are only checked by the increasing cold. There is a slight uncertainty whether there will be any winter this year. I was pleased today to hear a great noise & trampling in the woods produced by some cows who came running toward their homes which apparently had been scared by something unusual as their ancestors might have been by wolves. I have known sheep to be scared in the same and a whole flock to run bleating to me for protection. What shall we do with a man who is afraid of the woods –their solitude & darkness– What salvation is there for him? God is silent & mysterious. Some of our richest days are those in which no sun shines outwardly, but so much the more a sun shines inwardly. I love nature, I love the landscape because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests– It is cheerfully –musically earnest. I relie on the earth. Land where the wood has been cut off & is just beginning to come up again is called sprout land. The sweet scented life everlasting has not lost its scent yet –but smells like the balm of the fields. The partridge-berry leaves checker the ground on the side of moist hill-sides in the woods– Are they not properly called checker berries? The era of wild apples will soon be over– I wander through old orchards of great extent now all gone to decay all of native fruit which for the most part went to the cider mill– But since the temperance reform –and the and the general introduction of grafted fruit –no wild apples such as I see every where in deserted pastures and where the woods have grown up among them –are set out. I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples–1 Ah poor man! there are many pleasures which he will be debarred from. Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin & the porter, I doubt if as extensive orchards are set out to day in this town as there were a century ago when these vast straggling cider orchards were set out. Men stuck in a tree then by every wall side & let it take its chance– I see nobody planting trees today in such out of the way places along almost every road & lane & wall side, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees & pay a price for them they collect them into a plot by their houses & fence them in. My Journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love. My affection for any aspect of the world. What I love to think of. I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearnings than an expanding bud –which does indeed point to flower & fruit to summer & autumn –but is aware of the warm sun & spring influence only. I feel ripe for something yet do nothing –cant discover what that thing is. I feel fertile HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY merely. It is seed time with me– I have lain fallow long enough. Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me not without reason –notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp –yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me – and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness. Yet I question sometimes if there is not some settlement to come.

WALDEN: From a hill-top you can see a fish leap in almost any PEOPLE OF part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this WALDEN smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised, –this piscine murder will out,– and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling undulations when they CHAUCER are half a dozen rods in diameter.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

1. William M. White’s version of the journal entry is:

The era of wild apples will soon be over.

I wander through old orchards of great extent, Now all gone to decay, All of native fruit Which for the most part went to the cider-mill.

But since the temperance reform And the general introduction of grafted fruit, No wild apples, Such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, And where the woods have grown up among them, Are set out.

I fear that he who walks over these hills a century hence Will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1853

The federal government granted Michigan permission to dig a canal through what was known as “The Soo” (St. Mary’s River/Sault Ste. Marie between Lake Superior and Lake Huron).

The Cumberland-Oxford Canal Company began defaulting on its mortgage payments.

The Seneca River Towing Path of the Barge Canal was extended from Baldwinsville to Jack’s Reef.

The state Court for the Trial of Impeachments was convened for the first time in the trial of Canal Commissioner John C. Mather (he would be acquitted).

Plans were made for a lumber steamer to travel the canal, as well as the Grand River and Chippewa Creek, connecting with the Welland Canal and eliminating transshipment of goods at Buffalo (this steamer would never be built).

Charles Ellet Jr.’s THE MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RIVERS: CONTAINING PLANS FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE DELTA FROM INUNDATION; AND INVESTIGATIONS OF THE PRACTICABILITY AND COST OF IMPROVING THE NAVI GAT ION OF THE OHIO AND OTHER RIVERS BY MEANS OF RESERVOIRS, ETC.: HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.” Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Indeed, on June 26, 1775, Washington appointed Colonel Richard Gridley of Massachusetts to be the army’s first chief engineer. At the time, the principal concern was military fortification. This remained the case in 1802, when Thomas Jefferson stationed a corps of engineers at West Point, creating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1824, when Thoreau was a happy barefoot boy, the Corps broadened its scope into civil affairs, beginning a war against America’s rivers that intensified as the Corps became the default federal agency for river management. Initially the technical know-how came largely from the French School of hydraulic engineering. Not until 1835, midway through Thoreau’s college years, did Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York grant the first civilian American engineering degree. “Even up to the 1850s,” wrote Corps historian John Chambers, “nearly all of the engineers –military and civilian– had received their scientific education at West Point.” During peacetime, rivers dominated their mission. Charles Ellet Jr.’s THE MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RIVERS (1853) and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’s REPORT UPON THE PHYSICS AND HYDRAULICS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER (1867) summarized river civil engineering in their times. Everything was about control. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 239-240

FLOWAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1858

August 5, Thursday: The transatlantic telegraph cable was brought ashore. Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick would exult, in their THE STORY OF THE TELEGRAPH, about the laying of this transatlantic cable: It shows that nothing is impossible for man. HISTORY OF TELEGRAPHY

Not to be outdone, the Times of London exulted that: The Atlantic Telegraph has half undone the Declaration of 1776.

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

World peace was breathlessly anticipated. This was the time to “make muskets into candlesticks.” It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth. Due probably to the fact that the cable that had been laid was of much too small a diameter and the voltage 1 being used much too high, transmitting Queen Victoria’s message to President Buchanan would require 16 /2 hours. (At that rate of transmission, class, how long would it have required to have transmitted the story of the Tower of Babel?)

Henry Thoreau for the 16th and 17th times (Dr. Bradley P. Dean has noticed) deployed in his journal a weather term that had been originated by Luke Howard: “The black willows are perhaps in their best condition,–airy, rounded masses of light green rising one above another, with a few slender black stems, like umbrella handles, seen here and there in their midst, low spreading cumuli of slender falcate leaves, buttressed by smaller sallows, button-bushes, cornels, and pontederias,–like long green clouds or wreaths of vapor resting on the riverside.... The willows slumber along its shore, piled in light but low masses, even like the cumuli clouds above.”

August 5: Thursday. 9.30 A.M.– Up river to Pantry Brook. It clears up this morning after several cool, cloudy, and rainy dog-days. The wind is westerly and will probably blow us part way back. The river is unusually full for the season, and now quite smooth. The pontederia is apparently in its prime; the button-bush perhaps a little past, the upper halves of its balls in the sun looking brown generally. The late rose is still conspicuous, in clumps advanced into the meadow here and there. See the mikania only in one or two places beginning. The white lilies are less abundant than usual, methinks, perhaps on account of the high water. The water milkweed [Asclepias incarnata, the swamp milkweed] flower is an interesting red, here and there, like roses along the shore. The gratiola begins to yellow the shore in some places, and I notice the unobtrusive red of dense fields of stachys on the flat shores. The sium has begun to lift its umbels of white flowers above most other plants. The purple utricularia tinges the pools in many places, the most common of all its tribe. The best show of lilies is on the west side of the bay, in Cyrus Hosmer’s meadow, above the willow row. Many of them are not open at 10 o’clock A. M. I noticed one with the sepals perfectly spread flat on the water, but the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY petals still held together in a sharp cone, being held by the concave, slightly hooked points. Touching this with an oar, it opens quickly with a spring. The same with many others, whose sepals were less spread. Under the influence of the light and warmth, the petals elevate or expand themselves in the middle, becoming more and more convex, till at last, being released at their overlapping points, they spring open and quickly spread themselves equally, revealing their yellow stamens. How satisfactory is the fragrance of this flower! It is the emblem of purity. It reminds me of a young country maiden. It is just so simple and unproved. Wholesome as the odor of the cow. It is not a highly refined odor, but merely a fresh youthful morning sweetness. It is merely the unalloyed sweetness of the earth and the water; a fair Opportunity and field for life; like its petals, uncolored by any experience; a simple maiden on her way to school, her face surrounded by a white ruff. But how quickly it becomes the prey of insects! As we paddle slowly along the edge of the pads, we can see the weeds and the bottom distinctly in the sun, in this still August air, even five or six feet deep,–the countless utricularias, potamogetons, etc., etc., and hornwort standing erect with its reddish stems. Countless schools of little minnows of various species, chubby little breams not an inch long, and lighter-colored banded minnows are steadily passing, partly concealed by the pads, and ever and anon we see the dimple where some larger pickerel has darted away, for they lie just on the outer edge of the pads. The foliage is apparently now in the height of its beauty, this wet year, now dense enough to hide the trunks and stems. The black willows are perhaps in their best condition,–airy, rounded masses of light green rising one above another, with a few slender black stems, like umbrella handles, seen here and there in their midst, low spreading cumuli of slender falcate leaves, buttressed by smaller sallows, button-bushes, cornels, and pontederias,–like long green clouds or wreaths of vapor resting on the riverside. They scarcely leave the impression of leaves, but rather of a low, swelling, rounded bank, even as the heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel. It is a peculiarity of this, which I think is our most interesting willow, that you rarely see the trunk and yet the foliage is never dense. They generally line one side of the river only, and that is the meadow, a concave, passive, female side.2 They resound still with the sprightly twitter of the kingbird, that aerial and spirited bird hovering over them, swallow-like, which loves best, methinks, to fly where the sky is reflected beneath him. Also now from time to time you hear the chattering of young blackbirds or the link of bobolinks there, or see the great bittern flap slowly away. The kingbird [Eastern Kingbird Tyrannus tyrannus], by his activity and lively note and his white breast, keeps the air sweet. He sits now on a dead willow twig, akin to the flecks of mackerel sky, or its reflection in the water, or the white clamshell, wrong side out, opened by a musquash, or the fine particles of white quartz that may be found in the muddy river’s sand. He is here to give a voice to all these. The willow’s dead twig is aerial perch enough for him. Even the swallows deign to perch on it. These willows appear to grow best on elevated sand-bars or deep sandy banks, which the stream has brought down, leaving a little meadow behind them, at some bend, often mixed with sawdust from a mill. They root themselves firmly here, and spread entirely over the sand. The rose, which grows along with the willows and button-bushes, has a late and rare look now. From off Rainbow Rush Shore I pluck a lily more than five inches in diameter. Its sepals and petals are long and slender or narrow (others are often short, broad, and rounded); the thin white edges of the four sepals are, as usual, or often, tinged with red. There are some twenty-five petals in about four rows. Four alternate ones of the outmost row have a reddish or rosaceous line along the middle between the sepals, and both the sepals and the outmost row of petals have seven or eight parallel darkish lines from base to tip. As you look down on the lily, it is a pure white star centred with yellow,–with its short central anthers orange yellow. The Scirpus lacuatria and rainbow rush are still in bloom and going to seed. The first is the tule of California. Landed at Fair Haven Pond to smell the Aster macrophyllua. It has a slight fragrance, somewhat like that of the Maine and northern New Hampshire one. Why has it no more in this latitude? When I first plucked it on Webster Stream I did not know but it was some fragrant garden herb. Here I can detect some faint relationship only by perseveringly smelling it. The purple utricularia is the flower of the river to-day, apparently in its prime. It is very abundant, far more than any other utricularia, especially from Fair Haven Pond upward. That peculiar little bay in the pads, just below the inlet of the river, I will call Purple Utricularia Bay, from its prevalence there. I count a dozen within a square foot, one or two inches above the water, and they tinge the pads with purple for more than a dozen rods. I can distinguish their color thus far. The buds are the darkest or deepest purple. Methinks it is more abundant than usual this year. I notice a commotion in the pads there, as of a musquash making its way along, close beneath the surface, and at its usual rate, when suddenly a snapping turtle puts its snout out, only up to the eyes. It looks exactly like a sharp stake with two small knots on it, thus While passing there, I heard what I should call my night-warbler’s note, and, looking up, saw the bird dropping to a bush on the hillside. Looking through the glass, I saw that it was the Maryland yellow-throat!! and it afterward flew to the button-bushes in the meadow3 I notice no polygonum out, or a little of the front-rank only. Some of the polygonums not only have leaves like 2.Vide August 7th and 15th. 3.Thoreau was never sure about his night warbler. Though here he identified the Common Yellowthroat as his mysterious singer, Cruickshank says on most occasions it was probably the Ovenbird Seiurus aurocapillus giving its aerial song. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY a willow, especially like the S. Iucida, but I see that their submerged leaves turn, or give place, to fibrous pink roots which might be mistaken for those of the willow. Lily Bay is on the left, just above the narrow place in the river, which is just above Bound Rock. There are but few lilies this year, however; but if you wish to see how many there are, you must be on the side toward the sun. Just opposite this bay, I heard a peculiar note which I thought at first might be that of a kingbird, but soon saw for the first time a wren within two or three rods perched on the tall sedge or the wool-grass and making it,– probably the short-billed marsh wren. It was peculiarly brisk and rasping, not at all musical, the rhythm something like shar te dittle ittle ittle ittle ittle, but the last part was drier or less liquid than this implies. It was a small bird, quite dark above and apparently plain ashy white beneath, and held its head up when it sang, and also commonly its tail. It dropped into the deep sedge on our approach, but did not go off, as we saw by the motion of the grass; then reappeared and uttered its brisk notes quite near us, and, flying off, was lost in the sedge again. We ate our dinner on the hill by Rice’s. This forenoon there were no hayers in the meadow, but before we returned we saw many at work, for they had already cut some grass next to the upland, on the drier sides of the meadow, and we noticed where they had stuck up green bushes near the riverside to mow to. While bathing at Rice’s landing, I noticed under my arm, amid the potamogeton, a little pickerel between two and a half and three inches long, with a little silvery minnow about one inch long in his mouth. He held it by the tail, as it was jerking to and fro, and was slowly taking it in by jerks. I watched to see if he turned it, but to my surprise he at length swallowed it tail foremost, the minnow struggling to the last and going alive into his maw. Perhaps the pickerel learn by experience to turn them head downward. Thus early do these minnows fall on fate, and the pickerel too fulfill his destiny. Several times on our return we scared up apparently two summer ducks, probably of this year, from the side of the river, first, in each case, seeing them swimming about in the pads; also, once, a great bittern,–I suspect also a this year’s bird, for they are probably weaned at the same time with the green one. Though the river was high, we pushed through many beds of potamogeton, long leafy masses, slanting downward and waving steadily in the stream, ten feet or more in length by a foot wide. In some places it looked as if the new sparganium would fairly choke up the stream. Huckleberries are not quite yet in their prime.

October 12, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau had been an expert witness summoned against his will to testify on behalf of a person whose property had been flooded by a dam, and his side had lost this case. This would be the context in which he wrote “I think that the law is really a ‘humbug,’ and a benefit principally to the lawyers.”

The flowage controversy climaxed five decades worth of lawsuits, providing an opportunity for a longitudinal case study of environmental law. To my knowledge, it is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 32

In Japan, Utagawa Hiroshiga, who had spent his final few years as a monk, died at the age of 62 during an outbreak of cholera (it is not known whether his death was due to the epidemic). HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Famous Last Words:

“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853

399 BCE Socrates drinking the hemlock “Crito, I owe a cock to Æsclepius.”

27 CE Jesus being crucified “It is finished.” [John 19:30]

February 5, 1256 Doyu his jisei farewell poem to life In all my six and fifty years No miracles occurred. For the Buddhas and the Great Ones of the Faith, I have questions in my heart. And if I say, “Today, this hour I leave the world,” There’s nothing in it. Day after day, Does not the sun rise in the east?

October 8, 1272 Goku Kyonen his jisei farewell poem to life The truth embodied in the Buddhas Of the future, present, past; The teaching we received from the Fathers of our faith Can all be found at the tip of my stick.

October 17, 1280 Enni Ben’en his jisei farewell poem to life All my life I taught Zen to the people— Nine and seventy years. He who sees not things as they are Will never know Zen.

August 21, 1281 Ingo his jisei farewell poem to life Three and seventy years I’ve drawn pure water from the fire— Now I become a tiny bug. With a touch of my body I shatter all worlds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

October 12, 1333 Giun his jisei farewell poem to life All doctrines split asunder Zen teaching cast away— Fourscore years and one, The sky now cracks and falls The earth cleaves open— In the heart of the fire Lies a hidden spring.

February 26, 1370 Daido Ichi’i his jisei farewell poem to life A tune of non-being Filling the void: Spring sun Snow whiteness Bright clouds Clear wind.

February 20, 1387 Bassui Tokushō his jisei farewell poem to life “Look straight ahead. What’s there? If you see it as it is You will never err.”

1415 John Huss being burned at the stake “O, holy simplicity!”

June 27, 1428 Kaso Sodon his jisei farewell poem to life A drop of water freezes instantly— My seven years and seventy. All changes at a blow Springs of water welling from the fire.

May 30, 1431 Joan of Arc being burned at the stake “Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.”

November 21, 1481 Ikkyū Sōjun his jisei farewell poem to life In all the kingdom southward From the center of the earth Where is he who understands my Zen? Should the master Kido himself appear He wouldn’t be worth a worn-out cent.

May 4, 1534 Father John Houghton as he was being disemboweled “And what wilt thou do with my heart, O Christ?”

July 6, 1535 Sir Thomas More being beheaded “The King’s good servant, but God’s First.”

1536 Anne Boleyn being beheaded “Oh God, have pity on my soul.”

February 18, 1546 Martin Luther found on his chamber table “We are beggars: this is true.”

July 16, 1546 Anne Askew being burned at the stake “There he misseth, and speaketh without the book”

June 24, 1548 Kogaku Soko his jisei farewell poem to life My final words are these: As I fall I throw all on a high mountain peak— Lo! All creation shatters; thus it is That I destroy Zen doctrine.

January 27, 1568 Dairin Soto his jisei farewell poem to life My whole life long I’ve sharpened my sword And now, face to face with death I unsheathe it, and lo— The blade is broken— Alas!

1601 Tycho Brahe unsolicited comment “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

1618 Sir Walter Raleigh his wife would embalm his head and “Strike, man, strike.” keep it near her in a red leather bag HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

October 1, 1643 Kogetsu Sogan his jisei farewell poem to life Katsu! Katsu! Katsu! Katsu!

1649 Charles I the chopper was to wait for a signal “Stay for the sign.” that the king had prepared himself

1659 Friend Marmaduke Ste- unsolicited comments made over the Friend Marmaduke: “We suffer not as evil-doers venson and Friend Wil- muting roll of a drum intended to pre- but for conscience’ sake.” Friend William: “I die liam Robinson vent such remarks from being heard for Christ.”

1660 Friend Mary Dyer asked at her execution “Nay, first a child; then a young man; whether they should pray for her soul then a strong man, before an elder of Christ Jesus.”

October 1, 1661 Gudō Toshoku his jisei farewell poem to life “I have finished my task. It is now up to my followers to work for mankind.”

July 16, 1669 Daigu Sōchiku his jisei farewell poem to life Needles pierce my ailing body, and my pain grows greater. This life of mine, which has been like a disease — what is its meaning? In all the world I haven’t a single friend to whom I can unburden my soul. Truly all that appears to the eye is only a flower that blooms in a day.

1681 Headman Ockanickon of the Mantas are the “Leaping Frogs” “Be plain and fair to all, both Indian the Mantas group of the Lenape tribe and Christian, as I have been.”

May 15, 1688 Mukai Chine her jisei farewell poem to life It lights up as lightly as it fades: a firefly.

1692 Massachusetts Bay being pressed to death for refusing to “Add more weight that my misery colonist Giles Corey cooperate in his trial for witchcraft may be the sooner ended.”

October 12, 1694 Matsuo Chūemon his jisei farewell poem to life On a journey, ill: Munefusa (Bashō) my dream goes wandering over withered fields.

January 10, 1696 Gesshū Sōko his jisei farewell poem to life Inhale, exhale Forward, back Living, dying: Arrows, let flown each to each Meet midway and slice The void in aimless flight— Thus I return to the source.

January 4, 1718 Aki no Bo his jisei farewell poem to life The fourth day of the new year: what better day to leave the world?

October 6, 1721 Dōkyō Etan his jisei farewell poem to life Here in the shadow of death it is hard To utter the final word. I’ll only say, then, “Without saying,” Nothing more, Nothing more.

1777 John Bartram during a spasm of pain “I want to die.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

December 25, 1783 Yosa no Buson his jisei farewell poem to life (he Of late the nights would die on January 17, 1784) are dawning plum-blossom white.

1790 Benjamin Franklin unsolicited comment “A dying man can do nothing easy.”

July 24, 1792 Bufo his jisei farewell poem to life Oh, I don’t care where autumn clouds are drifting to.

1793 Louis Capet, being beheaded in the Place de la Con- “I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; King Louis XVI of France corde I Pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.”

1793 Jean-Paul Marat reviewing a list of names “They shall all be guillotined.”

1793 Citizen Marie Antoinette stepping on the foot of her executioner “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.”

1794 George Jacques Danton he had been convicted of not having “Show my head to the people. made adequate use of the guillotine It is worth seeing.”

December 24, 1794 Chirin his jisei farewell poem to life In earth and sky no grain of dust— snow on the foothills.

1798 Giovanni Casanova having spent his life collecting sequen- “I have lived as a philosopher and died tially and in tandem 132 pubic scalps as a Christian.”

1799 George Washington fearing being buried alive (a common “’Tis well.” fear for that period), he was being heartily reassured by his physician

August 25, 1804 Gengen’ichi his jisei farewell poem to life Morning glory even though you wither dawn will break anew.

1806 Charles Dickinson he was dueling with Andrew Jackson “Why have you put out the lights?”

September 3, 1806 Chogo his jisei farewell poem to life I long for people— then again I loathe them: end of autumn.

1809 Thomas Paine his physician asked whether he wished “I have no wish to believe on that subject.” to believe Jesus to be the son of God

June 28, 1820 Seisetsu Shucho his jisei farewell poem to life My hour draws near and I am still alive. Drawn by the chains of death I take my leave. The King of Hades has decreed Tomorrow I shall be his slave.

1821 John Keats dying of TB in Rome “Severn … I am dying … I shall die easy … don’t be frightened … be firm and thank God it has come.”

May 2, 1823 Kiko his jisei farewell poem to life That which blossoms falls, the way of all flesh in this world of flowers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1825 Phebe Walker Bliss Emer- died in Concord “Don’t call Dr. Ripley his boots squeak so, son Ripley Mr. Emerson used to step so softly, his boots never squeaked.”

November 27, 1825 Gazen his jisei farewell poem to life I lean against the stove and lo! eternity.

1826 Thomas Jefferson died at 12:50PM “Is it the 4th? —Ah.”

August 25, 1826 Retsuzan his jisei farewell poem to life The night I understood this is a world of dew, I woke up from my sleep.

1826 John Adams died at 5: 30PM — Jefferson actually “Thomas Jefferson still surv...” had, in Virginia, predeceased him

November 19, 1827 Kobayashi Issa his jisei farewell poem to life What matters if I live on— a tortoise lives a hundred times as long.

1830 King George IV early one morning in Windsor Castle “Good God, what is this? — My boy, this is death.”

January 6, 1831 Ryokan his jisei farewell poem to life Now it reveals its hidden side and now the other — thus it falls, an autumn leaf.

1832 Sam Sharpe being hanged after an unsuccessful “I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slave revolt on the island of Jamaica slavery.”

May 12, 1835 Hanri his jisei farewell poem to life My life: echoes of a clucking tongue above pure waters.

1836 James Madison unsolicited comment “I always talk better lying down.”

October 7, 1837 Sengai Gibon his jisei farewell poem to life He who comes knows only his coming He who goes knows only his end. To be saved from the chasm Why cling to the cliff? Clouds floating low Never know where the breezes will blow them.

1846 Benjamin Robert Haydon final entry in 38-year journal before “Stretch me no longer on this tough world. offing himself — Lear”

October 31, 1847 Kyohaku his jisei farewell poem to life I am not worthy of this crimson carpet: autumn maple leaves.

1848 John Quincy Adams had just voted “no” on war on Mexico “This is the last of earth. I am composed.”

December 5, 1848 Shofu his jisei farewell poem to life One moon— one me— snow-covered field path.

1849 Washington Goode offered a cup of water before being “This is the last Cochituate water that I shall ever hanged in Boston drink.”

1849 Edgar Allan Poe in bad shape in Baltimore “Lord help my poor soul.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

April 12, 1849 Katsushika Hokusai his jisei farewell poem to life Now as a spirit I shall roam the summer fields.

1849 Frederic Chopin dying of tuberculosis “Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive.”

1850 John Caldwell Calhoun unsolicited comment “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her.”

1851 John James Audubon shooting at sitting ducks on his estate, “You go down that side of Long Pond and I’ll go at age 66 despite stroke and senility down this side and we’ll get the ducks!”

December 4, 1851 Kizan his jisei farewell poem to life When I am gone will someone care for the chrysanthemum I leave?

1852 Daniel Webster his attendant was tardy “I still live!” in administering some brandy

July 15, 1855 Enryo his jisei farewell poem to life Autumn waters of this world wake me from my drunkenness.

1857 Auguste Comte he had been making himself the pope “What an irreparable loss!” of a religion of science, “Positivism”

August 16, 1858 Namagusai Tazukuri his jisei farewell poem to life In fall the willow tree recalls its bygone glory.

October 12, 1858 Utagawa Hiroshiga his jisei farewell poem to life I leave my brush in the East And set forth on my journey. I shall see the famous places in the Western Land.

March 23, 1859 Hakuen his jisei farewell poem to life What is it but a dream? The blossoming as well lasts only seven cycles.

1859 John Brown request “I am ready at any time — do not keep me waiting.”

July 27, 1860 Kinko his jisei farewell poem to life Within the vast and empty autumn night dawn breaks.

1862 Henry David Thoreau he was editing manuscript “moose ... Indian”

June 11, 1863 Bairyu his jisei farewell poem to life O hydrangea— you change and change back to your primal color.

1864 General John Sedgwick Battle of Spotsylvania “They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.”

1865 Abraham Lincoln on stage, an actor ad-libbed a reference The President laughed to the presence of the President

1865 John Wilkes Booth with his leg broken, surrounded by “Useless ... useless.” relentlessly angry armed men, in a burning barn HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

November 5, 1868 Amano Hachiro his jisei farewell poem to life Lightning flickers only in the north: the moon is overcast.

1872 Samuel F.B. Morse doctor tapped on his chest and said: “Very good, very good.” “This is the way we doctors telegraph, Professor.”

October 29, 1872 Otsuchi his jisei farewell poem to life O white chrysanthemum— man, too, passes his prime.

1872 Horace Greeley Whitelaw Reid took over the Tribune “You son of a bitch, you stole my newspaper!” March 28, 1878 Gizan Zenrai his jisei farewell poem to life I was born into this world I leave it at my death. Into a thousand towns My legs have carried me, And countless homes— What are all these? A moon reflected in the water A flower floating in the sky. Ho!

1881 Billy the Kid in the dark, he heard Pat Garrett enter “Who is it?”

August 16, 1881 Rokushi his jisei farewell poem to life I wake up from a seventy-five-year dream to millet porridge.

1882 Charles Darwin fundamentalists tell lying stories of his “I am not the least afraid to die.” abandoning his heretical theories in favor of Christ Jesus and His salvation

January 4, 1882 Hankai his jisei farewell poem to life The year is ending: I have not left my heart behind.

1883 Sojourner Truth advice for us all “Be a follower of the Lord Jesus.”

1883 Karl Marx his housekeeper asked him whether he “Last words are for fools who haven’t said had any last words enough.”

1886 Emily Dickinson unsolicited comment “I must go in, the fog is rising.”

April 11, 1886 Fuso his jisei farewell poem to life Upon the lotus flower morning dew is thinning out.

1887 Henry Ward Beecher unsolicited comment “Now comes the mystery.”

1888 Louisa May Alcott unsolicited comment “Thus far the Lord has led me on.”

1890 Joseph Cary Merrick the actor John Hurt, pretending to be “Nothing ever dies.” The Elephant Man in a movie

August 25, 1890 Okyo his jisei farewell poem to life This phantasm of falling petals vanishes into moon and flowers....

1891 Phineas Taylor Barnum inquiry “How were the circus receipts today at Madison Square Garden?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

January 2, 1893 Nakamichi his jisei farewell poem to life At the crossroad of my life and death a cuckoo cries.

Ice in a hot world my life melts.

1894 George Inness witnessing the sunset, he threw his “My God! oh, how beautiful!” hands into the air and fell

February 1903 Baiko his jisei farewell poem to life Plum petals falling I look up — the sky, a clear crisp moon.

1910 Leo Tolstòy asked to reconcile with the church “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six.”

1912 Robert Scott freezing to death at the South Pole “It seems a pity, but I do not think that I can write more.”

November 29, 1914 Bokusui his jisei farewell poem to life A parting word? The melting snow is odorless.

January 29, 1919 Getsurei his jisei farewell poem to life Stumble, fall, slide down the snow slope.

August 31, 1920 Koson his jisei farewell poem to life I die the evening of the day the hibiscus blooms.

August 2, 1922 Alexander Graham Bell When his deaf wife pleaded “Aleck, “No.” please don’t leave me,” he spelled “no” in her hand.

1923 Pancho Villa retired with a general’s salary, he vis- “Don’t let it end like this. ited the local bank and was ambushed Tell them I said something.” on July 23, 1923 in Parral, Chihuahua

April 27, 1923 Saruo his jisei farewell poem to life Cherry blossoms fall on a half-eaten dumpling.

1926 Luther Burbank Three months before he had admitted that he did not believe in an afterlife; “I don’t feel good.” he died in a frenzy of daily hate-mail.

February 20, 1926 Meisetsu his jisei farewell poem to life My only hope against the cold— one hot-water bottle.

1927 Isadora Duncan The long white scarf around her neck “Adieu, mes amis, got caught in the wheel of her car. je vais à l’amour.”

July 24, 1927 Ryūnosuke Aku- his jisei farewell poem to life One spot, alone tagawa, “Gaki” left glowing in the dark: my snotty nose.

March 14, 1932 George Eastman Suicide note — he shot himself. “My work is done. Why wait?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

May 31, 1935 Oto his jisei farewell poem to life At night my sleep embraces the summer shadows of my life.

1936 George V, King of It was suggested that he might recuper- “Bugger Bogner.” England ate at Bogner Regis

1945 Franklin Delano Roosevelt having a massive cerebral hemorrhage “I have a terrific headache.”

1945 Adolf Hitler as hypothesized by Kurt Vonnegut “I never asked to be born in the first place.”

1946 Alfred Rosenberg hangman asked if he had last words “No.”

1965 Winston Churchill slipping into a 9-day coma “I’m bored with it all.”

1977 Gary Gilmore being inventively executed “Let’s do it.”

1997 Diana, Princess of Wales per French police records “My God. What’s happened?”

1998 Richard Feynman unsolicited comment “I’d hate to die twice, It’s so boring.”

1998 Karla Fay Tucker Governor George W. Bush refused “I am going to be face to face with Jesus now.... I requests from Christian organizations will see you all when you get there. I will wait for based upon her alleged conversion you.”

October 12. P.M. – Up Assabet. Most exposed button-bushes and black willows are two thirds bare, and the leaves which remain on the former are for the most part brown and shrivelled. The balls stand out bare, ruddy or brown. The coarse grass of the riverside (Phalaris?) is bleached as white as corn. The Cornus sericea begins to fall, though some of it is green; and the C. florida at Island shows some scarlet tints, but it is not much exposed. I believe that this was quite showy at Perth Amboy. There are many maple, birch, etc., leaves on the Assabet, in stiller places along the shore, but not yet a leaf harvest. Many swamp white oaks look crisp and brown. fallen leaves I land at Pinxter Swamp. The leaves of the azaleas are falling, mostly fallen, and revealing the large blossom- buds, so prepared are they for another year. With man all is uncertainty. He does not confidently look forward to another spring. But examine the root of the savory-leaved aster, and you will find the new shoots, fair purple shoots, which are to curve upward and bear the next year’s flowers, already grown half an inch or more in earth. Nature is confident. The river is lower than before this year, or at least since spring, yet not remarkably low, and meadows and pools generally are drier. The oak leaves generally are duller than usual this year. [Vide 15th.] I think it must be that they are killed by sugar maple frost before they are ripe. Some small sugar maples are still as fair as ever. You will often see one, large or small, a brilliant and almost uniform scarlet, while another close to it will be perfectly green. scarlet oak The Osmunda regalis and some of the small or middle-sized ferns, not evergreens, in and about the swamps, are generally brown and withered, though with green ones intermixed. They are still, however, interesting, with their pale brown or cinnamon-color and decaying scent. Hickories are for the most part being rapidly browned and crisp. Of the oaks, the white is apparently the most generally red at present. I see a scarlet oak still quite green. Brakes are fallen in the pastures. They lie flat, still attached to the ground by their stems, and in sandy places they blow about these and describe distinct and perfect circles there. The now fallen dark-brown brake lies on or across the old brake, which fell last year and is quite gray but remarkably conspicuous still. They have fallen in their ranks, as they stood, and lie as it were with a winding-sheet about them. Young sweet-fern, where it had been burned in the spring, is quite green. Exposed clethra is crisp and brown. elm foliage Some bass trees are quite bare, others but partly. The hop hornbeam is in color and falling like the elm. Acorns, red and white (especially the first), appear to be fallen or falling. They are so fair and plump and glossy that I love to handle them, and am loath to throw away what I have in my hand. I see a squirrel-nest of leaves, made now before the leaves are fallen. I have heard of judges, accidentally met at an evening party, discussing the efficacy of the laws and courts, and deciding that, with the aid of the jury system, “substantial justice was done.” But taking those cases in which honest men refrain from going to law, together with those in which men, honest and dishonest, do go to law, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY I think that the law is really a “humbug,” and a benefit principally to the lawyers. This town has made a law recently against cattle going at large, and assigned a penalty of five dollars. I am troubled by an Irish neighbor’s cow and horse, and have threatened to have them put in the pound. But a lawyer tells me that these town laws are hard to put through, there are so many quibbles. He never knew the complainant to get his case if the defendant were a-mind to contend. However, the cattle were kept out several days, till a Sunday came, and then they were all in my grounds again, as I heard, but all my neighbors tell me that I cannot have them impounded on that day. Indeed, I observe that very many of my neighbors do for this reason regularly turn their cattle loose on Sundays. The judges may discuss the question of the courts and law over their nuts and raisins, and mumble forth the decision that “substantial justice is done,” but I must believe they mean that they do really get paid a “substantial” salary. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1859

Henry Thoreau copied into his 2d commonplace book extracts from an article on hydrodynamics having to do with the velocity and carrying power of river currents, in APPLETON’S DICTIONARY OF MACHINES, MECHANICS, ENGINE-WORK AND ENGINEERING (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1857-1858, Volume II), a book in the Concord town library. ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY

February: The following appeared in this month’s issue of the New England Farmer: THE MEADOW LANDS OF THE CONCORD RIVER VALLEY. MEETING OF THE PROPRIETORS AT CONCORD. It is not generally known throughout the State that thousands of acres of meadow land on the Concord River, from Billerica to Framingham, have been flooded by means of a dam at the former place, so as to seriously damage those lands. The law granting the right of the water power at Billerica was such that the proprietors have ever been unable to obtain redress through the courts. Several cases, growing out of this state of things, have been in litigation for years. The amount of land damaged by these overflows is from ten to fifteen thousand acres, all the way up the river as far as Framingham. The mill proprietors brought a suit against the city of Boston for diverting a part of the Concord river from its natural course, and reservoirs were built above from which water was sent down when needed. This usually happens in the haying season, and is another great source of damage to the owners of the meadows. Recently an attempt to unite all the interests upon some plan for redress has been made. A preliminary meeting was held some weeks ago, and a committee was then appointed to consider the matter and report something definite. A meeting was held December 27th, at the Town Hall, in Concord. About two hundred farmers were present, though this is but a small part of the number interested in the lands. The mill privilege at Billerica is now owned by Mr. Talbot, and he was present, accompanied by his counsel, but took no part in the meeting. The meeting was called to order at one o’clock by Simon Brown, Esq., of Concord, and, on motion of Samuel H. Rhoades, Esq., of Concord, a committee was appointed to report a list of officers for permanent organization. Simon Brown was chosen President, Col. David Heard, of Wayland, and seven others, Vice-Presidents, and Mr. R.F. Fuller, of Wayland, and Dr. Joseph Reynolds, of Concord, Secretaries. Mr. Brown opened the question with a clear statement of the position of the proprietors of those meadow lands. He said the first settlers in this town and vicinity had been attracted by its beautiful river and the fine meadows skirting it, which were a yearly source of wealth to the inhabitants. He said they came here to devise some means of obtaining redress. All they wanted was justice, and they came together with the kindliest feelings towards every man. He urged those who had an interest in t his HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY matter to organize — to take a stand, and raise their colors and nail them to the mast. (Applause.) Col. David Heard, of Wayland, said he was glad to see so many interested in a question in which he had been working for forty years. Some young men, he said, had run into the idea that these meadow lands were never valuable, but he knew better. He found in an old Assessors’ book of the town of Wayland that that town assessed taxes on 1200 acres of meadow. Some of these lands had come into his possession at the rate of $75 an acre. These lands, he said, had been stolen inch by inch, under the law, if it could be called law, which had kept them out of their just dues. He said he had been entrusted with much responsibility in the law suits that had been carried on, and he had no doubt but he might have raised a company at any time to have torn down the dam, and allowed the owner to sue for damages. But the people had forborne continually through their defeat. He said he was determined to continue the suit as long as he had the means. Besides this, the Cochituate reservoirs were let loose in haying time, when the water was low, and this did serious damage. In fact, he said, they had a dam at both ends, and a curse between them. Mr. Brown, the chairman, added a few remarks, in regard to the damage done to lands owned by him. Rich and fertile bottom lands were rendered nearly valueless. The committee, appointed at a previous meeting, reported the following series of resolutions, upon which remarks were invited: Whereas, it is believed by many owners of land upon the Concord River and its tributaries, that their lands have been of late much more injured than formerly by inundations caused by obstructions, by dams or otherwise, and by retaining the waters in reservoirs and suddenly releasing them in the warm season; And, whereas, in various other parts of the Commonwealth, as well as in this country, great destruction of crops, and great injury to health, is produced by interference with the natural flow of our streams and rivers, whereby the drainage and cultivation of vast tracts of most valuable lands are prevented; And, whereas, it is believed that the peace of the community, and the security of land and mill owners, and the interests of agriculture, would be promoted by carefully ascertaining and defining, and by publishing by record or otherwise, the legal height of all dams, or other obstructions, on all our streams and rivers, and of all privileges, limitations and restrictions incident thereto; therefore, Resolved, That a Committee be raised to investigate and report at a future meeting what dams or other obstructions are maintained on the Concord River or its tributaries, and whether any of said obstructions are illegal, giving such information as may be obtained of the claims, legal and illegal, of mill owners and others who maintain them. 2. That it is expedient that an act of the Legislature be passed, to provide for defining and recording the height of all dams and other obstructions on all streams and rivers in the Commonwealth, and of all privileges, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY limitations and restrictions incident thereto. 3. That the interests of agriculture require that provision be made by law, so that in proper cases dams and other obstructions to the natural flow of the water may be removed or lowered, or restricted in their use as to the season of the year or otherwise, upon just compensation to be paid by the parties benefited to those injured by such proceedings. 4. That this meeting are determined fully to investigate the complaints of land-owners on the Concord River and its tributaries, and to persevere by all lawful means to protect the rights of land owners, the health of the community, and the interests of agriculture, against all illegal encroachments of those who control the dams and other obstructions theron; and further, to procure such legislation as may be necessary to relieve our most valuable lands of the curse of a second deluge, whether caused by legal or illegal obstructions. The following resolution was afterwards added, on motion of Mr. R.F. Fuller, of Wayland: Whereas, The special remedy prescribed by the statute for the flowage of lands on the Concord River by the proprietors of the Middlesex Canal has been in such a form and so limited in point of time, under the construction which has been given to it by the Supreme Judicial Court, as practically to furnish no remedy whatever; therefore, Resolved, That adequate remedies should be provided by the Legislature for injuries to land-owner on the Concord River and its tributaries for the damage annually done by the flowage of their lands, and furnishing, as the general mill acts do, compensation year by year for the annual injury to the land and the crops. Mr. R.F. Fuller, of Wayland, said he was one of the meadow proprietors, and he sympathized entirely in the spirit of the resolutions, as he presumed every man who owned any of the meadow land would. He believed that the only redress to be had was from the General Court. The courts could not award justice unless the law allowed it, and in this case the law-makers had been at fault. The act giving leave to build the canal provided that any one receiving damage thereby should sue within one year and in the Court of Sessions. That court was abolished about the time the act was passed, and the Supreme Court had held that in the above provision the damage referred to the “source of the damage,” which in this case was the building of the dam. Under the present laws no redress could be had. Dr. Joseph Reynolds, of Concord, read from a work descriptive of Middlesex county, as it was when first settled, and for years afterwards, showing the wealth of meadow land then existing. He presumed that the meadows on the river now were not worth more than half as much as they were forty years ago, or possibly twenty-five years ago. He said thousands were suffering from this evil, which was continually increasing, and it was only to favor a very few. Col. Heard said there was one consideration not yet touched upon. The stagnant waters had already shown their pernicious HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY effects upon the atmosphere; and farms finely situated in Wayland had been sold at one-third their former price, on this account. These, he declared, were by no means rare cases. Mr. Barker, of Weston, corroborated the remarks of previous speakers. He owned a meadow which was uncommonly high, and he had thought that it could never be damaged by water. But for the last few years his meadow had been worse than worthless. He had paid taxes and received no income. Mr. Heard, of Wayland, said he did not own an acre of meadow land, but he was interested, and so was every person who lived on the banks of the Concord river. If the evil should be allowed to continue, the inhabitants would be driven back from the river banks. The stench from the river was sometimes very bad. He looked upon it as a nuisance; and he hoped it would be removed one way or another. He would advocate the matter sanctioned by Judge Shaw of removing a nuisance. (Applause.) The Chairman said if this was anything but a meeting of farmers, there would be fifty present charged full to bursting with speeches. Here were men w ho had suffered damages for half a century, and they would not be heard from. He would introduce a gentleman and a lawyer, from another State, who, he said, had probably tried more cases of flowage than any other man in New England. He introduced Judge French, of New Hampshire. Judge French said he was not present to take any part in this local question, but he stated some valuable facts from his experience. He said he believed, and he had said so many times before, that the amount of meadow land overflowed by the dams of manufacturing companies would raise wood enough ten times over to carry those mills by steam. He advised the proprietors of these meadow lands to ask the Legislature to give them a law, if they had none adequate, under which this dam may be lowered, or, if necessary, entirely removed, and a compensation made to the proprietors of the dam. He had no doubt that the Massachusetts General Court would give such a law, when the circumstances were known. Massachusetts had, in 1855, passed the best drainage law in the world; by which a man was given power to drain through any adjacent lands. He believed this was, in spirit, fully up to such an act as was wanted. In England, where a large territory had been overflowed, the evil had been removed by an act of Parliament, by which the proprietors had been compensated in a degree sufficient to support a steam power equal to the water power taken from them, and the streams were allowed to go free as God had intended they should. Mr. Abel Gleason, of Wayland, made some remarks, mostly corroborative of the other speakers. He spoke of the inconvenience and damage from the waters sent down from the Cochituate reservoirs above, during the haying season. Col. Heard said he knew that the whole fall of the river from Wayland to Billerica, twenty-two miles, was only two feet; but he believed, in common with several other speakers, that the water in the river at this point was several feet higher than it was at the dam in Billerica. Deacon Heard, from Wayland, made some remarks upon the effects of the dam. Judge French, being requested, explained that, by the law that made water run down hill, the surface of the water must be somewhat descending; and that it was very natural that the water should be piled up higher twenty miles back than at the dam. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY The resolutions were then passed without any opposition. Mr. Samuel H. Rhoades moved that the officers of this meeting, and such persons as the meeting might add, be appointed an Executive Committee to strengthen, perfect and continue this organization, and to raise such funds as may be necessary to secure its objects. The committee was raised as follows: Simon Brown, of Concord, President; Col. David Heard, of Wayland, Elijah Wood, Jr., of Concord, John Eaton, of Sudbury, Jonas Smith, of Lincoln, Jonathan Hill, of Billerica, Nathan O. Reed, of Bedford, Thomas Page, of Carlisle, Charles Fisk, of Framingham, Vice Presidents; R.F. Fuller, of Wayland, Dr. Joseph Reynolds, of Concord, Secretaries, and Samuel H. Rhoades, of Concord, Treasurer. To whom were added Nathan Barker, of Weston, and Thomas J. Damon, of Wayland. After some further remarks, in which no new facts were elicited, the meeting dissolved. It was estimated by several of the speakers that the amount of property damaged — much of it rendered valueless — was as much as a million dollars. — Boston Journal.

On June 4, 1859, this little-known Thoreau was hired by the River Meadow Association, a seven-town coalition of farmers demanding removal of the downstream factory dam in Billerica. They claimed it was back-flooding up to fifteen thousand acres of their rich alluvial valley and ruining their agricultural economy, which was based on meadow hay, and to a lesser extent, cranberries. This “flowage controversy” was arguably America’s first major environmental debate over dam removal, a veritable class-action suit with more than five hundred petitioners that culminated a half-century of legal conflict. After five days of paid work for his client –mainly bridge inventory— Thoreau left their employment to pursue his own private investigation, becoming a silent third partner in the otherwise raucous public controversy. ... The flowage controversy climaxed five decades worth of lawsuits, providing an opportunity for a longitudinal case study of environmental law. To my knowledge, it is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY February 10, Thursday: This was Town Meeting Day in Sudbury, Massachusetts:

Later that winter, on February 10, 1859, the angry landowners of Sudbury voted unanimously that the “Selectmen of said Town be instructed to petition the legislature” for relief regarding their wet meadows. Specifically, Henry Vose and 176 others wanted an act that would require removal of the compensating reservoirs above them, and the Billerica dam below. Two days later Concord joined them with a petition signed by Elijah Wood Jr., one of Thoreau’s boating companions, and 178 others. Wayland followed with Richard Heard and 116 others, and then Bedford, with P.f.P.F. Chamberlain and 68 others. These first four proposals were referred by the House of Representatives to its Committee on Agriculture, with additional proposals following on February 26 and 28.”28. The summary document for all towns was titled “Petition — of the Towns of Concord, Wayland, Sudbury, Bedford, and Carlisle, Praying for the Removal of Nuisances and Unauthorized Encroachments in Concord River — to the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Clearly and eloquently it stated their plight: Your complainantscomplaints andand petitionerspetitioners areare chiefly agriculturists, and our most valuable lands, in respect of natural fertility and productiveness, were, from time immemorial, our meadow lands, situated on the banks of the Sudbury and Concord rivers, constituting an alluvial formation, which, without reckoning windings, reaches some twenty-five miles, through Wayland, Sudbury, Lincoln, Concord, Bedford, Carlisle, and Billerica, and comprises from eight to ten thousand acres.... [These lands] had always been subject to overflow in the Spring freshets, and in cause of deluging rains; occasionally, though rarely, at other times; but these inundations, always leaving, like the Nile, a fertilizing deposit, and passing off without any important artificial obstruction, were the blessing of the Husbandman. .... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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All together, 540 individual landowners joined in what was effectively a class-action lawsuit with statewide and national implications. Their principal legal advocate, the Hon. Judge Mellen, was explicit about the scope and importance: “The petitioners represent the interests of thousands of meadow- owners in all parts of the Commonwealth.” This was a tale of woe with two clear culprits. Most important was the state itself. Using capital letters for emphasis, Mellen argued: “THIS DEPRECIATION WAS WHOLLY CHARGEABLE TO THE MIDDLESEX CANAL CORPORATION,” now defunct, which had built the Billerica dam at the outlet of the watershed and sold its water privileges to factory owners. The second culprit was the City of Boston, which in 1844 had “purchased, and built, or repaired, two vast Reservoirs, distant from, and independent of,” their water supply reservoir of Cochituate. These were built after the Middlesex Canal ceased to operate in practice, though its charter remained legal until 1856. These waters were held in the winter and during times of freshet, and then released exactly when the manufactories needed them in the late summer. As a result, in July and August they “pour into our valley every day for these months, upward of seventeen millions of gallons,” whereas the natural flow from the lake was only “five millions daily.” These “deluging powers” or “water avelanches” kept the lower reaches of the river full of water and made the meadows wet and unusable. The haymakers — trapped between the metaphorical alligator in the water and the tiger on the shore — were getting less hay, and what they did get was of inferior quality, and only a few cranberries during drought years. Their land had greatly depreciated. “Sixty-five years ago, the Meadows were perfectly accessible to the heaviest teams, up and down the river, to its brink, ... without the slightest difficulty from slumping.... But from about the year 1804, when the Canal Proprietors had made two additions to the height of their dam, and had opened the Canal for travel and transportation, the Meadows became so soft as to be impossible for teams, except in times of extreme dryness, and then only for light ones, and in particular parts. Since the last addition to the dam, thirty years ago, these lands have been, with slight exceptions, inaccessible.” .... HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another of the meadow owners’ advocates, Judge Abbott, then asked: “And now that the Compensating reservoirs are no longer needed, what does the Cochituate Water Board do? Instead of relieving the meadowland farmers below, they have gone and sold the Marlborough Reservoir to a mill-owner, for a trifling consideration ... [and] ... [t]he Hopkinton establishment they have leased for ten years, at a few hundreds.” Abbott then explained the ethical rationale for bringing the story out at this time: they hoped it “may prove instructive, and we gladly embrace an opportunity to bring to the bosom of a great and powerful Commonwealth, a story of strange complications, not to say chicaneries, resulting in a practical and persistent denial of justice to an inoffensive and loyal community, flagrantly wronged and outraged, through two entire generations.” The final part of the petition was the legal part: “We believe that the meshes of the Middlesex Canal Act were woven by the subtle fingers of lobby legislation.” After narrating a compelling tale of corruption, they identified five specific legal complaints against the canal legislation. First and most insightful was the issue of complexity, aka wildness: “No man, nor set of men, can for[e]see the extent, nor all the incidents, nor, in all respect, the nature of the damage which may accrue.” Correctly they pointed out that there was no way to know how the consequences of raising a dam would ramify through the system. A second concern was that the act of incorporation for the canal allowed only one year for a plaintiff to prosecute for damages, even though the damage accrued annually. This one-year statue of limitations made no sense in a climate where the variability in annual rainfall was greater than the average annual amount. In such a setting, it would take several years to notice a real long-term change. Third, the appropriate of the water of the Concord River by the Canal Company had been a covert decision made before the farmers had a chance to object. It was never “openly proposed” in such a way that the meadow owners could legally respond. Rather, the river’s water was “stealthily usurped.” Fourth, no tribunal had been created by the Canal Act that was “competent to determine what should be the height of the Billerica Dam; simply because there is not a magistrate, nor a court, from the lowest of the highest, in the Sate, that has the slightest power of the subject, any more than the puniest child who breathes the malaria which it generates.” That is, the dam height was completely arbitrary, and its indirect impacts beyond the immediate flowage of the dam pool were unknown. Fifth, “though the power to” claim the water and build a dam “lay within the Canal’s authority, they did not give back the rights to the water to the meadowlands when the water was no longer needed, but sold it to a private miller for probably less than a quarter of what it was worth in power, rather than give it back to us.” In short, the river was being treated as a commodity taken from the farmers by the state and sold to private industry for a profit. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 147-151 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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February 16, Wednesday: Following the recommendation of a commission he had appointed in 1858, the French Minister of the Interior proclaimed that the universal pitch, termed “diapason normal,” should be 870 vibrations per second at 15° C (a machine built to produce this pitch, consequently, would be housed in a glass case at the Paris Conservatoire).

[I]n the lead-up to his role in the flowage controversy in 1859, Thoreau realized that his own particular genius was also a manifestation of wildness. For an analogy, he turned to the chicken-thieving hen-hawk. “That bird will not be poultry of yours,” he told his townsmen in his mind. “Though willed, or wild, it is not willful in its wildness.” True wildness is never intentional. It simply is. It is an inherent property of all nature, including human nature. “It has its own way and is beautiful” in and of itself. In the human context, wildness is the true source of “any surpassing work of art,” the impulsiveness of genius itself. “No hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder than genius,” he concludes. Indeed, it was Thoreau’s wild genius that most endeared him to his contemporary Walt Whitman, who referred to “his lawlessness — his dissent — his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” This was consistent with Thoreau’s own views on literature: “In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is only another name for tameness.” “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” This is arguably Thoreau’s most famous quote, at least for bumper stickers. In the context of his hen-hawk epiphany above, it could be rendered as “In genius is the preservation of the world.” By “genius,” he meant his own instinctive, intuitive, individualistic, impulsive being. By “world,” he was referring to the one we create with our minds. This was transcendentalism in its purest sense. In the process, Thoreau could easily convert his flooded meadows into the wild waters of an inland sea. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 119

Feb. 16. P.M.– From the entrance of the Mill road I look back through the sun, this soft afternoon, to some white pine tops near Jenny Dugan’s. Their flattish boughs rest stratum above stratum like a cloud, a green mackerel sky, hardly reminding me of the concealed earth so far beneath. They are like a flaky crust of the earth,1 a more ethereal, terebinthine, evergreen earth. It occurs to me that my eyes rest on them with the same pleasure as do those of the hen-hawk which has been nestled in them. My eyes nibble the piny sierra which makes the horizon’s edge, as a hungry man nibbles a cracker. The hen-hawk [Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis] and the pine are friends. The same thing which keeps the hen-hawk in the woods, away from the cities, keeps me here. That bird settles with confidence on a white pine top and not upon your weathercock. That bird will not be poultry of yours, lays no eggs for you, forever hides its nest. Though willed, or wild, it is not willful in its wildness. The unsympathizing man regards the wildness of some animals, their strangeness to him, as a sin; as if all their virtue consisted in their tamableness. He has always a charge in his gun ready for their extermination. What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own. The hen-hawk shuns the farmer, but it seeks the friendly shelter and support of the pine. It will not consent to walk in the barn-yard, but it loves to soar above the clouds. It has its own way and is beautiful, when we would fain subject it to our will. So any surpassing work of art is strange and wild to the mass of men, as is genius itself. No hawk that soars and steals poultry is wilder than genius, and none is more persecuted or above persecution. It can never be poet laureate, to say “pretty Poll” and “Polly want a cracker.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Henry Thoreau was being written by Sophy Ripley, a daughter of Mrs. Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley:

My dear Mr Thoreau Mr Johnson will spend the night at our house tomorrow, and Mr Em- erson and a few others are coming at six to take tea with him, and Mother wants you to come very much — We hope you will be able to— Yrs respectfully Sophy Ripley February 16th

March 7, Monday: James Worster, a farmer and former blacksmith in his 50s, had been attempting to fight the Great Falls Manufacturing Company owners of 5 cotton mills in New Hampshire since 1847. He had been in the habit of purchasing or leasing farmland that was downstream from dams owned by out-of-state mill owners and therefore likely to be flooded; for instance he had leased farmland in Dover that had flooded because of a dam holding back the Salmon Falls River. Worster partially destroyed that dam by tearing off an abutment and cutting down its planking, and then threatened to destroy the entire dam. The company had gone to court and obtained an injunction against his further damaging their dam. Then in 1852 Worster’s daughter Adeline Worster, who co-owned land with him in Tuftonboro on the northeast shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, sued the Lake Company, claiming that its dam at Lake Village had flooded and damaged their property, but her lawsuit had been dismissed by the court. Then in 1853 her father involved himself in more properties that were being flooded seasonally by the Lake Company’s dams –meadowland in Sanbornton, a farm in Gilford along Paugus Bay, and a share of Rattlesnake Island in Lake Winnipesaukee– but the court had thrown out that case as well. James Bell, an agent of the Lake Company who had a brother Justice Samuel Bell in one of the seats on the New Hampshire Superior Court, obtained from that body an injunction preventing Worster from further interfering with the property of the Lake Company, but this injunction didn’t stop Worster. He moved to Concord, New Hampshire and obtained farmland bordering the Merrimack River in Hooksett upstream from a dam that powered the giant Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester. Again his property was flooded and again he had cause to be furious.

On this morning, at 6:30AM, James Worster and another man appeared at the Amoskeag Company’s dam. When a watchman ordered them to leave, they refused and engaged in a fistfight. The watchman knocked Worster down 3 times, bloodying his nose.

Deutsche op.220, a waltz by Johann Baptist Strauss II, was performed for the initial time, in the Sperl Ballroom, Vienna.

In the case of Ableman v Booth (62 US 506) the United States Supreme Court decided that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, because it was federal, overrode state laws of habeas corpus. This reversed the Wisconsin decision of 1854. Here is Chief Justice Roger Brooks Taney, writing for the court, opinioning that the powers and jurisdictions of state government were derivative and subordinate: The judges of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin do not distinctly state from what source they suppose they have derived this judicial power. There can be no such thing as judicial authority unless it is conferred by a Government or sovereignty, and if the judges and courts of Wisconsin possess the jurisdiction they claim, they must derive it either from the United States or the State. It certainly has not been conferred on them by the United HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY States, and it is equally clear it was not in the power of the State to confer it, even if it had attempted to do so, for no State can authorize one of its judges [62 US 516] or courts to exercise judicial power, by habeas corpus or otherwise, within the jurisdiction of another and independent Government. And although the State of Wisconsin is sovereign within its territorial limits to a certain extent, yet that sovereignty is limited and restricted by the Constitution of the United States. And the powers of the General Government, and of the State, although both exist and are exercised within the same territorial limits, are yet separate and distinct sovereignties, acting separately and independently of each other within their respective spheres. And the sphere of action appropriated to the United States is as far beyond the reach of the judicial process issued by a State judge or a State court, as if the line of division was traced by landmarks and monuments visible to the eye. And the State of Wisconsin had no more power to authorize these proceedings of its judges and courts than it would have had if the prisoner had been confined in Michigan, or in any other State of the Union, for an offence against the laws of the State in which he was imprisoned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY On the basis of this decision Sherman M. Booth, who had years before been guilty of illegally helping an escaped slave, would again be arrested and returned his federal imprisonment in the federal Custom House in Milwaukee.

As the [flowage petition of the Concord River meadowland farmers] was working its way through the [Massachusetts] legislature in early 1859, Henry Thoreau was enjoying boating on a dramatic spring freshet. On March 7, out of the blue, he had a remarkable insight that would forever change the way he did things and would help motivate his later project. He realized that “the cause and the effect” of many natural phenomena “are equally evanescent and intangible, and the former must be investigated in the same spirit and with the same reverence with which the latter is perceived.” More generally, he came to see that the ways and means of “the economy of Nature” could be understood, and that this understanding could enhance his appreciation of nature. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 151

March 7: 6 30 A.M. — To Hill. I come out to hear a spring bird, the ground generally covered with snow yet and the channel of the river only partly open. On the Hill I hear first the tapping of a small woodpecker. Then I see a bird alight on the dead top of the highest white oak on the hilltop, on the topmost branches. It is a shrike [Northern Shrike Lanius excubitor]. While I am watching him eight or ten rods off, I hear robins down below, west of the hill. Then, to my surprise, the shrike begins to sing. It is at first a wholly ineffectual and inarticulate sound without any solid tone to it, a mere hoarse breathing, as if he were clearing his throat, unlike any bird that I know, –a shrill hissing. Then he uttered a kind of mew, a very decided mewing, clear and wiry, between that of a catbird and the note of the nuthatch, as if to lure a nuthatch within his reach; then rose into the sharpest, shrillest vibratory or tremulous whistling or chirruping on the very highest key. This high gurgling jingle was like some of the notes of a robin singing in summer. But they were very short spurts in all these directions, though there was all this variety. Unless you saw the shrike it would be hard to tell what bird it was. This variety of notes covered HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY considerable time, but were sparingly uttered with intervals. It was a decided chinking sound – the clearest strain – suggesting much ice in the stream. I heard this bird sing once before, but that was also in early spring, or about this time. It is said that they imitate the notes of the birds in order to attract them within their reach. Why, then, have I never heard them sing in winter? (I have seen seven or eight of them the past winter quite near.) The birds which it imitated – if it imitated any this morning – were the catbird and the robin, neither of which probably would it catch, –and the first is not here to be caught. Hear – a peep, I looked up and saw three or four birds passing rather [sic], which suddenly descended and settled on this oak-top. They were robins, but the shrike instantly hid himself behind a bough and in half a minute flew off to a walnut and alighted, as usual, on its very topmost twig, apparently afraid of its visitors. The robins kept their ground, one alighting on the very point which the shrike vacated. Is not this, then, probably the spring note or pairing note or notes of the shrike? The first note which I heard from the robins, far under the hill, was sveet sveet, suggesting a certain haste and alarm, and then a rich, hollow, somewhat plaintive peep or peep-eep-eep, as when in distress with young just flown. When you first see them alighted, they have a haggard, an anxious and hurried, look. I hear several jays this morning. I think that many of the nuts which we find in the crevices of bark, firmly wedged in, may have been placed there by jays, chickadees, etc., to be held fast while they crack them with their bills. A lady tells me that she saw, last Cattle-Show Day, [ ] [ ], putting up a specimen of hairwork in a frame (by his niece) in the exhibition hall. I think it represented flowers, and underneath was written “this Hare was taken from 8 different heads.” She made some sort of exclamation, betraying that there was some mistake in the writing, whereupon [ ] [ ] took it down and carried it off, but soon came back with a new description or label, “this hare was taken from 8 different heads,” and thus it stood through the exhibition. P. M.–To Ministerial Swamp. I hear of two who saw bluebirds this morning, and one says he saw one yesterday. [Vide 9th.] This seems to have been the day of their general arrival here, but I have not seen one in Concord yet. It is a good plan to go to some old orchard on the south side of a hill, sit down, and listen, especially in the morning when all is still. You can thus often hear the distant warble of some bluebird [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis] lately arrived, which, if you had been walking, would not have been audible to you. As I walk, these first mild spring days, with my coat thrown open, stepping over tinkling rills of melting snow, excited by the sight of the bare ground, especially the reddish subsoil, where it is exposed by a cutting, and by the few green radical leaves, I stand still, shut my eyes, and listen from time to time, in order to hear the note of some bird of passage just arrived. There are few, if any, so coarse and insensible that they are not interested to hear that the bluebird has come. The Irish laborer has learned to distinguish him and report his arrival. It is a part of the news of the season to the lawyer in his office and the mechanic in his shop, as well as to the farmer. One will remember, perchance, to tell you that he saw one a week ago in the next town or county. Citizens just come into the country to live put up a bluebird box, and record in some kind of journal the date of the first arrival observed, – though it may be rather a late one. The farmer can tell you when he saw the first one, if you ask him within a week. I see a great many of those glow-worm-like caterpillars observed in the freshet in midwinter, on the snowy ice in the meadows and fields now; also small beetles of various kinds, and other caterpillars. I think this unusual number is owing to that freshet, which washed them out of their winter quarters so long ago, and they have never got back to them. I also see–but their appearance is a regular early spring, or late winter, phenomenon–a great many of those slender black-bodied insects from one quarter to (with the feelers) one inch long, with six legs and long gray wings, two feelers before, and two forks or tails like feelers behind.

The last are sometimes concealed by the wings. This is what I have called for convenience Perla. They are crawling slowly about over the snow. I have no doubt that crows eat some of the above-named caterpillars, but do other birds? The mystery of the life of plants is kindred with that of our own lives, and the physiologist must not presume to explain their growth according to mechanical laws, or as he might explain some machinery of his own making. We must not expect to probe with our fingers the sanctuary of any life, whether animal or vegetable. If we do, we shall discover nothing but surface still. The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence which only the most ingenuous worshipper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even. The cause and the effect are equally evanescent and intangible, and the former must be investigated in the same spirit and with the same reverence with which the latter is perceived. Science is often like the grub which, though it may have nestled in the germ of a fruit, has merely blighted or consumed it and never truly tasted it. Only that intellect makes any progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the same time perceives the effluence, The rude and ignorant finger is probing in the rind still, for in this case, too, the angles of incidence and excidence are equal, and the essence is as far on the other side of the surface, or matter, as reverence detains the worshipper on this, and only reverence can find out this angle instinctively. Shall we presume to alter the angle at which God chooses to be worshipped? Accordingly, I reject Carpenter’s explanation of the fact that a potato vine in a cellar grows toward the light, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY when he says, “The reason obviously is, that, in consequence of the loss of fluid from the tissue of the stem, on the side on which the light falls, it is contracted, whilst that of the other side remains turgid with fluid; the stem makes a bend, therefore, until its growing point becomes opposite to the light, and then increases in that direction.” (C.’s “Vegetable Physiology,” page 174.) There is no ripeness which is not, so to speak, something ultimate in itself, and not merely a perfected means to a higher end. In order to be ripe it must serve a transcendent use. The ripeness of a leaf, being perfected, leaves the tree at that point and never returns to it. It has nothing to do with any other fruit which the tree may bear, and only the genius of the poet can pluck it. The fruit of a tree is neither in the seed nor the timber, – the full-grown tree, – but it is simply the highest use to which it can be put.

March 15, Tuesday: In his cottage Sunnyside, his “snuggery,” in Tarrytown, New York, surrounded by his servants, Washington Irving lay down his pen after completing the 5th and final volume of the biography of his namesake, who had patted him on the head while he was a frail bairn, General/President George Washington.

Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the Rome studio of Harriet Goodhue Hosmer and viewed her “Zenobia in Chains.” He pronounced that he “had seldom or never been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture.”

More than 300 Catholic students in the Boston schools refused to read the required scripture from the Protestant Bible and were immediately suspended, not to be allowed to return until they submitted in the required readings. In the meantime, they would run the risk of being arrested for truancy. The incident would lead to the establishment of a Catholic school system in Boston.

On March 15, 1859, the Committee of Agriculture of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, chaired by John S. Eldridge, reported that it had considered the petitions requesting the removal of nuisances and unauthorized encroachments and made the following decision: “Resolved, That a joint committee, consisting of two members on the part of the senate, and three members of the House of Representatives, be appointed to investigate the flowage of lands lying in the towns of Concord, Wayland, Sudbury, Bedford, and Carlisle, and to recommend such changes and improvements in said flowage as they may deem requisite for the public good and the owners of said lands.” By the end of the month, the resolution had been “engrossed,” and it was sent for concurrence to the House and Senate on March 24 and 28, respectively. On April 1, the General Court (legislature) of the Commonwealth passed this first of four separate acts regarding the flowage controversy. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 152-153 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Zenobia in Chains

March 15. Rainy day and southerly wind. I come home in the evening through a very heavy rain after two brilliant rainbows at sunset, the first of the year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY March 17, Thursday: The inception of Henry Thoreau’s Musketaquid flowage measurements:

On March 17, coincident to the day with the appointment of the Joint Committee, Henry began a program of systematic stage measurements near the river’s triple point. His original datum was the base of the slanting iron truss of the railroad bridge, located four feet from its eastern end. At the time, the water was rising. On March 17 he caught the peak of the spring freshet, recording it to be five inches from the highest part of the truss. When making these measurements, he saw and sketched the water surface “heaped up in the middle” between each of the sets of piers supporting Flint’s Bridge. He’d been watching this sort of thing since the fall of 1853, when he noticed that each bridge acted like a dam during strong flows because the abutments confined the flow and the piers partly blocked it. The result was a river surface elevation on the upstream side of each bridge that was at least several inches higher than on the downstream side. This effect was exaggerated during high flows, especially when breakup ice was present during the spring freshet. Thoreau realized that river stage at any point was much more complex than a dipstick measurement. Rather, it was a function not only of the water budget but also of the strength of the current, the degree of constriction, and the presence or absence of objects such as ice flows and meadow tufts. Stated conversely, each bridge backed up the river in its own way. Stated mathematically, if one knew the input variables, one could calculate the output effect for each bridge, all the way up to the high side of the highest bridge. This is exactly what Thoreau was contracted to do three months later, which suggests that the bridge work was his idea. Observing the spring freshet of 1859 led him to a separate radical theory about how the bridges and causeways were permanently changing the meadows. Each bridge interfered with the transport of ice-rafted clumps or tufts of meadow. Without bridges, clumps were rafted straight downstream and/or directed by the wind. But with bridges, clumps were either stopped by the causeways or concentrated by the raking action of bridge piers: “Some meadows are now saved by the cause ways & bridges & willow rows.” Over time, what had originally been a gently sloped alluvial valley before bridge construction was becoming a series of steps, with flatter, more sluggish treads between bridges and zones of steeper, faster flow near them. This correct theory — which he developed before he was hired — became part of the text of the 1860 flowage report. It’s quite likely that Thoreau shared it, perhaps with Simon Brown, the president of the committee, whose land Thoreau visited this spring while searching for arrowheads. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 153-154

March 17. 6.30 A.M. — River risen still higher. It is seven and a half inches below the highest part of the truss and about fifteen and a half inches below the middle of the lower stone step of the railroad. It is not quite over Wood’s road. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY I hear a robin fairly singing. A great many musquash have been killed within a week. One says a cartload have been killed in Assabet. Perhaps a dozen gunners have been out in this town every day. They get a shilling apiece for their skins. One man getting musquash and one mink earned five or six dollars the other day. I hear their guns early and late long before sunrise and after sunset, for those are the best times. P. M. – To Flint’s Bridge by water. The water is very high, and smooth as ever it is. It is very warm. I wear but one coat on the water. The town and the land it is built on seem to rise but little above the flood. This bright smooth and level surface seems here the prevailing element, as if the distant town were an island. I realize how water predominates on the surface of the globe. I am surprised to see new and unexpected water-lines, drawn by the level edge of the flood about knolls in the meadows and in the woods,–waving lines, rarely if ever recognized or thought of by the walker or any, which mark the boundary of a possible or probable freshet any spring. Even if the highest water-mark were indicated at one point, the surveyor could not, with any labor short of infinite, draw these lines for us which wind about every elevation of earth or rock. Yet, though this slight difference of level which the water so simply and effectually points out, is so unobservable by us ordinarily, no doubt Nature never forgets it for a moment, but plants grow and insects, etc., breed in conformity to it. Many a kingdom of nature has its boundaries parallel with this waving line. By these freshets, the relation of some field, usually far from the stream, to future or past deluge is suggested. I am surprised and amused, at least, to walk in such a field and observe the nice distinctions which the great water-level makes there. So plants and animals and thoughts have their commonly unseen shores, and many portions of the earth are, with reference to them, islands or peninsulas or capes, shores or mountains. We are stiff and set in our geography because the level of water is comparatively, or within short periods, unchangeable. We look only in the sea for islands and continents and their varieties. But there are more subtle and invisible and fluctuating floods which island this or that part of the earth whose geography has never been mapped. For instance, here is Mantatuket Rock, commonly a rocky peninsula with a low or swampy neck and all covered with wood. It is now a small rocky island, and not only the swampy neck but a considerable portion of the upland is blotted out by the flood, covered and concealed under water; and what surprises me is that the water should so instantly know and select its own shore on the upland, though I could not have told with my eye whether it would be thirty feet this way or as many that. A distinction is made for me by the water in this case which I had never thought of, revealing the relation of this surface to the flood ordinarily far from it, and which I now begin to perceive that every tree and shrub and herbaceous plant growing there knew, if I did not. How different to-day from yesterday! Yesterday was a cool, bright day, the earth just washed bare by the rain, and a strong northwest wind raised respectable billows on our vernal seas and imparted remarkable life and spirit to the scene. To-day it is perfectly still and warm. Not a ripple disturbs the surface of these lakes, but every insect, every small black beetle struggling on it, is betrayed; but, seen through this air, though many might not notice the difference, the russet surface of the earth does not shine, is not bright. I see no shining russet islands with dry but flushing oak leaves. The air is comparatively dead when I attend to it, and it is as if there were the veil of a fine mist over all objects, dulling their edges. Yet this would be called a clear day. These aerial differences in the days are not commonly appreciated, though they affect our spirits. When I am opposite the end of the willow-row, seeing the osiers of perhaps two years old all in a mass, they are seen to be very distinctly yellowish beneath and scarlet above. They are fifty rods off. Here is the same chemistry that colors the leaf or fruit, coloring the bark. It is generally, probably always, the upper part of the twig, the more recent growth, that is the higher-colored and more flower or fruit like. So leaves are more ethereal the higher up and further from the root. In the bark of the twigs, indeed, is the more permanent flower or fruit. The flower falls in spring or summer, the fruit and leaves fall or wither in autumn, but the blushing twigs retain their color throughout the winter and appear more brilliant than ever the succeeding spring. They are winter fruit. It adds greatly to the pleasure of late November, of winter, or of early spring walks to look into these mazes of twigs of different colors. As I float by the Rock, I hear rustling amid the oak leaves above that new water-line, and, there being no wind, I know it to be a striped squirrel, and soon see its long-unseen striped sides flirting about the instep of an oak. Its lateral stripes, alternate black and yellowish, are a type which I have not seen for a long time, or rather a punctuation-mark, the character to indicate where a new paragraph commences in the revolution of the seasons. Double lines. I find by measurement that there is from two to three inches fall in the middle between the piers of Flint’s Bridge, on the two sides of the bridge, supposing the planking to be level; but there is much more close to the abutments, for the water is very conspicuously heaped up in the middle in each case, or between each two piers, thus:– HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY If you look from above, it is somewhat thus:–

If I land now on any knoll which is left; dry above the flood, an island in the meadow, and its surface is broken, I am pretty sure to find Indian relics. They pitched their wigwams on these highest places, near water. I was speaking yesterday of the peculiarity of our meadow-bays in time of flood,–a shore where there are no shore-marks; for in time trees, rocks, etc., arrange themselves parallel with the water’s edge, and the water by its washing makes for itself a strand, washing out the soil from the bank and leaving the sand and stones, and paths of animals and men conform to the permanent shore, but in this case all is abrupt and surprising. Rocky islands covered with green lichens and with polypody half submerged rise directly from the water, and trees stand up to their middles in it. Any eye would perceive that a rock covered with green lichens quite down to the water’s edge was something unusual.

During the summer of 1859, Thoreau worked nearly full-time for eight weeks. And in 1860 he worked nearly full-time for another two weeks and part-time for months. The totality of his project spans eighteen months, from March 17, 1859 to September 27, 1860. To my knowledge, Thoreau’s river project is the most wide- ranging scientific (i.e. theoretical) investigation of any American river prior to 1877, when Grove Karl Gilbert, a charter member of the U.S. Geological Survey, reported on the streams of the Henry Mountains in Utah. This claim excludes the equally sophisticated engineering studies of America’s larger rivers because the interest there didn’t involve natural science. Thoreau’s study is a pioneering examination of a disrupted river system that predates, by half a century, Gilbert’s early twentieth-century study of rivers impacted by gold rush mining in California. Henry’s transition to river work began on June 16. That’s when his normal routine of botanical inventory abruptly shifts to a systematic transect across the Great Meadow. The result was a flora base on distance from the natural levee of the Concord River and the elevation above standing water. He repeated this transect on July 7 suggesting he was monitoring botanical change through time. Among the plants, he lists six different kinds of sedges alone. I interpret this task as the first of many he carried out for himself that summer. His flora matches the nineteenth-century summary provided by historian Brian Donahue from other sources, with meadows “dominated by cord-grass (Spartina pectinata), reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea), fowl meadow grass (Poa palustris and Glyceria striata), blue joint (Calamagrostis canadensis), red top (Agrestis alba), and a number of other grasses and sedges. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 157-158 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

April 1, Friday: Henry Thomas Buckle’s mother died. He would conclude a review of John Stuart Mill’s ESSAY ON LIBERTY, for Fraser’s Magazine, by observing that he needed to have faith that death was not final — because without this it would not be possible for him to go on.

Approximately one year before he died, Thoreau had a good laugh about the practice of law in general and water law in particular. “I hear the Judge Minott of Haverhill once told a client, by way of warning, that two millers who owned mills on the same stream went to law about a dam, and at the end of the lawsuit one lawyer owned one mill and the other the other.” This black humor from the April 11, 1861 entry in his journal nicely summarized the final result of the flowage controversy. When the gavel came down in the General Court at Boston on April 25, 1862, the result was a big fat zero, except for three years’ worth of gainful employment for the attorneys on opposite sides, and for those within the legislature. After more than 1,100 days of meetings, hearings, experiments, and writing sessions coordinated by half a dozen government- funded committees and commissions, the final result looped back to where it all started. The last of four legislative acts repealed the first. First came the act to appoint a Joint Committee to study the situation (April 1, 1859). Next, based on that study, came the act to tear down the Billerica dam (September 1, 1860). After that came the act to suspend the teardown and study the matter once again (April 9, 1861). Finally came the act to repeal the initial act, which brought everything back to the beginning (April 25, 1862). All of this time and money, especially during preparations for Civil War, could have been saved by asking one local genius to weigh in. Of course, Thoreau would not have rendered the Solomon-like judgment that the law so craves. Rather, after eighteen months of river investigations, he had become convinced that the entire watershed of Musketaquid above its natural outlet was behaving as one big coherent system within which humans were pervasive and ubiquitous players. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 231

April 1. Some have planted peas and lettuce. Melvin, the sexton, says that when Loring’s Pond was drained once–perhaps the dam broke–he saw there about all the birds he has seen on a salt marsh. Also that he once shot a mackerel gull in Concord, – I think he said it was in May; that he sees the two kinds of yellow-legs here; that he has shot at least two kinds of large gray ducks, as big (one, at least) as black ducks. He says that one winter (it may have been the last) there were caught by him and others at one place in the river below Ball’s Hill, in sight of Carlisle Bridge, about two hundred pounds of pickerel within a week, – something quite unprecedented, at least of late years. This was about the last of February or first of March. No males were caught! and he thinks that they had collected there in order to spawn. Perhaps perch and pickerel collect in large numbers for this purpose.

P.M. – To Assabet over meadows in boat; a very strong and a cold northwest wind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY I land again at the (now island) rock, on Simon Brown’s land, and look for arrowheads, and picked [sic] up two pieces of soapstone pottery. One was probably part of the same which C. found with me there the other day. C.’s piece was one side of a shallow dish, say an inch and a half deep, four eighths to six eighths of an inch thick, with a sort of ear for handle on one side.–almost a leg.

His piece, like mine, looks as if it had been scratched all over on the outside by a nail, and it is evident that this is the way it was fashioned. It was scratched with some hard, sharp-pointed stone and so crumbled and worn away. This little knoll was half plowed (through its summit) last fall in order to be cultivated this spring, and the high water standing over all but the apex has for a fortnight been faithfully washing away the soil and leaving the stones–Indian relics and others–exposed. The very roots of the grass, yellowish-brown fibres, are thus washed clean and exposed in considerable quantity there. You could hardly have contrived a better way to separate the arrowheads that lay buried in that sod between the rocks from the sod and soil. At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first phœbe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-VEE, as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis. The villagers remark how dark and angry the water looks to-day. I think it is because it is a clear and very windy day and the high waves cast much shadow. Crow blackbirds common. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY April 3, Sunday: Richard Wagner took up residence in Lucerne.

Franz Schubert’s Gebet D.815 for vocal quartet and piano to words of Fouqué was performed for the initial time, at the Redoutensaal, Vienna.

Henry Thoreau noted on this day that the sand that was washing off the farmed slopes into the rivers was providing material to work into beaches on the edge of enlarged channels: “various parallel shore lines, with HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY stones arranged more or less in rows along them — thus forming a regular beach of 4 of 5 rods length”:

Undeniably, the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers were dammed at the top by the dams of the compensating reservoirs built by the City of Boston, and those of countless factory mills. But were they damned by that? The meadowland farmers thought so, calling the summer water releases from the compensating reservoirs “water avalanches,” and comparing their violence to an alligator in the water. Thoreau’s high-resolution hydrological data from two separate lines of inquiry during 1860 showed that the compensating reservoirs strengthened and raised the summer flows, causing more frequent floods and wetter meadows. He also bemoaned the wholesale deforestation of the uplands, which had been taking place for centuries. By the winter of 1852, he was alarmed that “they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever.... Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds!” By 1857 he was watching razed land being burned in all directions, and predicted a completely denuded landscape in the near future: “The smokes from a dozen clearings far and wide, from a portion of the earth thirty miles or more in diameter, ... woods burned up from year to year.... The smokes will become rarer and thinner year by year, till I shall detect only a mere feathery film and there is no more brush to be burned.” By 1859, forest cover had reached its minimum: “There is scarcely a wood of sufficient size and density left now for an owl to haunt in, and if I hear one hoot I may be sure where he is.” This deforestation was drying the uplands and enhancing the storm flooding. Sprout-land and trodden pastures were sending stronger pulses of snowmelt runoff to the main valley, leaving less to infiltrate down to aquifers to sustain the brooks between storms. Thoreau saw this as a crime against upland landscapes: “These little brooks have their history. They once turned sawmills. They even used their influence to destroy the primitive [forests] which grew on their banks, and now, for their reward, the sun is let in to dry them up and narrow their channels. Their crime rebounds against themselves.” The upland environment makeover made Thoreau’s river more volatile than before. This was particularly true for late summer subtropical storms. A heavy summer rainstorm that previously would have been buffered by forest foliage, soaked up by humus, and allowed to infiltrate down to the aquifer instead now drains away as surface and shallow subsurface runoff to nearby brooks. When these brooks combined forces, and when they entered sediment-filled downstream channels, they overflowed, strengthening the summer freshets that ruined the hay. And with the forest gone, far less moisture was being sent back up to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration during the summer. This kept Musketaquid’s summer stage higher than during the Holocene.... — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 233-234 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

... With higher storm discharges came excess sediment, especially from tillage landscapes. Thoreau wrote: “The ground being bare where corn was cultivated last year, I see that the sandy soil has been washed far down the hill for its whole length by the recent rains combined with the melting snow.... This, plainly, is one reason why the brows of such hills are commonly so barren. They lose much more than they gain annually.” When washed into his three rivers, this sand gave them material to work into beaches on the edge of enlarged channels: “various parallel shore lines, with stones arranged more or less in rows along them — thus forming a regular beach of 4 of 5 rods length.” Additionally, the upland landscape was being drenched by livestock manure, whether dropped on pastures by the animals themselves or spread on grain fields as fertilizer. Thoreau began to notice that the green scum called duckweed, so characteristic of barnyards, was now showing up in river sloughs. The use of imported chemical fertilizers, particularly guano, was increasing as well. Swamps that once sopped up nutrients now became a source. Thus, when it rained, a flush of nutrients worked its way downstream into a sluggish river where the only thing limiting aquatic growth was the amount of phosphorous and nitrogen. Ironically, the fertilization of English hay on the uplands stimulated the growth of aquatic plants in the shallows, clogging the river with weeds and backing up water. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 233-234

He made a journal entry that resulted in a portion of the following paragraph from “Life without Principle”: This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for –business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.

April 3: An easterly wind and rain.

P.M. – To White Pond. C. says he saw a striped snake on the 30th. We go by Clamshell. The water on the meadows is now visibly lowered considerably, and the tops of bushes begin to appear. The high water has stood over and washed down the base of that avalanche of sand from my new ravine, leaving an upright edge a foot high, and as it subsided gradually, it has left various parallel shore-lines, with stones arranged more or less in rows along them, thus HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY forming a regular beach of four or five rods’ length.

“Once entrained or incorporated, sediment migrates downstream according to its particle size. In Henry’s emerging theory are these statements: “[T]he heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel” [August 5, 1858], “The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly not with mud,” and “Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places — but sand is the enduring building material” [July 19, 1859]. Though the bottom of the Concord River is muddy in many places, its “bottom is occasionally ... of soft shifting sand ripple-marked ... under 4 or 5 feet of water” [August 1, 1859]. For clean sand, his last observation can be used to estimate a basal drag velocity of approximately two to three feet per second. Such ripples, especially those in Nut Meadow Brook [March 26, 1860], fascinated Henry throughout his sojourning life [July 10, 1859; April 3, 1859]. Like the flowage of the fine sand and clay at the Deep Cut, ripples were an emergent phenomenon composed of inorganic material, but sharing some properties with life. Like the clay at the Deep Cut, ripples straddled the continuum between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 198

The b[ae]omyces is in its perfection this rainy day. I have for some weeks been insisting on the beauty and richness of the moist and saturated crust of the earth. It has seemed to me more attractive and living than ever,– a very sensitive cuticle, teeming with life, especially in the rainy days. I have looked on it as the skin of a pard. And on a more close examination I am borne out by discovering, in this now so bright baeomyces and in other earthy lichens and in cladonias, and also in the very interesting and pretty red and yellow stemmed mosses, a manifest sympathy with, and an expression of, the general life of the crust. This early and hardy cryptogamous vegetation is, as it were, a flowering of the crust of the earth. Lichens and these mosses, which depend on moisture, are now most rampant. If you examine it, this brown earth-crust is not dead. We need a popular name for the b[ae]omyces. C. suggests “pink mould.” Perhaps “pink shot” or “eggs” would do. A great many oak leaves have been blown off in the late windy weather. When I disturb a leaf in the woods I find it quite dry within this rainy day. I saw the other day a long winrow of oak leaves, a foot high, washed up on the meadow-edge a quarter of a mile off, opposite Ball’s Hill, whence they partly came. It does not rain hard to-day, but mizzles, with considerable wind, and your clothes are finely bedewed with it even under an umbrella. The rain-drops hanging regularly under each twig of the birches, so full of light, are a very pretty sight as you look forth through the mizzle from under your umbrella. In a hard rain they do not lodge and collect thus. I hear that Peter Hutchinson hooked a monstrous pickerel at the Holt last winter. It was so large that he could not get his head through the hole, and so they cut another hole close by, and then a narrow channel from that to the first to pass the line through, but then, when they came to pull on the line, the pickerel gave a violent jerk and escaped. Peter thinks that he must have weighed ten pounds. Men’s minds run so much on work and money that the mass instantly associate all literary labor with a pecuniary reward. They are mainly curious to know how much money the lecturer or author gets for his work. They think that the naturalist takes so much pains to collect plants or animals because he is paid for it. An Irishman who saw me in the fields making a minute in my note-book took it for granted that I was casting up my wages and actually inquired what they came to, as if he had never dreamed of any other use for writing. I might have quoted to him that the wages of sin is death, as the most pertinent answer. “What do you get for lecturing now?” I am occasionally asked. It is the more amusing since I only lecture about once a year out of my native town, often not at all; so that I might as well, if my objects were merely pecuniary, give up the business. Once, when I was walking on Staten Island, looking about me as usual, a man who saw me would not believe me when I told him that I was indeed from New England but was not looking at that region with a pecuniary view,–a view to speculation; and he offered me a handsome bonus if I would sell his farm for him. I see by the White Pond path many fox-colored sparrows apparently lurking close under the lee side of a wall out of the way of the storm. Their tails near the base are the brightest things of that color–a rich cinnamon- HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY brown–that I know. Their note to-day is the chip much like a tree sparrow’s. We get quite near them. Near to the pond I see a small hawk, larger than a pigeon hawk, fly past,–a deep brown with a light spot on the side. I think it probable it was a sharp-shinned hawk. The pond is quite high (like Walden, which, as I noticed the 30th ult., had risen about two feet since January, and perhaps within a shorter period), and the white sand beach is covered. The water being quite shallow on it, it is very handsomely and freshly ripple-marked for a rod or more in width, the ripples only two or three inches apart and very regular and parallel, but occasionally there is a sort of cell a foot long (a split closed at each end) in one. In some parts, indeed, it reminded me of a cellular tissue, but the last foot next the shore had no ripple- marks; apparently they were constantly levelled there. These were most conspicuous where a dark sediment, the dead wood or crumbled leaves, perchance, from the forest, lay in the furrows and contrasted with the white sand. The cells were much more numerous and smaller in proportion than I represent them.

I find in drawing these ripple-marks that I have drawn precisely such lines as are used to represent a shore on maps, and perchance the sight of these parallel ripple-marks may have suggested that method of drawing a shore-line. I do not believe it, but if we were to draw such a lake-shore accurately it would be very similar.

April 15, Friday: Because the headmen of the Winnebago tribe of native Americans considered that their tribe had on its reservation “more lands than are necessary for their occupancy and use,” and because the tribalists were “desirous of promoting settled habits of industry and enterprise amongst themselves by abolishing the tenure in common by which they now hold their lands,” and because the tribalists were “anxious to relieve themselves from the burden of their present liabilities, and it being essential to their welfare and best interests that they shall be enabled to commence their new mode of life and pursuits free from the annoyance and embarrassment thereof, or which may be occasioned thereby,” the kind white men of the Department of the Interior of the United States of America agreed on this day to a treaty. They would sell these excess lands to the highest bidder in accordance with their best judgment, and out of the proceeds of this sale would build housing for the red natives, and furnish them with agricultural implements, stock-animals, and other necessary aid and facilities, sufficient that they might under favorable circumstances commence agricultural pursuits. (The treaty completed itself with an explicit reminder that this agreement was going to be in no sense a give-away: “All the expenses connected with, and incident to, the making of this agreement, and the carrying out of its provisions, shall be defrayed out of the funds of the Winnebagoes.”)

April 15. Ground white with snow this morning, but it melts in a few hours, and, the sun coming out, I observe, after it is gone, much bluish vapor curling up from plowed ground, looking like a smoke there, but not from ground not recently plowed or from grass ground. Is it that the plowed ground is warmer, or merely that it has absorbed more moisture? Perhaps the sun penetrates it and so warms it more, since it lies up lighter. It is a very noticeable phenomenon, at any rate, that only the ground just plowed thus smokes. P.M.– To Cliffs and Well Meadow. There is quite a shimmer in the air, the day being pretty warm, but methinks it is a little greater over plowed ground than over sod, but I see it in woods as high as the tree-tops. M. [?] Pratt refers it chiefly to heat, as about a stove, and thinks I should [SEE] the most over the driest sand, and it occurs to me that if it is chiefly owing to evaporation I ought to see considerable over water, but I believe that I do not. Carpenter refers it (in part, at least) to the exhalation of plants, but they are not now exhaling, – not leafed or leafing as yet. I am uncertain, therefore, whether to regard [SIC] the earliest shimmer in the spring, on pleasant days, to heated air in motion or to vapor raised by heat into the air. (Vide back to April 10th.) I see and hear white-bellied swallows as they are zigzagging through the air with their loud and lively notes. I am pretty sure it was these and not the martin I heard on the 13th. The bay-wing [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus] now sings –the first I have been able to hear– both about the Texas house and the fields this side of Hayden’s, both of them similar dry and open pastures. I heard it just before noon, when the sun began to come out, and at 3 P. M., singing loud and clear and incessantly. It sings with a pleasing deliberation, contrasting with the spring vivacity of the song sparrow, whose song many would confound it with. It comes to revive with its song the dry uplands and pastures and grass-fields about the skirts of villages. Only think how finely our life is furnished in all its details, – sweet wild birds provided to fill HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY its interstices with song! It is provided that while we are employed in our corporeal, or intellectual, or other, exercises we shall be lulled and amused or cheered by the singing of birds. When the laborer rests on his spade to-day, the sun having just come out, he is not left wholly to the mercy of his thoughts, nature is not a mere void to him, but he can hardly fail to hear the pleasing and encouraging notes of some newly arrived bird. The strain of the grass finch [Vesper Sparrow Pooecetes gramineus] is very likely to fall on his ear and convince him, whether he is conscious of it or not, that the world is beautiful and life a fair enterprise to engage in. It will make him calm and contented. If you yield for a moment to the impressions of sense, you hear some bird giving expression to its happiness in a pleasant strain. We are provided with singing birds and with ears to hear them. What an institution that! Nor are we obliged to catch and cage them, nor to be bird-fanciers in the common sense. Whether a man’s work be hard or easy, whether he be happy or unhappy, a bird is appointed to sing to a man while he is at his work. Consider how much is annually spent on the farmer’s life: the beauty of his abode, which has inspired poets since the world was made; the hundreds of delicate and beautiful flowers scattered profusely under his feet and all around him, as he walks or drives his team afield, – he cannot put his spade into uncultivated, nor into much cultivated, ground without disturbing some of them; a hundred or two of equally beautiful birds to sing to him morning and evening, and some at noonday, a good part of the year; a perfect sky arched over him, a perfect carpet spread under him, etc., etc.! And can the farmer speak or think carelessly of these gifts? Will he find it in his heart to curse the flowers and shoot the birds? Hear a goldfinch, after a loud mewing on an apple tree, sing in a rich and varied way, as if imitating some other bird. Observe in the small shallow rills in the sandy road beyond the Smallpox Burying-Ground, made by the snow of the morning, now melted, very interesting ripples over a pebbly or uneven bottom on this side or that. The beauty of these little ripples was occasioned by their shadows amid the bright water. They were so arranged with remarkable order as to resemble the bright scales of a portion of a snake’s skin, thus:

with geometrical regularity, seven or eight parallel rows in a triangular form, successively diminishing in size. The ripple is occasioned merely by the impetuosity of the water meeting some slight obstacle. Thus you see in the very ripples on a rill a close resemblance in arrangement to the bright scales of a fish, and it [WOULD] greatly help to conceal a fish if it could lie under them. The water was generally less than an inch deep on a sandy bottom.

“Once entrained or incorporated, sediment migrates downstream according to its particle size. In Henry’s emerging theory are these statements: “[T]he heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel” [August 5, 1858], “The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly not with mud,” and “Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places — but sand is the enduring building material” [July 19, 1859]. Though the bottom of the Concord River is muddy in many places, its “bottom is occasionally ... of soft shifting sand ripple-marked ... under 4 or 5 feet of water” [August 1, 1859]. For clean sand, his last observation can be used to estimate a basal drag velocity of approximately two to three feet per second. Such ripples, especially those in Nut Meadow Brook [March 26, 1860], fascinated Henry throughout his sojourning life [July 10, 1859; April 3, 1859]. Like the flowage of the fine sand and clay at the Deep Cut, ripples were an emergent phenomenon composed of inorganic material, but sharing some properties with life. Like the clay at the Deep Cut, ripples straddled the continuum between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 198 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY The warm pine woods are all alive this afternoon with the jingle of the pine warbler [Pine Warbler Dendroica pinus], the for the most part invisible minstrel. That wood, for example, at the Punk Oak, where we sit to hear it. It is surprising how quickly the earth, which was covered half an inch deep this morning, and since so wet, has become comparatively dry, so that we sit on the ground or on the dry leaves in woods at 3 P. M. and smell the pines and see and hear the flies, etc., buzz about, though the sun did not come out till 12 M. This morning, the aspect of winter; at mid-forenoon, the ground reeking with moisture; at P. M., sit on dry leaves and hear the flies buzz and smell the pines! That wood is now very handsome seen from the westerly side, the sun falling far through it, though some trunks are wholly in shade. This warbler impresses me as if it were calling the trees to life. I think of springing twigs. Its jingle rings through the wood at short intervals, as if, like an electric shock, it imparted a fresh spring life to them. You hear the same bird, now here now there, as it incessantly flits about, commonly invisible and uttering its simple jingle on very different keys, and from time to time a companion is heard farther or nearer. This is a peculiarly summer-like sound. Go to a warm pine wood-side on a pleasant day at this season after storm, and hear it ring with the jingle of the pine warbler. As I sit on the stump of a large white pine which was sawed off, listening to these warblers, in a warm sun, I see a fair-weather cloud going over rather low, and hear the flies buzz about me, and it reminds me of those long-drawn summer days when you lie out-of-doors and are more related to the clouds travelling over. The summer clouds, the thunder-cloud especially, are nearer to us than the clouds of winter. When we go huckleberrying, the clouds are our fellow-travellers, to greet or avoid. I might say the clouds have come. I perceive that I am in the same apartment with them. Going up a mountain is like travelling half a day through a tan-yard, till you get into a fog, and then, when the fog blows away, you discover yourself and a buzzing fly on the sunny mountain-top. The wood thrush! At Well Meadow Head. Not being prepared to hear it, I thought it a boy whistling at first. Also a catbird mews? [Could this have been a goldfinch? (Not seen.)] The epigaea opened, apparently, the 13th.

May 23, Monday: Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Joseph Harrington, a small plot of land in the western part of Concord near the land of John Brown and the Damon Farms.

For the 1st time the opposing parties were brought face to face, as the Joint Committee on flowage of the Concord River assembled at Concord rather than in Boston. The representatives of 2 factories and the factory town of Billerica came close enough to actually press the flesh with the representatives of 6 meadowland farming communities! Would this make them BFF?

Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surviving surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR MAY 23d] HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY May 24, Tuesday: Prideaux John Selby’s wife Tabitha Lewis Mitford Selby died.

Martin Robison Delany departed with others aboard the Mendi from New-York harbor toward Liberia. Is freedom going to be an option?

A great rally was held in Cleveland, organized by Joshua Reed Giddings, and featured as speakers the Rescuers’ black leader John Mercer Langston, and Ohio Governor Salmon Portland Chase. The rally was held in the jailyard and four of the prisoners were able to make speeches from cell windows. Until this rescue crisis, Chase had been a Republican moderate, opposed violence, and had been criticized for doing nothing in 1856 to help Margaret Garner who had tried to escape from slavery in Kentucky with her husband and parents and 4 children by crossing the Ohio River at Cincinnati. (When she had been caught, she had started to kill her children rather than allow them to return to slavery, killing one daughter before being stopped by the slavecatchers. When the steamboat she was being transported on collided in the river with another steamboat, one of her infant children drowned — and Margaret had wept with joy.) The two convicted Ohio rescuers of John Price, one white and one black, were allowed to post a letter from their prison.

The Joint Committee on flowage of the Musketaquid river valley conducted the upriver portion of its investigation.

On the upriver trip, they found conditions to be lakelike: “a vast expanse, was either completely covered with water, or rendered soft and yielding to the step, making a passage across it decidedly unpleasant ... meadows, so called, were one vast sheet of water.” By the second day, all five committee members had arrived, joined by the Hon. Charles R. Train, representing the City of Boston. Heading downriver on the twenty-fifth, they viewed “vast tracts of meadow-land completely covered with water, and rendering the lands farther back from the River, soft and spongy.” This inundation ended at the Fordway, a “natural ford, which the Remonstrants [respondents] say more effectually impeded the progress of the waters than does the Dam.” This is true, but what they did not realize at the time was that the dam pool greatly decreased the efficiency of the outlet by reducing its downstream gradient. “At the dam, the water seemed to be about one foot higher than the flash boards over which it flowed.” This indicates strong flow in the river combined with the factory’s policy of holding back as much water as possible. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 155

May 24. What that brilliant warbler on the young trees on the side of the Deep Cut? Orange throat and beneath, with distinct black stripes on breast (i.e. on each side?), and, I think, some light color on crown. Was HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY [IT] Blackburnian? or maculosa?? [Probably first.] Hear the wood pewee. Sand cherry flower is apparently at its height. I see (the 9th of June) that its fruit is an abortive puff, like that of some plums.

May 25, Wednesday: The Joint Committee on flowage of the Musketaquid river valley conducted the downriver portion of its investigation.

On the upriver trip, they found conditions to be lakelike: “a vast expanse, was either completely covered with water, or rendered soft and yielding to the step, making a passage across it decidedly unpleasant ... meadows, so called, were one vast sheet of water.” By the second day, all five committee members had arrived, joined by the Hon. Charles R. Train, representing the City of Boston. Heading downriver on the twenty-fifth, they viewed “vast tracts of meadow-land completely covered with water, and rendering the lands farther back from the River, soft and spongy.” This inundation ended at the Fordway, a “natural ford, which the Remonstrants [respondents] say more effectually impeded the progress of the waters than does the Dam.” This is true, but what they did not realize at the time was that the dam pool greatly decreased the efficiency of the outlet by reducing its downstream gradient. “At the dam, the water seemed to be about one foot higher than the flash boards over which it flowed.” This indicates strong flow in the river combined with the factory’s policy of holding back as much water as possible. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 155

Waldo Emerson’s 56th birthday. He wrote in his journal:

The warblers at this season make much of the beauty & interest of the woods. They are so elegant in form & coat, and many of them here but for a short time; the Blackburnian warbler rarely seen by H.D.T.; the trees still allowing you to see far. Their small leaflets do not vie with the spaces of the sky — but let in the vision high — and (yesterday) Concord was all Sicily.

May 25. Dragon-flies have begun to come out of their larva state in numbers, leaving the cases on the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY weeds, etc. See one tender and just out this forenoon. Meadow fox-tail grass abundantly out (how long?), front of E. Hosmer’s by bars and in E. Hubbard’s meadow, front of meeting-house. The Salix petiolaris is either entire or serrate, and generally, I should now say, was becoming serrate, the later leaves, e.g. that one, a fertile one, nearly opposite the Shattuck oak. The river is quite high for the season, on account of the late rains. Hear within a day or two what I call the sprayey note of the toad, different and later than its early ring.

June 4, Saturday: Henry Thoreau was hired as a flowage consultant, to make an environmental impact assessment:

Specifically, a subcommittee of the petitioners led by town leaders — Simon Brown and Samuel H. Rhodes of Concord, David Heard of Wayland, and John Simonds of Bedford — signed a letter to Henry Thoreau asking him to carry out several tasks related to their legal case. They represented a group called the River Meadow Association, the name Henry listed in his survey notebook and in a letter dated July 8. The full membership of the association, listed in a questionnaire sent out to individual property owners later that summer, had voted to approve his selection. This action is indicated by one of Thoreau’s private letters, suggesting he was present for the vote. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 155

A joint Franco-Sardinian force defeated the Austrians at Magenta, opening the road to Milan. The victory would so cheer the French that Parisian dressmakers would apply the name of the battle to a new shade of red.

John Brown reached New-York. He would linger for a week in the Brooklyn home of Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester and the Reverend James Newton Gloucester. During the slavery era our church participated vigorously in the Underground Railroad and escaped slaves were provided food, clothing, and refuge. John Brown stopped by the Siloam Presbyterian Church enroute to Harpers Ferry and an offering of approximately $25 was raised for him to continue his work.

Henry Thoreau was being written to by Simon Brown, David Heard, Samuel H. Rhodes [Rhoades??], and John W. Simonds [Simmons??], about a proposed survey of the Concord River and its bridges and water levels:

Voted that the width of the bridges from Wayland to the dam at Billerica be measured between the abutments. The number and size of the wooden Piers, and of the Stone each piers. The depth of water at the bridges. To learn if possible the time of erection of each bridge. And if any abutments have been extended since the building of any bridge, & when, and to ascertain HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY the width of the river at its narrowest place at the falls, and the capacity of the sluice ways leading toward Lowell. Merrimac And if any bridges have been discontinued June 4th. 1859. Simon Brown— David Heard John W. Simonds Saml H. Rhoades.

According to Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 156, the preserved portion of this communication reads as follows:

Notice that the width of the bridges from Wayland to the dam at Bil- lerica be measured between the abutments. The number and size of the wooden piers and of the Stone piers. The depth of water at each bridge. To learn, if possible the time of erection of each bridge, and if any abutments have been extended since the building of any bridge, & when. And to ascertain the width of the river at its narrow- est place, at the falls, and the capacity of the sluceway leading to- ward Lowell merrimac. And if any bridged have been discontinued.

Professor Robert M. Thorson, in his THE BOATMAN: HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S RIVER YEARS, has commented about this:

On June 4, 1859, this little-known Thoreau was hired by the River Meadow Association, a seven-town coalition of farmers demanding removal of the downstream factory dam in Billerica. They claimed it was back-flooding up to fifteen thousand acres of their rich alluvial valley and ruining their agricultural economy, which was based on meadow hay, and to a lesser extent, cranberries. This “flowage controversy” was arguably America’s first major environmental debate over dam removal, a veritable class-action suit with more than five hundred petitioners that culminated a half-century of legal conflict. After five days of paid work for his client –mainly bridge inventory— Thoreau left their employment to pursue his own private investigation, becoming a silent third partner in the otherwise raucous public controversy. ... The flowage controversy climaxed five decades worth of lawsuits, providing an opportunity for a longitudinal case study of environmental law. To my knowledge, it is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment.

June 4, Saturday: P.M.– To Flint’s Pond. Cornus alternifolia well out, apparently three or four days. Yellow-eyed grass, how long? Poa compressa not quite out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

July 19, Tuesday: Moderates from northern German states met in Hanover to discuss German unification under Prussian leadership (this group, and the one formed 2 days earlier, would in September merge to form the Nationalverein).

In the morning was Harvard University’s commencement. After lunch was the annual meeting of the alumni of the Harvard Divinity School, to be followed at 4PM by an address by the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows. At the after-lunch session the controversy between liberal and conservative Unitarian reverends came out into the open on a motion to praise the terminally ill Reverend Theodore Parker made by the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway and seconded by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke. The meeting degenerated into wild argument and first tried to expel all newspaper reporters and then, failing to get these people to depart, cautioned them that they “knew well enough what to report and what not to.” The Reverend Conway proposed that his motion to praise the Reverend Parker be limited to a simple expression of sympathy in affliction, but even that had become too tainted to be brought to a vote. The participants in this meeting went into the lecture with the issue entirely unresolved, and in the lecture the Reverend Bellows condemned the Reverend Conway as a minister who would “dance in a church” and the Reverend Parker as a minister who would “worship in a theatre.” What was needed was recognition that society depended upon its institutions, and that religion was first and foremost one of those institution. The title of this lecture, which was being offered by the very Reverend who had originally suggested back in 1852 in Virginia that Conway abandon his Methodism and become a Unitarian minister, was, appropriately, “The New Catholic Church.”

The Transcendental philosophy ... delights in making the secular and the sacred, the right and the wrong, the grave and the gay, the male and the female, the world and the church, the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, the one and the same.

Since I do love a good fight I can’t help but point out that the Reverend Bellows, who was bellowing this condemnation of the integration of religion into one’s life, neglected to include an important phrase, “the Anglo-Saxon and the inferior races.” Why was this important distinction not also cited? A direct vote was after all escaped. The advertised hour for the annual address, to be delivered that year by Dr. Bellows of New York, had already been passed by a few minutes, and a motion for adjournment was carried. Next day I breakfasted at [James Russell] Lowell’s house with Edmund Quincy, who said, “So you could n’t get the Unitarians to pray for Parker?” He and others regarded it as due to my want of familiarity with the old Parkerite polemics that, while repudiating miracles, I should have attempted such a miracle as to soften the heart of militant Unitarianism. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

“Once entrained or incorporated, sediment migrates downstream according to its particle size. In Henry’s emerging theory are these statements: “[T]he heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel” [August 5, 1858], “The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly not with mud,” and “Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places — but sand is the enduring building material” [July 19, 1859]. Though the bottom of the Concord River is muddy in many places, its “bottom is occasionally ... of soft shifting sand ripple-marked ... under 4 or 5 feet of water” [August 1, 1859]. For clean sand, his last observation can be used to estimate a basal drag velocity of approximately two to three feet per second. Such ripples, especially those in Nut Meadow Brook [March 26, 1860], fascinated Henry throughout his sojourning life [July 10, 1859 {should this be April 15, 1859?; April 3, 1859]. Like the flowage of the fine sand and clay at the Deep Cut, ripples were an emergent phenomenon composed of inorganic material, but sharing some properties with life. Like the clay at the Deep Cut, ripples straddled the continuum between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 198

July 19. P.M. – Up Assabet. The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly, not with mud. Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places, but sand is the ordinary building-material. It is remarkable how the river, while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up the other side. Generally speaking, up and down this and the other stream, where there is a swift place and the bank worn away on one side, – which, other things being equal, would leave the river wider there, – a bank or island or bar is being built up on the other, since the eddy where, on one side, sand, etc., are deposited is produced by the rapidity of the current, thus:–

e.g. north side of Egg Rock, at Hemlocks, at Pigeon Rock Bend, at Swift Place Bank, etc., and on main stream at Ash Tree Bend. The eddy occasioned by the swiftness deposits sand, etc., close by on one side and a little offshore, leaving finally a low meadow outside where was once the bed of the river. There are countless places where the one shore is thus advancing and, as it were, dragging the other after it. I dug into that sand-bank, once sand-bar, at the narrow and swift place off Hildreth’s, five and a half feet deep, this afternoon. It is more than a rod wide and covered with willows and alders, etc. It is built up four or five feet above the summer level. It is uniformly fine sand, more or less darkened with decayed vegetation, probably much of it sawdust, and it has been deposited this depth here by the eddy at high water within a very recent period. The same agent is in a great many places steadily advancing such a bar or bank down the stream a rod or more from the old shore. The more recent and lower extremity of this bank or bar is composed of sawdust and shavings, almost entirely so to a depth of two feet. Before it reaches the surface, pads spring up in it; when [IT] begins to appear, pontederia shows itself, and bulrushes, and next black willows, button-bushes, etc. The finest black willows on the river grow on these sand-banks. They are also much resorted to by the turtles for laying their eggs. I dug up three or four nests of the Emys insculpta and Sternothaerus odoratus while examining the contents of the bank this afternoon. This great pile of dry sand in which the turtles now lay was recently fine HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY particles swept down the swollen river. Indeed, I think that the river once ran from opposite Merriam’s to Pinxter Swamp and thence along Hosmer’s hard land toward the bridge, and all the firm land north of Pinxter Swamp is such a sand-bank which the river has built (leaving its old bed a low meadow behind) while following its encroaching northeast side. That extensive hard land which the river annually rises over, and which supports a good growth of maples and swamp white oaks, will probably be found to be all alluvial and free from stones. The land thus made is only of a certain height, say four to six feet above summer level, or oftener four or five feet. At highest water I can still cut off this bend by paddling through the woods in the old bed of the river. Islands are formed which are shaped like the curving ridge of a snow-drift. Stagnant rivers are deep and muddy; swift ones shallow and sandy. Scirpus subterminalis, river off Hoar’s and Cheney’s, not long.

July 19th Pm up Assabet— The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly not with mud. Mud is deposited very slowly [^only] in the stagnant places— but sand is the enduring building ma- terial. It is remarkable how the river—while it may be encroaching on the bank on one side, preserves its ordinary breadth by filling up—the other side— Generally speaking up & down this & the other stream where there is a swift place & the bank borne away on one side— —which (other things being equal) would leave the river wider there—a bank or island or bar is being built up on the other—since the eddy where on one side sand &c are deposited is produced by the rapidity of the current— thus

eg N side of Egg Rock—at hemlocks— at Pigeon rock{.} bend—at swift-place bank— &c—& on main stream at Ash tree bend— The eddy occasioned by the swiftness deposits sand &c close by on one side & a little {of} shore—leaving finally a {Pages 159A and 159B of the holograph manuscript are blank.} low meadow outside where was once the bed of the river. There are countless places where the one shore is thus advancing {and}, as it were, dragging the other after it I dug into that sand bank, once sand bar, at the narrow & swift place off Hildreth’s—5 1/2 feet deep, this Pm. is more than a rod wide & covered with willows & alders—&c— It is built up 4 or 5 feet above the summer level. It is uniformly fine sand more or less darkened with [^decayed] vegetation— probably much of it saw-dust—& it has been deposited this depth here by the eddy at high water within a very recent period. The same agent is HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY in a great many places steadily advancing such a bar or bank down the stream a rod or more from the old shore— The more recent & lower extremity of this bank or bar—is composed of saw-dust & shavings—almost entirely so to a depth of 2 feet— Before it reaches the surface pads & pontederia spring up in it— when begins to appear— Pontederia shows itself [^& bull rushes]—& next black willow—button bushes &{c}. The finest black willows on the river grow on these sand-banks— They are also much resorted to by the turtles for laying their eggs I dug up 3 or 4 nests of the E. insculpta—& S. odoratus while examining the contents of the bank this p. m. This great pile of dry sand in which the turtles now lay—was recently fine particles swept down the swolen river. Indeed I think that the river once ran from opposite Merriams to Pinxter swamp & thence along Hosmer’s hard land toward the Bridge—& all the firm land N of Pinxter swamp—is such a [^sand] bank which the river has built (leaving its old bed a low meadow behind) while following its encroaching N. E side. That extensive hard land which the river annually rises over—& which supports a {good} growth of maples & swamp—white—oaks, will prob be found to be all alluvial & free from stones— The land thus made is only of a certain height say 4 to 6 feet above summer level or oftener 4 or 5 feet. At highest water I can still cut off this bend by paddling through the weeds {this word might possibly be “woods”} in the old bed of the river. Islands are formed which are shaped like the curving ridge of a snow-drift. Stagnant rivers are deep & muddy —swift ones shallow & sandy. Scirpus subterminalis river off Hoar & Cheneys not long– HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY July 22, Friday: Seth Ford swam across the Niagara River from a location north of the always-deadly American Falls, to the Canadian shoreline.

The Hawthornes had returned from Italy to England, where they would remain for approximately a year. On this date they arrived at the resort Redcar on the coast of Yorkshire, where Nathaniel Hawthorne would work on his manuscript for TRANSFORMATION, or THE MARBLE FAUN.

The earliest Puritan colonists recognized the Fordway as a serious impediment for free drainage, which is why they tried to excavate the channel there as early as 1636. This historical fact was the ace in the hole for the respondents of the 1859 flowage controversy, because it proved that persistent problems with upstream flooding predated construction of the first gristmill by a century, and the stone dam by two centuries. At the Fordway Thoreau noticed the rubble from early attempts to deepen it. He also noticed the underwater archeology of those who used it as a crossing, noting the “bricks & white crockery” associated with countless bumpy river crossings dating back to the earliest colonial times. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 184

July 22: Start just before 8 AM. and sail to the Falls of Concord River. Water 21+ inches above summer level. A southwest wind rises and blows us rapidly along. We are early enough to see the light reflected from the sides of the gyrating water-bugs. Heard from a bittern above the factory yesterday, too large for the small one and too small, perhaps, for the large one, a peculiar hoarse, grating note, lazily uttered,–a bittern’s croak,–at 1 P.M., as it flew over the meadows,–a sound perfectly becoming the bird, far as possible from music. Some have just begun to get the hay on our Great Meadows. The peetweet, our only beach-bird, teeters along the shore, reminding me that this is an arm of the ocean stream. At Hill’s Bridge we begin to find ourselves shut in by hills, and the character of the shores is fairly changed. There is very little meadow along the stream henceforward, but commonly a firm bank and pastures and cultivated fields–corn and potatoes–down to the shore, for it is commonly a firm shore, though it may be subject to inundation. The shores are still uninhabited,–the road being remote,–especially on the west side, and in the neighborhood of Middle Bridge we find ourselves off the middle of Billerica, the quiet town, and see its rural spire rising above the trees. Many handsome elm-tops and groves of elms are visible in Billerica. There is a fine grove of elms about the first house of the Atkins boat-house. Jug Island is a peculiar one, the only one of the kind that I know in the river,–except the small one at Falls,–firm and rocky, not made by the river, with deep water about it, especially on the east side, always separated from the shore, rising to a considerable height above the surface,–a part of the adjacent rocky range cut off by the river. The interval becomes more and more narrow and sandy or firm below this island and range of hills, and you see red-top and corn on it and woods. For the last mile above the Falls the river becomes rocky, the rocks gradually increasing in number, until at the Falls its bed is crowded with them. Some of the rocks are curiously water-worn. They are, as usual in our black river, almost as black as ink,–the parts much submerged,–and I notice that bricks and white crockery on the bottom acquire the same color from the water, as if painted black. The water of this river is a black paint-brush which coats all things with fast colors. Rocks half a dozen feet in diameter which were originally of the usual lumpish form HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY are worn thus

by the friction of the pebbles, etc., washed against them by the stream at high water. Several of them have this peculiar sheaf-like form; and black as ink. But, though evidently worn into this form by the rush of water, they are by no means worn smooth, but are as rough as a grater, such being their composition. These are just above the Fordway. There are two pleasant old houses near the Fordway on the east side. I was surprised to see on the upright sides of these rocks, one or two feet above the present water, very distinct white spots, looking like white paint across the river.

Examining, I found them to be three fourths to one inch in diameter of an oval or circular form; the white coating spreading on to the rock in an irregular fringe like the feet of an insect, increasing their resemblance to a bug, and they were raised one eighth or one tenth of an inch and finely dotted with the contained ova, reminding me of coins,–shaped like bugs or coins,–and I at first bent to read the inscriptions as if they were a work of art.

They were full of ova with much water in them or other liquid. [Vide August 8th.] Subtracting two and a quarter inches, I find the water at the Fordway, west side, two and one fourth feet deep, but generally not quite two feet. Apparently the stream has been cleared of rocks and deepened on the westerly side at the Falls. At the narrowest place, where there is a willow in the middle, there is a clear channel on the west about thirty-five feet wide and four and a quarter feet deep (at deepest), or to the willow thirty-eight and a quarter feet, to opposite shore fifty- four feet more, and about two feet deep at deepest, with many rocks; in all say ninety-two feet. We lunched about 12 o’clock (having got to the Falls about eleven), sitting on the largest rocky islet there, which, as I remember, may have been four to six rods long, but though it was not six feet above the water, if so much, there was no trace of the water ever having washed over it. Indeed, I think it does not rise more than five feet there ever, to judge from appearances. The obvious water-marks were about four feet above the present water. On this rock were dense trees and bushes, grass and soil, etc., etc., only five feet above the present surface and evidently not disturbed by water or ice. In the very midst of the Falls, on the rocky ridge where is some earth, only a foot or two above the water, grows the nesaea, as also abundantly on the sides. The hibiscus is very common along the neighboring shores. When I was here a month ago, the water being high, the current was very strong here, so that I could not paddle, perhaps could not have rowed a boat against it at the narrowest place; but now I can paddle against it there, and easily push about anywhere. When the water is high, then, it is strong and hard to resist at all falls and rapids. Now there is not so much of a rush as at the bridge near the powder-mills. The shores at the Falls are firm and rocky, though for the most part covered densely with bushes,–maples, alders, grape-vines, cat-briars, etc. There is no space for the river to expand in, and it is withal very much contracted in capacity by the rocks in it. Its bed is more or less strewn with rocks for some sixty rods, the largest forming rocky isles with soil and bushes and trees on them, though only some five or maybe six (?) feet high. There is water six and a half feet deep between the Fordway and the narrowest place below. I was surprised to see on the rocks, densely covering them, though only in the midst of the fall, where was the swiftest water, a regular seaweed, growing just like rockweed and of the same olive-green color, –“Podostemon Ceratophyllum, River-weed,”– still in bloom, though chiefly gone to seed. Gray says it is “attached to loose stones,” and Torrey says it “adheres to pebbles,” but here it covered the rocks under water in the swiftest place only, and was partly uncovered by the fall of the water. I found, in what I gathered, a little pout which had taken refuge in it. Though the botanist, in obedience to his rules, puts it among phaenogamous plants, I should not hesitate to associate it with the rockweed. It is the rockweed of our river. I have never seen it elsewhere in the river, though possibly it grows at the factory or other swift places. It seemed as if our river had there for a moment anticipated the sea, suffered a sea-change, mimicked the great ocean stream. I did not see it a few rods above or below, where the water is more sluggish. So far as I know, then, it grows only in the swiftest water, and there is only one place, and that the Falls, in Concord River where it can grow. Gray only speaks of it as HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY growing at “the bottom of shallow streams,” Torrey says “at the bottom of shallow pebbly streams,” and Bigelow only says it is attached to stones at the bottom. Yet apparently our sluggish river is only a stream, and sufficiently like ordinary rippling streams to admit of its growth at this one spot. A careless observer might confound it with the rockweed of the sea. It covers the rocks in exactly the same manner, and when I tore it off, it brought more or less of the thin, scaly surface of the rocks with it. It is a foretaste of the sea. It is very interesting and remarkable that at this one point we have in our river a plant which so perfectly represents the rockweed of the seashore. This is from four to eight or nine inches long. It has the peculiar strong fresh-water scent. The west end of Hill’s Bridge is (upper side of planking) eight feet eleven inches above summer level, under side of string-piece seven feet eight inches. I cannot hear that it ever rises on to this bridge, but there is a good deal of fresh drift stuff on the top of the abutment under the string-piece at seven feet eight inches above summer level, apparently washed on in the spring. The upper side of planking at east end is about nine feet eight inches above summer level. At Turnpike Bridge the water has apparently washed away a part of the abutment some seven and a half feet above summer level. At Middle Bridge, judging from water-marks on the piers, I should think the water might have risen there seven feet seven inches (more or less) above summer level, i. e. up to the timber which rests crosswise on the piers, twenty-two inches below top of planks. A carpenter who lives (?) at Billerica Corner says the water stood all around the nearest inhabited two-story house to the bridge last spring, so that you could go round it in a boat. (It is the opposite side the road to the river.) I think that this proves a rise here of at least seven feet above summer level and perhaps more. Therefore, as far as my observation goes, the rise of the river last spring from Sherman’s Bridge to Billerica Corner Bridge was very uniform and to about the same height above summer level, but it must fall off rapidly two or three feet or more at the Falls. I see neither of the small islands which are on Baldwin’s map below the Atkins house. It is a question if the river has as much created the shoal places as found them. The shallowest place in all the river above described also from Pelham Pond–is at the Fordway above the Falls, where it is not two and a half [FEET] at deepest to-day, and generally only two feet, with a hard bottom and numerous rocks in its bed. It is quite fordable in a carriage. The weediest place is at the Sudbury causeway. The most of a sand-bar visibly formed or forming is Barrett’s Bar. If a large piece of meadow should lodge on this, it would help make an island of it rapidly. The deepest and broadest place is in Fair Haven Pond. I think that the river proper is nowhere so wide as in some parts between Squaw [?] Harbor and Skelton Bend. The presence or absence of weeds at a given shallowness is a good gauge of the rapidity of the current. At the Fordway they do not grow where it is only two feet on an average, owing to the swiftness of the current (as well as stoniness), and in the very swiftest and narrowest part of the Falls occurs one species, the podostemon, which I have not found in any other part of the river. The muddiest are the most stagnant parts. The hibiscus and white maple do not occur on the main stream for a long distance above the mouth of the Assabet, maybe ten miles. It is remarkable how the river, even from its very source to its mouth, runs with great bends or zigzags regularly recurring and including many smaller ones, first northerly, then northeasterly, growing more and more simple and direct as it descends, like a tree; as if a mighty current had once filled the valley of the river, and meandered in it according to the same law that this small stream does in its own meadows. A river of this character can hardly be said to fall at all: it rather runs over the extremity of its trough, being filled to overflowing. Its only fall at present (above the Falls and this side Framingham) is like the fall produced by a dam, the dam being in this case the bottom in a shallow. If, after flowing twenty miles, all the water has got to rise as high as it was when it started, or rather if it has got to pass over a bottom which is as high as that was where it started, it cannot be said to have gained anything or have fallen at all. It has not got down to a lower level. You do not produce a fall in the channel or bottom of a trough by cutting a notch in its edge. The bottom may lose as much as the surface gains. Rocks which are covered by freshets a week or more will have lichens on them, as that on my old plan just below the Hemlocks. If our river had been dry a thousand years, it would be difficult to guess even where its channel had been without a spirit level. I should expect to find water-worn stones and a few muddy pools and small swamps.

Examining, I found them to be three fourths to one inch in diameter of an oval or circular form; the white coating spreading on to the rock in an irregular fringe like the feet of an insect, increasing their resemblance to a bug, and they were raised one eighth or one tenth of an inch and finely dotted with the contained ova, reminding me HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY of coins,–shaped like bugs or coins,–and I at first bent to read the inscriptions as if they were a work of art.

They were full of ova with much water in them or other liquid. [Vide August 8th.] Subtracting two and a quarter inches, I find the water at the Fordway, west side, two and one fourth feet deep, but generally not quite two feet. Apparently the stream has been cleared of rocks and deepened on the westerly side at the Falls. At the narrowest place, where there is a willow in the middle, there is a clear channel on the west about thirty-five feet wide and four and a quarter feet deep (at deepest), or to the willow thirty-eight and a quarter feet, to opposite shore fifty- four feet more, and about two feet deep at deepest, with many rocks; in all say ninety-two feet. We lunched about 12 o’clock (having got to the Falls about eleven), sitting on the largest rocky islet there, which, as I remember, may have been four to six rods long, but though it was not six feet above the water, if so much, there was no trace of the water ever having washed over it. Indeed, I think it does not rise more than five feet there ever, to judge from appearances. The obvious water-marks were about four feet above the present water. On this rock were dense trees and bushes, grass and soil, etc., etc., only five feet above the present surface and evidently not disturbed by water or ice. In the very midst of the Falls, on the rocky ridge where is some earth, only a foot or two above the water, grows the nesaea, as also abundantly on the sides. The hibiscus is very common along the neighboring shores. When I was here a month ago, the water being high, the current was very strong here, so that I could not paddle, perhaps could not have rowed a boat against it at the narrowest place; but now I can paddle against it there, and easily push about anywhere. When the water is high, then, it is strong and hard to resist at all falls and rapids. Now there is not so much of a rush as at the bridge near the powder-mills. The shores at the Falls are firm and rocky, though for the most part covered densely with bushes,–maples, alders, grape-vines, cat-briars, etc. There is no space for the river to expand in, and it is withal very much contracted in capacity by the rocks in it. Its bed is more or less strewn with rocks for some sixty rods, the largest forming rocky isles with soil and bushes and trees on them, though only some five or maybe six (?) feet high. There is water six and a half feet deep between the Fordway and the narrowest place below. I was surprised to see on the rocks, densely covering them, though only in the midst of the fall, where was the swiftest water, a regular seaweed, growing just like rockweed and of the same olive-green color, –“Podostemon Ceratophyllum, River-weed,”– still in bloom, though chiefly gone to seed. Gray says it is “attached to loose stones,” and Torrey says it “adheres to pebbles,” but here it covered the rocks under water in the swiftest place only, and was partly uncovered by the fall of the water. I found, in what I gathered, a little pout which had taken refuge in it. Though the botanist, in obedience to his rules, puts it among phaenogamous plants, I should not hesitate to associate it with the rockweed. It is the rockweed of our river. I have never seen it elsewhere in the river, though possibly it grows at the factory or other swift places. It seemed as if our river had there for a moment anticipated the sea, suffered a sea-change, mimicked the great ocean stream. I did not see it a few rods above or below, where the water is more sluggish. So far as I know, then, it grows only in the swiftest water, and there is only one place, and that the Falls, in Concord River where it can grow. Gray only speaks of it as growing at “the bottom of shallow streams,” Torrey says “at the bottom of shallow pebbly streams,” and Bigelow only says it is attached to stones at the bottom. Yet apparently our sluggish river is only a stream, and sufficiently like ordinary rippling streams to admit of its growth at this one spot. A careless observer might confound it with the rockweed of the sea. It covers the rocks in exactly the same manner, and when I tore it off, it brought more or less of the thin, scaly surface of the rocks with it. It is a foretaste of the sea. It is very interesting and remarkable that at this one point we have in our river a plant which so perfectly represents the rockweed of the seashore. This is from four to eight or nine inches long. It has the peculiar strong fresh-water scent. The west end of Hill’s Bridge is (upper side of planking) eight feet eleven inches above summer level, under side of string-piece seven feet eight inches. I cannot hear that it ever rises on to this bridge, but there is a good deal of fresh drift stuff on the top of the abutment under the string-piece at seven feet eight inches above summer level, apparently washed on in the spring. The upper side of planking at east end is about nine feet eight inches above summer level. At Turnpike Bridge the water has apparently washed away a part of the abutment some seven and a half feet above summer level. At Middle Bridge, judging from water-marks on the piers, I should think the water might have risen there seven feet seven inches (more or less) above summer level, i. e. up to the timber which rests crosswise on the piers, twenty-two inches below top of planks. A carpenter who lives (?) at Billerica Corner says the water stood all around the nearest inhabited two-story house to the bridge last spring, so that you could go round it in a boat. (It is the opposite side the road to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY river.) I think that this proves a rise here of at least seven feet above summer level and perhaps more. Therefore, as far as my observation goes, the rise of the river last spring from Sherman’s Bridge to Billerica Corner Bridge was very uniform and to about the same height above summer level, but it must fall off rapidly two or three feet or more at the Falls. I see neither of the small islands which are on Baldwin’s map below the Atkins house. It is a question if the river has as much created the shoal places as found them. The shallowest place in all the river above described also from Pelham Pond–is at the Fordway above the Falls, where it is not two and a half [FEET] at deepest to-day, and generally only two feet, with a hard bottom and numerous rocks in its bed. It is quite fordable in a carriage. The weediest place is at the Sudbury causeway. The most of a sand-bar visibly formed or forming is Barrett’s Bar. If a large piece of meadow should lodge on this, it would help make an island of it rapidly. The deepest and broadest place is in Fair Haven Pond. I think that the river proper is nowhere so wide as in some parts between Squaw [?] Harbor and Skelton Bend. The presence or absence of weeds at a given shallowness is a good gauge of the rapidity of the current. At the Fordway they do not grow where it is only two feet on an average, owing to the swiftness of the current (as well as stoniness), and in the very swiftest and narrowest part of the Falls occurs one species, the podostemon, which I have not found in any other part of the river. The muddiest are the most stagnant parts. The hibiscus and white maple do not occur on the main stream for a long distance above the mouth of the Assabet, maybe ten miles. It is remarkable how the river, even from its very source to its mouth, runs with great bends or zigzags regularly recurring and including many smaller ones, first northerly, then northeasterly, growing more and more simple and direct as it descends, like a tree; as if a mighty current had once filled the valley of the river, and meandered in it according to the same law that this small stream does in its own meadows. A river of this character can hardly be said to fall at all: it rather runs over the extremity of its trough, being filled to overflowing. Its only fall at present (above the Falls and this side Framingham) is like the fall produced by a dam, the dam being in this case the bottom in a shallow. If, after flowing twenty miles, all the water has got to rise as high as it was when it started, or rather if it has got to pass over a bottom which is as high as that was where it started, it cannot be said to have gained anything or have fallen at all. It has not got down to a lower level. You do not produce a fall in the channel or bottom of a trough by cutting a notch in its edge. The bottom may lose as much as the surface gains. Rocks which are covered by freshets a week or more will have lichens on them, as that on my old plan just below the Hemlocks. If our river had been dry a thousand years, it would be difficult to guess even where its channel had been without a spirit level. I should expect to find water-worn stones and a few muddy pools and small swamps.

July 31, Sunday morning: Margaret Crane Fuller died. Richard Frederick Fuller would write an account of his mother’s life for the benefit of her grandchildren.

On this day the manager of the dam across the Concord River at Billerica, Massachusetts opened the dam’s flood-gates and began to allow its backed-up waters to fall by a full 3 feet, and Henry Thoreau began to take 4 stage measurements of the levels of water in the Concord River daily — at near dawn, at midmorning, at midafternoon, and at dusk. Thoreau recorded his measurements to the nearest 1/64th inch. He would continue such measurements until August 15th, and such measurements would greatly increase the bulk of his journal. Thoreau would take careful notice of the fact that when the Middlesex Canal had become completely dry, the water levels beneath Concord’s North Bridge or Flint’s Bridge had fallen not more than an inch and a half, and would also take careful notice of the fact that when the manager of the Billerica dam would eventually close the spillway and allow the waters to rise again, up some 4 feet, this rise in water level would have only a minimal effect on the Concord River above Barrett’s Bar. What Thoreau was establishing, in his own mind, was the fact that the Billerica dam so detested by the meadow farmers actually had little or no effect on the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY upriver rate of flowage of the Concord River. This had been a false attribution that was leading them to an ineffective resolution of their meadow hay problem.

At the Framingham Ox-Bow of the Sudbury River, 16 miles up from Egg Rock, where river travelers have the alternative to drag their boat across the neck of the bow rather than paddle a mile around the bow, Thoreau paced it off and informed Ellery Channing that the stream banks were almost exactly 100 yards apart. They gazed upstream from this point toward their intended destination, Saxonville, but on that sultry dog day they did not drag Thoreau’s homemade dory across the neck. This would be the farthest point that Thoreau ever reached, venturing up either the Sudbury River or the Assabet River. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Thoreau had long known that “Nature has divided” the Musketaquid “agreeably into reaches,” which average about four miles long on the water and about a foot long on the scroll map. Recognition of these reaches, he believed, was what qualified him as a self-described “boatman.” “Between Sudbury Causeway & the falls I should divide the river into these Reaches: 1st, the Sudbury Meadow or Meandering Reach, extending from just above Heard’s Bridge to the Hay Bridge near the Concord line; 2d, The Fair Haven or Hill-Lake Reach, extending to Nut Meadow Brook; 3d, the Rapid Reach, which flows from near the mouth of the Assabet to Holt Ford inclusive; 4th, the Carlisle or Deep Lake Reach, which extends to the height of the hill below Jug Island, and 5th, the Billerica or shallow reach.” To these five reaches from his July 22 summary he added one more from his addendum report of July 31: a southernmost reach from Pelham Pond to Heard’s Bridge, which he called the Pelham Pond Reach. For each of these six reaches he provides a general description, average channel depth, type of aquatic vegetation, and so forth. Each yielded a different “sense of place.” One of the things that puzzled Henry at this scale was why there were two deep lake reaches — Fairhaven to the south, and Carlisle to the north — separated by the shallowest and most rapid reach. And why was this shallowest reach — a gravelly rapids — present on both sides of the powerful Assabet? The simple answer, he later realized, is that the middle Musketaquid is an enormous deltalike mound of coarse sediment deposited by the Assabet River at its mouth, and which divides one large lake into two. Subdividing reaches were zigzags where the river was “thrown” from one place to another by geological causes unrelated to alluvial activity. These range from a mile to a quarter mile in length on the water and a few inches on his map. “It is remarkable,” Thoreau wrote, “how the river (even from its very source to its mouth) runs with great bends or zigzags regularly recurring & including many smaller ones.” He recognized that these were places where the thread of the river was forced to flow either parallel to the tectonic grain or across it within a younger geological fault zone. Henry compared these large bends to the “wriggling of a snake controlled between 2 fences.” Overall, he saw this pattern weaken toward the north, where the river became more direct and simple, as “if a mighty current had once filled the valley.” This was a prescient insight. Indeed, during final stages of the last glaciation, powerful meltwater streams drained southward beneath the ice sheet and then northward toward it.... [At Walden Pond] the original valley became plugged with sediment during glacial retreat, burying residual ice blocks that later melted to form the Concord Lake District. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 180-182

July 31. 7.30 A.M. – Up river. C. and I, having left our boat at Rice’s Bend last night, walk to it this forenoon on our way to Saxonville. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Water three quarters of an inch above summer level. It is emphatically one of the dog-days. A dense fog, not clearing off till we are far on our way, and the clouds (which did not let in any sun all day) were the dog-day fog and mist, which threatened no rain. A muggy but comfortable day. As we go along the Corner road, the dense fog for a background relieves pleasantly the outlines of every tree, though only twenty rods off, so that each is seen as a new object, especially that great oak scrag behind Hubbard’s, once bent into a fence, now like a double-headed eagle, dark on the white ground. We go in the road to Rice’s on account of the heavy dew, yet the fine tops of red-top, drooping with dew over the path, with a bluish hue from the dew, – blue with dew, – wet our shoes through. The roads are strewn with meadow-hay, which the farmers teamed home last evening (Saturday). The grass is thickly strewn with white cobwebs, tents of the night, which promise a fair day. I notice that they are thickest under the apple trees. Within the woods the mist or dew on them is so very fine that they look smoke-like and dry, yet even there, if you put your finger under them and touch them, you take off the dew and they become invisible. They are revealed by the dew, and perchance it is the dew and fog which they reveal which are the sign of fair weather. It is pleasant to walk thus early in the Sunday morning, while the dewy napkins of the cobwebs are visible on the grass, before the dew evaporates and they are concealed. Returning home last evening, I heard that exceedingly fine z-ing or creaking of crickets (?), low in the grass in the meadows. You might think it was a confused ringing in your head, it is so fine. Heard it again toward evening. Autumnalish. On the 26th I saw quails which had been picking dung in a cart-path. Probably their broods are grown. The goldfinch’s note, the cool watery twitter, is more prominent now. We had left our paddles, sail, etc., under one of Rice’s buildings, on some old wagon-bodies. Rice, who called the big bittern “cow-poke, baked-plum-pudding.” It is worth the while to get at least a dozen miles on your journey before the dew is off. Stopped at Weir Hill Bend to cut a pole to sound with, and there came two real country boys to fish. One little fellow of seven or eight who talked like a man of eighty, – an old head. who had been, probably, brought up with old people. He was not willing to take up with my companion’s jesting advice to bait the fish by casting in some of his worms, because, he said, “It is too hard work to get them where we live.” Begin to hear the sharp, brisk dittle-ittle-ittle of the wren amid the grass and reeds, generally invisible. I only hear it between Concord line and Framingham line. What a variety of weeds by the riverside now, in the water of the stagnant portions! Not only lilies of three kinds, but heart-leaf, Utricularia vulgaris and purpurea, all (at least except two yellow lilies) in prime. Sium in bloom, too, and Bidens Beckii just begun, and Ranunculus Purshii still. The more peculiar features of Concord River are seen in these stagnant, lake-like reaches, where the pads and heart-leaf, pickerel-weed, button-bush, utricularias, black willows, etc., abound. Above the Sudbury causeway, I notice again that remarkable large and tall typha, apparently T. latifolia (yet there is at least more than an inch interval between the two kinds of flowers, judging from the stump of the sterile bud left on). [Vide (PAGE 273).] It is seven or eight feet high (its leaves), with leaves flat on one side (only concave at base, the sheathing part) and regularly convex on the other. They are so much taller than any I see elsewhere as to appear a peculiar species. Long out of bloom. They are what you may call the tallest reed of the meadows, unless you rank the arundo with them, but these are hardly so tall. The button-bush, which is, perhaps, at the height of its bloom, resounds with bees, etc., perhaps as much as the bass has. It is remarkable that it is these late flowers about which we hear this susurrus. You notice it with your back to them seven or eight rods off. See a blue heron several times to-day and yesterday. They must therefore breed not far off. We also scare up many times green bitterns, perhaps young, which utter their peculiar note in the Beaver Hole Meadows and this side. For refreshment on these voyages, [WE] are compelled to drink the warm and muddy-tasted river water out of a clamshell which we keep, – so that it reminds you of a clam soup, – taking many a sup, or else leaning over the side of the boat while the other leans the other way to keep your balance, and often plunging your whole face in at that, when the boat dips or the waves run. At about one mile below Saxonville the river winds from amid high hills and commences a great bend called the Ox-Bow. Across the neck of this bend, as I paced, it is scarcely twenty rods, while it must be (as I judged by looking, and was told) a mile or more round. Fishermen and others are accustomed to drag their boats overland here, it being all hard land on this neck. A man by the bridge below had warned us of this cut-off, which he said would save us an hour! A man fishing at the Ox-Bow said without hesitation that the stone-heaps were made by the sucker, at any rate that he had seen them made by the sucker in Charles River, – the large black sucker (not the horned one). Another said that the water rose five feet above its present level at the bridge on the edge of Framingham, and showed me about the height on the stone. It is an arched stone bridge, built some two years ago. About the Sudbury line the river becomes much narrower and generally deeper, as it enters the first large meadows, the Sudbury meadows, and is very winding, – as indeed the Ox-Bow was. It is only some thirty or forty feet wide, yet with firm upright banks a foot or two high, – canal-like. This canal-like reach is the transition from the Assabet to the lake-like or Musketaquid portion. At length, off Pelham Pond, it is almost lost in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY weeds of the reedy meadow, being still more narrowed and very weedy, with grassy and muddy banks. This meadow, which it enters about the Sudbury line, is a very wild and almost impenetrable one, it is so wet and muddy. It is called the Beaver-Hole Meadows and is a quite peculiar meadow, the chief growth being, not the common sedges, but great bur-reed, five or six feet high and all over it, mixed with flags, Scirpus fluviatilis, and wool-grass, and rank canary grass. Very little of this meadow can be worth cutting, even if the water be low enough. This great sparganium was now in fruit (and a very little in flower). I was surprised by the sight of the great bur-like fruit, an inch to an inch and a half in diameter, the fruit-stems much branched and three or four feet high. It is a bur of sharp-pointed cones; stigmas linear.

I can hardly believe that this is the same species that grows in C. It is apparently much earlier than ours. Yet ours may be a feeble growth from its very seeds floated down. Can it be that in this wild and muddy meadow the same plant grows so rankly as to look like a new species? It is decidedly earlier as well as larger than any I find in C. It does not grow in water of the river, but densely, like flags, in the meadow far and wide, five or six feet high, and this, with the Scirpus fluviatilis, etc., makes a very novel sight. Where there are rare, wild, rank plants, there too some wild bird will be found. The marsh wrens and the small green bitterns are especially numerous there. Doubtless many rails here. They lurk amid these reeds. Behind the reeds on the east side, opposite the pond, was a great breadth of pontederia. Zizania there just begun. This wren (excepting, perhaps, the red-wing blackbird [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus]) is the prevailing bird of the Sudbury meadows, yet I do not remember to have heard it in Concord. I get a nest, [Rice saw one in his meadow (at the Dam Meadows) in Concord half a dozen years ago. I hear of another in Nine-Acre Corner this year.] suspended in a patch of bulrush (Scirpus lacustris) by the river’s edge, just below the Sudbury causeway, in the afternoon. It is a large nest (for the bird), six inches high, with the entrance on one side, made of coarse material, apparently withered bulrush and perhaps pipes and sedge, and no particular lining; well woven and not very thick; some two and a half or three feet above water. The bird is shy and lurks amid the reeds. We could not now detect any passage into Pelham Pond, which at the nearest, near the head of this reach, came within thirty rods of the river. Do not the lake-like reaches incline to run more north and south? The potamogetons do not abound anywhere but in shallows, hence in the swifter places. The lake-like reaches are too deep for them. Cardinal-flower. Have seen it formerly much earlier. Perhaps the high water in June kept it back. This sixteen miles up, added to eleven down, makes about twenty-seven that I have boated on this river, to which may be added five or six miles of the Assabet.

August 1, Monday: The initial day of the New England Colored Citizens Convention. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

“Once entrained or incorporated, sediment migrates downstream according to its particle size. In Henry’s emerging theory are these statements: “[T]he heaviest particles of alluvium are deposited nearest the channel” [August 5, 1858], “The architect of the river builds with sand chiefly not with mud,” and “Mud is deposited very slowly, only in the stagnant places — but sand is the enduring building material” [July 19, 1859]. Though the bottom of the Concord River is muddy in many places, its “bottom is occasionally ... of soft shifting sand ripple-marked ... under 4 or 5 feet of water” [August 1, 1859]. For clean sand, his last observation can be used to estimate a basal drag velocity of approximately two to three feet per second. Such ripples, especially those in Nut Meadow Brook [March 26, 1860], fascinated Henry throughout his sojourning life [July 10, 1859 {should this be April 15, 1859?; April 3, 1859]. Like the flowage of the fine sand and clay at the Deep Cut, ripples were an emergent phenomenon composed of inorganic material, but sharing some properties with life. Like the clay at the Deep Cut, ripples straddled the continuum between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 198

August 1. 6 A.M. – River is at summer level. This being Monday morning, the river is probably lower than at any other time in the week. Am surprised to see in water opposite between Monroe’s and Dodd’s the Myriophyllum ambiguum var. natans, amid the Bidens Beckii. It must have been out (under water) a fortnight. A pretty sprig of pectinate leafets above the capillary-leafed and slimy mass. The B. Beckii (just beginning to bloom) just shows a few green leafets above its dark and muddy masses, now that the river is low. Evidently the above two and lilies, cardinal-flowers, etc., depend on the state of the river in June. After a very wet June I think there is less bloom on them. Some years the first two are not noticed at all. We have now got down to the water milfoil and the B. Beckii. These might be called low-water plants. [Vide August 4th.] The bottom is occasionally – though quite rarely in Concord – of soft shifting sand, ripple-marked, in which the paddle sinks, under four or five feet of water (as below the ash tree hole), and few weeds grow on such a shallow. Evidently the hill at Hemlocks would be a flowing sand-hill, if it were not held together by the hemlocks. The common cat-tail (about five feet high by railroad, beyond the South Bridge) has no interval between the two kinds of flowers, but mine of yesterday (vide [SIX] pages back) has, and yet it is much larger than the common. Can it, then, be the Typha augustifolia, which is described as smaller and rare? I see a kingbird hovering within six inches above the potamogetons, front of Cheney’s, and repeatedly snapping up some insects, perhaps a devil’s-needle. [Often afterward for weeks; stoops from the willows.] The west edge of the Rock above Island is eleven and a half inches above summer level. Now, at 5 P.M., the river has risen an inch and a half since 6 A.M., though we have not had a drop of rain for three days, and then but a few drops, and it fell three quarters of an inch between yesterday (Sunday) morning and this morning. Is this rise owing to the water let on from various mill-ponds this Monday morning? HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY August 23, Tuesday: It was reported in a San Francisco, California newspaper that during the previous afternoon a horse and rider had come dashing down the steep hill on California street toward Kerny, when the horse stumbled and fell, pitching the clumsy rider over his head. Horse and man rolled down the hill together; presently they regained their feet, when the “sagacious” horse, with a look of “supreme contempt” for his rider, wheeled round and kicked the man down, and then stood as if ready to burst out in a “horse laugh” of exultation over him. Fortunately, the man was not seriously hurt, and gathering himself up he remounted his “Bucephalus” and rode off, “looking rather crest-fallen.”

An 8-year-old having been severely bitten by the dog of a Spaniard, this newspaper urged that the police ensure he “either keeps him chained or kills him.”

This edition of this newspaper also reported that 3 calves and yearlings of a herd of cattle being driven over a delapidated pier had fallen through its planking, without anyone trying to rescue them from the bay water.

It was also reported that a German woman with freckled face and light hair about 35 years of age, name unknown, had left her boarding house at the Sansome street Hotel on the previous Saturday and disappeared. Since she had recently arrived from New Orleans where her husband had died, the surmise was that she had committed suicide.

This edition of this newspaper also reported on the funeral of a Mr. Wm. Louderback, run over by a fire engine. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY In Concord, Massachusetts 5 members of the legislative committee investigating in the flowage controversy of long standing boarded a “steam-tug” to inspect the Concord and Sudbury river watershed while it was at its lowest stage. These were Senator Edward Griffin Parker of Norfolk, Senator Samuel W. Bowerman of Berkshire, Representative William Wiley Russell of Sunderland, Representative Stephen A. Chase of Salem, and Representative Stephen C. Wrightington of Fall River.

“Strong circumstantial evidence suggests that Thoreau was watching them from a safe distance. His journal indicates that he was in town all morning. This would have been the town’s most newsworthy event of the summer. This was the culmination of a controversy he’d been thinking about for at least fifteen years and working on for weeks. This date coincides with an abrupt change in his summer research schedule. An earlier journal entry refers to the time when the “Commissioners were here,” indicating that he was present during their first visit. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 25

They steamed upriver 13 miles, to the boundary of Wayland and downriver through Bedford and Carlisle across the Fordway natural bedrock barrier to Billerica, returning to Concord for hearings to be hosted there on the following day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

After more than a month of legal proceedings in Boston, the Joint Committee returned to Concord.... This time the entourage went north and south on the same day, “sailing in a steam-tug the whole length of the stream from Farm Bridge to Billerica.” This required a round trip south to Wayland and back, followed by a round trip north to Billerica and back, the same sixty miles that Thoreau had skated round trip in a single day many years earlier. In Sudbury they reported the current to have been exceedingly sluggish, its flow having been nearly stopped by weeds growing in patches up to half a mile in length over various sandbars such as Bent’s Bar in Wayland. Churning through the weeds must have been challenging. In the northerly segment, Barrett’s Bar below the Assabet was seen as the greatest of all “natural obstructions except that of the Fordway,” which they saw as “an obstruction to the passage of water almost as great, apparently, as the dam itself.” Upon arriving at the Billerica dam, the petitioners suggested “that the water should be drawn down, in order that the Committee might see the old Dam and ascertain its relative height.” They were referring to the original 1798 dam for the Middlesex Canal, which was submerged by the higher stone-faced dam of 1828 built immediately downstream. Both parties engaged to do so “upon some Saturday night which parties might agree on,” provided that the Joint Committee was notified. Saturday night was best for a drawdown because the river would have the Sabbath to recover in time to turn factory wheels on Monday morning. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 201 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

The resumption of hearings on August 23 coincided with Henry’s return to his normal sojourning practice. On that day he provided his first detailed record of natural history observations since July 12, when the passage of the surveyor John Avery through town inspired his stage monitoring work. For the next three days, Thoreau’s journal returned to his old groove of musing about natural history and philosophy. Beginning August 26 its entries read like those of early summer prior to his intense engagement with the river project. Things went smoothly for the next two weeks, until September 16, which Thoreau spent surveying along Bedford Road for Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then, for the next month, Thoreau’s journal entries brimmed with rants against superfluous wealth, the immorality of slavery, annoying music, social niceties, capital markets, and abolition politics. The river project, at least for now, seemed a thing of the past and his journal no longer a scientific notebook. During this interval he sent a letter to his close friend H.G.O. Blake on September 26 complaining that he was not in a “fit mood” to write, “for I feel and think rather too much like a business man, having some very irksome affairs to attend to these months and years on account of my family.” — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 202

Aug. 23. P.M. — To Laurel Glen to see the effect of the frost of the 17th (and perhaps 18th). As for autumnal tints, the Smilacina racemosa is yellowed, spotted brown in streaks, and half withered; also two-leaved Solomon’s-seal is partly yellowed and withered. Birches have been much yellowed for some time; also young wild cherry and hazel, and some horse-chestnuts and larches on the street. The scarlet lower leaves of the choke-berry and some brakes are the handsomest autumnal tints which I see to-day. At Laurel Glen, these plants were touched by frost, in the lowest places, viz., the very small white oaks and hickories; dogsbane very generally; ferns generally,–especially Aspidium Thelypteris (?), the revolute one at bottom of hollow,–including some brakes; some little chinquapin oaks and chestnuts; some small thorns and blueberry (Vaccinium vacillans shoots); aspen, large and tender leaves and shoots; even red maple; many hazel shoots; geraniums; indigo-weed; lespedeza (the many-headed) and desmodium (one of the erect ones); a very little of the lowest locust leaves. These were very small plants and low, and commonly the most recent and tender growth. The bitten part, often the whole, was dry and shrivelled brown or darker. In the river meadows the blue-eyed grass was very generally cut off and is now conspicuously black,–I find but one in bloom,–also small flowering ferns. The cranberries (not vines) are extensively frost-bitten and spoiled. In Moore’s Swamp the potatoes were extensively killed, the greenest or tenderest vines. One says that the driest part suffered the most. They had not nearly got ripe. One man had his squash vines killed. [At frosty hollows by Ripple Lake on the 28th, see the effects of the same frost of 17th,–little chinquapin oaklets and the tenderest shoots of Cornus alba, the gray dead twigs of the cornel of past years, all their tops; and these two are almost the only shrubs at the bottom. The older cornel leaves have been turned to dark purple, plainly by the frost. Erechthites not touched even Aug. 30th (vide September 2d).] HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

The flowage controversy climaxed five decades worth of lawsuits, providing an opportunity for a longitudinal case study of environmental law. To my knowledge, it is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 32

September 28, Wednesday: During a rope-walking exhibition by Mons. Cornise in Albion a bridge over the Erie Canal, crowded with some 500 spectators, collapsed and 15 corpses would later be collected (in all likelihood there would have been a number of other corpses, trapped in that crumpled wreckage beneath the surface of the water).

James Worster, a farmer and former blacksmith in his 50s, had been attempting to fight the Great Falls Manufacturing Company owners of 5 cotton mills in New Hampshire since 1847. He had been in the habit of purchasing or leasing farmland that was downstream from dams owned by out-of-state mill owners and therefore likely to be flooded; for instance he had leased farmland in Dover that had flooded because of a dam holding back the Salmon Falls River. Worster partially destroyed that dam by tearing off an abutment and cutting down its planking, and then threatened to destroy the entire dam. The company had gone to court and obtained an injunction against his further damaging their dam. Then in 1852 Worster’s daughter Adeline Worster, who co-owned land with him in Tuftonboro on the northeast shore of Lake Winnipesaukee, sued the Lake Company, claiming that its dam at Lake Village had flooded and damaged their property, but her lawsuit had been dismissed by the court. Then in 1853 her father involved himself in more properties that were being flooded seasonally by the Lake Company’s dams –meadowland in Sanbornton, a farm in Gilford along Paugus Bay, and a share of Rattlesnake Island in Lake Winnipesaukee– but the court had thrown out that case as well. James Bell, an agent of the Lake Company who had a brother Justice Samuel Bell in one of the seats on the New Hampshire Superior Court, obtained from that body an injunction preventing Worster from further interfering with the property of the Lake Company, but this injunction didn’t stop Worster. He moved to Concord, New Hampshire and obtained farmland bordering the Merrimack River in Hooksett upstream from a dam that powered the giant Amoskeag textile mills in Manchester. Again his property was flooded and again he had cause to be furious. On a morning during March of this year, at 6:30AM, he and another man had appeared at the Amoskeag Company’s dam. When a watchman ordered them to leave, they had refused and engaged in a fistfight. The watchman had knocked Worster down 3 times, bloodying his nose. Four months after his attack on the Amoskeag dam, the Amoskeag Company’s agent had become suspicious and notified the sheriff, and when Worster appeared in July with 6 men, to rip the flashboards off the dam, the sheriff and his deputies had taken Worster into custody. The Amoskeag Company then purchased an unpaid note in Worster’s name and placed a legal lien on Worster’s Hooksett property for nonpayment.

During August, while James Worster was on trial for trying to destroy the Amoskeag dam, and was still enjoined from damaging the Lake Company’s dam in Lake Village, Worster complained to the Lake Company that their dam had overflowed his properties along Lakes Winnisquam and Winnipesaukee.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that on this night, James Worster led a group of up to 50 farmers, mill operators, loggers, and laborers of New Hampshire’s Lakes Region armed with axes and iron rods, in a “Lake Village Riot” attempt to destroy the 250-foot Lake Village dam at the south outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee. The dam was controlled by the hydraulic empire deceptively titled “Winnipissiogee Lake Cotton and Woolen Manufacturing Company of New Hampshire” (also referred to informally as the “Lake Company”), that regulated how much water would enter the channel of the Merrimack River to power the cotton cards, the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY spinning frames, and the power looms of the enormous textile mills in Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts (this happened to be more water power than was then being accessed by the entirety of the French nation). Between 1845 and 1856 this deceptively named corporation had stealthily gained control over 103 square miles of New Hampshire waters, including Winnipesaukee, Squam, Winnisquam, and Newfound lakes. “Lake Village,” then part of neighboring Gilford, relied on water that flowed from Lake Winnipesaukee into Opechee Bay to power its foundry, machine shop and mills (it has since become Lakeport, a neighborhood of Laconia, New Hampshire), but the Lake Company had no interest in the local industries of that community. Worse, the company raised the lake levels during the winter, flooding the local farmers’ fields, then allowed the water to run into the river channel during the summer, impeding impeded navigation for shippers and ferryboat owners, and preventing loggers from sending timber downstream. An agent of the Lake Company had expressed the opinion that James Worster “ought to be in jail or in an insane asylum.” A New Hampshire judge had characterized him as “so much a man of one idea, that it is of no use to talk with him.” He would pay a prison penalty for having created such an impression of his character.

Though the insurgents managed to wrestle a few flash-board planks off the top of the dam, the sheriff showed up in time to prevent any significant damage. However, the men returned during that afternoon and began again to remove the planking. While Lake Company agent Josiah French and his assistant were trying to stop them, French’s assistant struck one of the men on the hand with an iron bar, whereupon some of the men attempted to shove French off the dam. The men then again departed, but returned around nightfall with reinforcements, a larger crowd of local citizens from as far afield as Concord, New Hampshire. They brought with them an officer of the law who took Josiah French and his assistant into custody on a charge of assault and battery. James Worster was among a group of 50 wielding axes and iron bars against the dam. They managed to do some damage, but it seemed they had underestimated how long it would take to destroy a tight, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY 7-year-old, 250-foot-wide stone dam. What happened next, as described in the Winnipesaukee Gazette, was that “the big boys” arrived (these, presumably, were roughsters who had been hired by the Lake Company): “The crowd was summarily dispersed, without much regard to ceremony – some of whom were not handled very lightly.” For having attempted to shove Josiah French off the dam, 7 of the rioters would be indicted for attempted murder, but this would be a jury trial that would end in a hung jury. For having struck a rioter’s hand with an iron bar, French would be sued for assault, but his jury would acquit him. Worster would be charged with contempt for rioting after he’d been enjoined against interfering with the Lake Company’s property, and the litigation would drag on for years, during which Worster would lose his temper and attack the Lake Company’s lawyer. Finally this man would be convicted and sentenced to 3 months in prison and a $500 fine (and it would appear that this punishment brought an end to his single-mindedness).

The fuel for the anger in New Hampshire was the same fuel feeding the legal wrangling in Concord [Massachusetts]. Dam construction had raised the level of Lake Winnipesaukee and flowed the insurgents’ lands in an upstream direction. Environmental historian Theodore Steinberg concluded that “Their attack on the dam ... resulted from economic frustration, of lives caught up in the capitalist transformation of the region — an economic shift that left them behind.” Much the same could be said simultaneously about the farmers of Musketaquid, who had been bucking an irreversible economic trend that would, after the Civil War, make America the richest nation in the world. Thoreau understood that seething anger. He had felt it as a young man in 1844 when he threatened vigilante justice against the Billerica dam. He had felt it in 1845-1846 at Walden Pond, when he railed against the iron horse of the locomotive, and industrial progress in general. By 1850, however, he had calmed down enough to join that capitalist transformation as a land surveyor. During the mid-1850s he realized that this makeover had, for better and worse, become thoroughly integrated into his landscape. By 1859 his anger had shifted away from engineered structures to political, economic, and cultural issues, especially slavery and financial inequality. During Concord’s flowage controversy, Henry’s sympathies clearly lay with the valley farmers who had hired him, rather than the opposing industrialists. Nevertheless, observed historian Robert Gross, “The pencil-makers ‘John Thoreau & Son’” were “as fully engaged in the market revolution as any other business in Concord.” In fact, during the zenith of Thoreau’s river years in the late 1850s, he lived in a household “on the fringe of the economic elite,” complete with two Irish servants in the house. His surveying business added to the income from the pencil and black-lead business. Based on Thoreau’s archive of survey maps, his “eleven jobs in 1859 and thirteen in 1860 are about average for his career.” This frequency is confirmed by Henry’s self-reporting in his journal. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 202-203

September 28: At Cattle-Show to-day I noticed that the ladies’ apple (small, one side green, the other red, glossy) and maiden’s-blush (good size, yellowish-white with a pink blush) were among the handsomest. The pumpkin-sweet one of the largest exhibited. The ram’s horn was a handsome uniformly very dark purple HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY or crimson. The white pine seed is very abundant this year, and this must attract more pigeons [American Passenger Pigeon Ectopistes migratorius]. Coombs tells me that he finds the seed in their crops. Also that he found within a day or two a full-formed egg with shell in one. In proportion as a man has a poor ear for music, or loses his ear for it, he is obliged to go far for it or fetch it from far, and pay a great price for such as he can hear. Operas, ballet-singers, and the like only affect him. It is like the difference between a young and healthy appetite and the appetite of an epicure, between a sweet crust and a mock-turtle soup. As the lion is said to lie in a thicket or in tall reeds and grass by day, slumbering, and sallies at night, just so CAT with the cat. She will ensconce herself for the day in the grass or weeds in some out-of-the-way nook near the house, and arouse herself toward night. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1860

January 28, Saturday: Britain formally returned the Mosquito Coast to Nicaragua.

REPORT OF THE JOINT SPECIAL COMMITTEE UPON THE SUBJECT OF THE FLOWAGE OF MEADOWS ON CONCORD AND SUDBURY RIVERS JANUARY 28, 1860 was issued in Boston by William White, Printer to the State (this publication offered no information in regard to measurements by flowage expert and environmental impact assessor Henry Thoreau).

Though Thoreau is never mentioned in the court proceedings, we know he closely followed the case to its bitter end, if only for intellectual amusement. His private journal paraphrases oral testimony given under oath, suggesting he attended the hearings. The people he interviewed became witnesses. His clients shared his ideas in court anonymously. His private papers contain published pamphlets about the controversy, and handwritten copies of reports. His work schedule was timed to coincide with key dates of experiments and hearings. One of the movement’s leaders, David Heard, was Thoreau’s client, correspondent, and assistant. John Shepard Keyes, Concord’s most powerful politician, personally gifted Henry with a beautiful blue- marbled copy of the full report, inscribed to “H.D. Thoreau, Esq. with regards of J.S.K.” Simon Brown, chair of the River Meadow Association and former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, thanked Henry with carriages rides around town after he became too ill to sojourn. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 23

Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard College had been reported in a Boston newspaper to have commented, in a public lecture at the Boston Mercantile Library, on the truly absurd and wrongheaded speculations offered by Charles Darwin in his recent ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVO RE D SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE: What has the whale in the arctic regions to do with the lion or the tiger in the tropical Indies? There is no possible connection between them; and yet they are built respectively according to one & the same idea. There is behind them & anterior to their existence, a thought. There is a design according to which they were built, which must have been conceived before they were called into existence; otherwise these things could not be related in this general manner. Whenever we study the general relations of animals, we study more than the affinities of beasts. We study the manner in which it has pleased the Creator to express his thoughts in living realities; and that is the value of that study for intellectual Man; for while he traced these thoughts as revealed in nature, he must be conscious that he feels, and attempts as far as it is possible for the limited mind of man to analyze the thoughts of the Creator, to approach if possible into the counsels that preceded the calling into existence of this world with its inhabitants, HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY and there lies really the moral value of the study of nature; for it makes us acquainted with the Creator in a manner in which we cannot learn Him otherwise. As the Author of Nature, we must study Him in the revelation of nature in that which is living before our eyes. Darwin therefore wrote on this day to Professor Asa Gray of Harvard: Down Bromley Kent Jan. 28th My dear Gray Hooker has forwarded to me your letter to him; & I cannot express how deeply it has gratified me. To receive the approval of a man, whom one has long most sincerely respected, & whose judgment & knowledge are universally admitted, is the highest reward an author can possibly wish for; & I thank you heartily for your most kind expressions.— I have been absent from home for a few days, & so could not earlier answer your letter to me of the 10th of Jany. — You have been extremely kind to take so much trouble & interest about the Edition. It has been a mistake of my publisher not thinking of sending over the sheets. I had entirely & utterly forgotten your offer of receiving the sheets as printed off. But I must not blame my publisher; for had I remembered your most kind offer, I feel pretty sure I shd not have taken advantage of it; for I never dreamed of my Book being so successful with general readers: I believe I shd have laughed at the idea of sending the sheets to America.— After much consideration & on the strong advice of Lyell & others, I have resolved to leave the present book as it is (excepting correcting errors or here & there inserting short sentence) & to use all my strength which is but little to bring out the first part (forming a separate volume with index &c) of the three volumes which will make my bigger work; so that I am very unwilling to take up time in making corrections for an American Edition.— I enclose list of few corrections in the 2d Reprint, which you will have received by this time complete; & I could send 4 or 5 corrections or additions of equally small importance, or rather of equal brevity. — I, also, intend to write a short Preface with brief history of subject. — These I will set about, as they must some day be done & I will send them you in a short time, — the few corrections first, & the preface afterwards, unless I hear that you have given up all idea of separate Edition. You will then be able to judge whether it is worth having new Edition with your Review prefixed. Whatever be the nature of your Review, I assure you I should feel it a great honour to have my Book thus preceded. — In business matters it is always best to speak out plainly: as I should not, as we have managed it, get anything from an American publisher, if you do print an Edition & can get any profit, nothing should induce me to touch a penny of it. My terms with Murray are that I receive 2/3 of Profits, & he 1/3; — with respect to latter, I can of course say nothing. — But I expect when you come to consider the case, you will not think a new Edition worth thinking about; though an answer to Agassiz would be a great advantage to subject.— Thank you much for telling me the magnificent compliment of Wyman & for sending me extract from Agassiz. I cannot see the force of his argument; & if he wished to puff my book he could HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY not have been more ingenious. — I am delighted to hear that H.D. Rogers, the Professor at Glasgow & so excellent a geologist goes very long way with my views.— Believe me, my dear Gray I feel all your most generous sympathy & assistance Yours most truly | C. Darwin I shall value much at any time your criticisms, either in your HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Review or by letter.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR JANUARY 28th]

The attorneys for opposite sides used lofty rhetoric to spin the situation in their favor. Presenting the case for the petitioners, the golden-tongued Henry French intoned: “This rich and beautiful expanse, forming ... a noble feature of a delightful landscape, is converted into a loathsome laboratory of mephitic gasses and poisonous exhalations.” “Instead of ‘the sweet and wholesome odor of the new-mown hay,’” there is “‘a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors’ ... as perceptible as the effluvia of a slaughter-house. Whole families have been prostrated and decimated by fevers.... Chronic and acute rheumatisms have become alarmingly prevalent.... Books and clothing contract moisture and mould in closets, trunks, and drawers.... The sale of real estate is paralyzed.... Some of the most substantial and pleasant dwellings have been long vacant, and ... have found no purchasers. Strangers who come to view these estates, say, “You have too much water here,” and they go their way. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Presenting the case for the respondents, the silver-tongued Josiah Abbott claimed on behalf of the industrialists that the whole case was a “great and significant mistake,” a sentimental fiction derived from youthful nostalgia for the romanticized good old days. It was a “monstrous exaggeration,” he asserted, to suggest that a “most beautiful and smiling mead” had been converted into a “barren wilderness” by the actions of one small dam, or that “an almost earthly paradise, whose beauties should be embalmed in song, and so go down to remote generations,” had been converted “to an unsightly bog and an unhealthy quagmire.” As this rhetoric ricocheted back and forth, Thoreau was busy proving to himself that both sides were correct, and that both sides were ignorant of the complexities. The downstream dam was indeed a serious problem for meadow agriculture. Simultaneously, the upstream watershed was being transformed in ways that made the lowland alluvial valley of Musketaquid wetter, especially during summer. But within the legal arena, the whole case — four years, four legislative acts, and great cost — boiled down to the single discrete question: was the downstream dam the main problem? No one knew because no one could have known, the science wasn’t there yet, at least not in the public domain. Round and round the blame game went, creating a gold mine for the lawyers, who thrived in the vacuum of scientific knowledge and theory. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 23-24 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Two worlds were in collision. The view looking upstream was that of Lowell, Massachusetts, the hydropowered heart of Yankee industry. That’s where the powerful Merrimack River, having drained from New Hampshire’s highest mountains, fishhooks to the northeast. That’s where the controlled fall of water turned 31 mills, 6,300 looms, and 225,000 thread spindles in that city alone. Farther down, the Merrimack flowed to the Atlantic as “mere waste water, to use Thoreau’s term. More cloth was woven in this vicinity than in the entire Confederacy combined. Cotton picked by enslaved human beings was being manufactured into fabrics by America’s most enslaved river. Equally enslaved was the lowermost reach of the Concord River, which enters the Merrimack at Lowell. There, above the locks of the Middlesex Canal, were four factory dams. For these industrialists looking upstream, the entire alluvial valley was one large reservoir of gravitational potential energy created to power their factories before the age of coal-fired steam. For farmers looking downstream, what hung in the balance was their way of life, which they themselves had been slowly transforming during the previous three or four decades. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 24 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY March 8, Thursday: David Lee Child of Wayland would offer, to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, on this day and the following one, an addendum to the original flowage report dealing with the dam at the mouth of the Concord River and Sudbury River (Wayland was the town most obviously harmed, during this 19th- Century environmental impact controversy). Per Child’s “memorial,” the blame for the “uniform Dead Sea” situation of the Musketaquid was ascribed entirely to the legislation that had originally created the Middlesex Canal and the dam that had provided its water. The original agreements that had been signed by the various meadowland owners and by their town officials had been “materially altered” by subsequent circumstances, and therefore needed to be modified in the final product of the negotiation. The situation could only be corrected by complete removal of said dam, plus the digging out of 3 or 4 bars of sediment that had established themselves over the years at points in the river channel above said dam, plus a “restored right of action against the City of Boston for all damages done by their compensating reservoirs, so called.”

Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln delivered, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, the standard stump speech

about American slavery being contrary to the spirit of our Declaration of Independence that he had already delivered on March 6th in New Haven and on March 7th in Meriden, Connecticut and would go on to deliver without significant changes on March 9th in Norwich and on March 10th in Bridgeport CT. According to the New Haven Daily Palladium for March 7th, this was the gist of it: MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF [INSERT TOWN HERE]: If the Republican party of this nation shall ever have the national house entrusted to its keeping, it will be the duty of that party to attend to all the affairs of national house-keeping. Whatever matters of importance may come up, whatever difficulties may arise in the way of its administration of the government, that party will then have to attend to. It will then be compelled to attend to other questions, besides this question which now assumes an overwhelming importance — the question of Slavery. It is true that in the organization of the Republican party this question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present. The old question of tariff — a matter that will remain one of the chief affairs of national housekeeping to all time — the question of the management of financial affairs; the question of the disposition of the public domain — how shall it be managed for the purpose of getting it well settled, and of making there the homes of a free and happy people — these will remain open and require attention for a great while yet, and these questions will have to be attended to by whatever party has the control of the government. Yet, just now, they cannot even obtain a hearing, and I do not purpose to detain you upon these topics, or what sort of hearing they should have when opportunity shall come. For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY topic of the day. It is true that all of us — and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere — all of us wish this question settled — wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object. In the beginning of the year 1854 a new policy was inaugurated with the avowed object and confident promise that it would entirely and forever put an end to the Slavery agitation. It was again and again declared that under this policy, when once successfully established, the country would be forever rid of this whole question. Yet under the operation of that policy this agitation has not only not ceased, but it has been constantly augmented. And this too, although, from the day of its introduction, its friends, who promised that it would wholly end all agitation, constantly insisted, down to the time that the Lecompton bill was introduced, that it was working admirably, and that its inevitable tendency was to remove the question forever from the politics of the country. Can you call to mind any Democratic speech, made after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, down to the time of the Lecompton bill, in which it was not predicted that the Slavery agitation was just at an end; that “the abolition excitement was played out,” “the Kansas question was dead,” “they have made the most they can out of this question and it is now forever settled.” But since the Lecompton bill no Democrat, within my experience, has ever pretended that he could see the end. That cry has been dropped. They themselves do not pretend, now, that the agitation of this subject has come to an end yet. [Applause.] The truth is, that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it: we must do something about it, whether we will or not. We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating. It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and as closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies. Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled. And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude. There have been many efforts to settle it. Again and again it has been fondly hoped that it was settled, but every time it breaks out afresh, and more violently than ever. It was settled, our fathers hoped, by the Missouri Compromise, but it did not stay settled. Then the compromises of 1850 were declared to be a full and final settlement of the question. The two great parties, each in National Convention, adopted resolutions declaring that the settlement made by the Compromise of 1850 was a finality — that it would last forever. Yet how long before it was unsettled again! It broke out again in 1854, and blazed higher and raged more furiously than ever before, and the agitation has not rested since. These repeated settlements must have some fault about them. There must be some inadequacy in their very nature to the purpose for which they were designed. We can only speculate as to where that fault — that inadequacy, is, but we may perhaps profit by past experience. I think that one of the causes of these repeated failures is that our best and greatest men have greatly underestimated the size of this question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores — plasters too small to cover the wound. That is one reason that all settlements have proved so temporary — so evanescent. [Applause.] Look at the magnitude of this subject! One sixth of our population, in round numbers — not quite one sixth, and yet more than a seventh, — about one sixth of the whole population of the United States are slaves! The owners of these slaves consider them property. The effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and nothing else — it induces them to insist upon all that will favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure its value, and make it durable, lasting and universal. The effect on the minds of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY owners is to persuade them that there is no wrong in it. The slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow, for holding that species of property, and hence he has to struggle within himself and sets about arguing himself into the belief that Slavery is right. The property influences his mind. The dissenting minister, who argued some theological point with one of the established church, was always met by the reply, “I can’t see it so.” He opened the Bible, and pointed him to a passage, but the orthodox minister replied, “I can’t see it so.” Then he showed him a single word — “Can you see that?” “Yes, I see it,” was the reply. The dissenter laid a guinea over the word and asked, “Do you see it now?” [Great laughter.] So here. Whether the owners of this species of property do really see it as it is, it is not for me to say, but if they do, they see it as it is through 2,000,000,000 of dollars, and that is a pretty thick coating. [Laughter.] Certain it is, that they do not see it as we see it. Certain it is, that this two thousand million of dollars, invested in this species of property, all so concentrated that the mind can grasp it at once — this immense pecuniary interest, has its influence upon their minds. But here in Connecticut and at the North Slavery does not exist, and we see it through no such medium. To us it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men, not property; that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us. [Applause.] I say, we think, most of us, that this Charter of Freedom applies to the slave as well as to ourselves, that the class of arguments put forward to batter down that idea, are also calculated to break down the very idea of a free government, even for white men, and to undermine the very foundations of free society. [Continued applause.] We think Slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the Territories, where our votes will reach it. We think that a respect for ourselves, a regard for future generations and for the God that made us, require that we put down this wrong where our votes will properly reach it. We think that species of labor an injury to free white men — in short, we think Slavery a great moral, social and political evil, tolerable only because, and so far as its actual existence makes it necessary to tolerate it, and that beyond that, it ought to be treated as a wrong. Now these two ideas, the property idea that Slavery is right, and the idea that it is wrong, come into collision, and do actually produce that irrepressible conflict which Mr. Seward has been so roundly abused for mentioning. The two ideas conflict, and must conflict. Again, in its political aspect, does anything in any way endanger the perpetuity of this Union but that single thing, Slavery? Many of our adversaries are anxious to claim that they are specially devoted to the Union, and take pains to charge upon us hostility to the Union. Now we claim that we are the only true Union men, and we put to them this one proposition: What ever endangered this Union, save and except Slavery? Did any other thing ever cause a moment’s fear? All men must agree that this thing alone has ever endangered the perpetuity of the Union. But if it was threatened by any other influence, would not all men say that the best thing that could be done, if we could not or ought not to destroy it, would be at least to keep it from growing any larger? Can any man believe that the way to save the Union is to extend and increase the only thing that threatens the Union, and to suffer it to grow bigger and bigger? [Great applause.] Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. And hence, there are but two policies in regard to Slavery that can be at all maintained. The first, based on the property view that Slavery is right, conforms to that idea throughout, and demands that we shall do everything for it that we ought to do if it were right. We must sweep away all opposition, for opposition to the right is wrong; we must agree that Slavery is right, and we must adopt the idea that property has persuaded the owner to believe — that Slavery is morally right and socially elevating. This gives a philosophical basis for a permanent policy of encouragement. The other policy is one that squares with the idea that Slavery is wrong, and it consists in doing everything that we ought to do if it is wrong. Now, I don’t wish to be misunderstood, nor to leave a gap down to be misrepresented, even. I don’t mean that HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY we ought to attack it where it exists. To me it seems that if we were to form a government anew, in view of the actual presence of Slavery we should find it necessary to frame just such a government as our fathers did; giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established, while we possessed the power to restrain it from going outside those limits. [Applause.] From the necessities of the case we should be compelled to form just such a government as our blessed fathers gave us; and, surely, if they have so made it, that adds another reason why we should let Slavery alone where it exists. If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. [Laughter.] I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [Applause.] Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Great laughter.] But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide! [Prolonged applause and cheers.] That is just the case! The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be! [Applause.] Now I have spoken of a policy based on the idea that Slavery is wrong, and a policy based upon the idea that it is right. But an effort has been made for a policy that shall treat it as neither right or wrong. It is based upon utter indifference. Its leading advocate has said “I don’t care whether it be voted up or down.” [Laughter.] “It is merely a matter of dollars and cents.” “The Almighty has drawn a line across this continent, on one side of which all soil must forever be cultivated by slave labor, and on the other by free;” “when the struggle is between the white man and the negro, I am for the white man; when it is between the negro and the crocodile, I am for the negro.” Its central idea is indifference. It holds that it makes no more difference to us whether the Territories become free or slave States, than whether my neighbor stocks his farm with horned cattle or puts it into tobacco. All recognize this policy, the plausible sugar-coated name of which is “popular sovereignty.” [Laughter.] This policy chiefly stands in the way of a permanent settlement of the question. I believe there is no danger of its becoming the permanent policy of the country, for it is based on a public indifference. There is nobody that “don’t care.” ALL THE PEOPLE DO CARE! one way or the other. [Great applause.] I do not charge that its author, when he says he “don’t care,” states his individual opinion; he only expresses his policy for the government. I understand that he has never said, as an individual, whether he thought Slavery right or wrong — and he is the only man in the nation that has not! Now such a policy may have a temporary run; it may spring up as necessary to the political prospects of some gentleman; but it is utterly baseless; the people are not indifferent; and it can therefore have no durability or permanence. But suppose it could! Then it could be maintained only by a public opinion that shall say “we don’t care.” There must be a change in public opinion, the public mind must be so far debauched as to square with this policy of caring not at all. The people must come to consider this as “merely a question of dollars and cents,” and to believe that in some places the Almighty has made Slavery necessarily eternal. This policy can be brought to prevail if the people can be brought round to say honestly “we don’t care;” if not, it can never be maintained. It is for you to say whether that can be done. [Applause.] You are ready to say it cannot, but be not too fast! Remember what a long stride has been taken since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Do you know of any Democrat, of either branch of the party — do you know one who declares that he believes that the Declaration of Independence has any application to the negro? Judge Taney declares that it has not, and Judge Douglas even vilifies me personally and scolds me roundly for saying that the Declaration applies to all men, and that negroes are men. [Cheers.] Is there a Democrat here who does not deny that the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Declaration applies to a negro? Do any of you know of one? Well, I have tried before perhaps fifty audiences, some larger and some smaller than this, to find one such Democrat, and never yet have I found one who said I did not place him right in that. I must assume that Democrats hold that, and now, not one of these Democrats can show that he said that five years ago! [Applause.] I venture to defy the whole party to produce one man that ever uttered the belief that the Declaration did not apply to negroes, before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Four or five years ago we all thought negroes were men, and that when “all men” were named, negroes were included. But the whole Democratic party has deliberately taken negroes from the class of men and put them in the class of brutes. [Applause.] Turn it as you will, it is simply the truth! Don’t be too hasty then in saying that the people cannot be brought to this new doctrine, but note that long stride. One more as long completes the journey, from where negroes are estimated as men to where they are estimated as mere brutes — as rightful property! That saying, “in the struggle between the white man and the negro,” &c., which I know came from the same source as this policy — that saying marks another step. There is a falsehood wrapped up in that statement. “In the struggle between the white man and the negro” assumes that there is a struggle, in which either the white man must enslave the negro or the negro must enslave the white. There is no such struggle! It is merely an ingenious falsehood, to degrade and brutalize the negro. Let each let the other alone, and there is no struggle about it. If it was like two wrecked seamen on a narrow plank, when each must push the other off or drown himself, I would push the negro off or a white man either, but it is not; the plank is large enough for both. [Applause.] This good earth is plenty broad enough for white man and negro both, and there is no need of either pushing the other off. [Continued applause.] So that saying, “in the struggle between the negro and the crocodile,” &c., is made up from the idea that down where the crocodile inhabits a white man can’t labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile inhabits a white man can’t labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile or negro; if the negro does not the crocodile must possess the earth; [laughter;] in that case he declares for the negro. The meaning of the whole is just this: As a white man is to a negro, so is a negro to a crocodile; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile, so may the white man rightfully treat the negro. This very dear phrase coined by its author, and so dear that he deliberately repeats it in many speeches, has a tendency to still further brutalize the negro, and to bring public opinion to the point of utter indifference whether men so brutalized are enslaved or not. When that time shall come, if ever, I think that policy to which I refer may prevail. But I hope the good freemen of this country will never allow it to come, and until then the policy can never be maintained. Now consider the effect of this policy. We in the States are not to care whether Freedom or Slavery gets the better, but the people in the Territories may care. They are to decide, and they may think what they please; it is a matter of dollars and cents! But are not the people of the Territories detailed from the States? If this feeling of indifference — this absence of moral sense about the question — prevails in the States, will it not be carried into the Territories? Will not every man say, “I don’t care, it is nothing to me?” If any one comes that wants Slavery, must they not say, “I don’t care whether Freedom or Slavery be voted up or voted down?” It results at last in naturalizing [the word Lincoln spoke was more likely to have been “nationalizing”] the institution of Slavery. Even if fairly carried out, that policy is just as certain to naturalize [again, “nationalize”] Slavery as the doctrine of Jeff Davis himself. These are only two roads to the same goal, and “popular sovereignty” is just as sure and almost as short as the other. [Applause.] What we want, and all we want, is to have with us the men who think slavery wrong. But those who say they hate slavery, and are opposed to it, but yet act with the Democratic party — where are they? Let us apply a few tests. You say that you think slavery is wrong, but you denounce all attempts to restrain it. Is there anything else that you think wrong, that you are not willing to deal with as a wrong? Why are you so careful, so tender of this one wrong and no other? [Laughter.] You will not let us do a single thing as if it was wrong; where is no place where you will allow it to be even called HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY wrong! We must not call it wrong in the Free States, because it is not there, and we must not call it wrong in the Slave States because it is there; we must not call it wrong in politics because that is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion; we must not bring it into the Tract Society or the other societies, because those are such unsuitable places, and there is no single place, according to you, where this wrong thing can properly be called wrong! [Continued laughter and applause.] Perhaps you will plead that if the people of Slave States should themselves set on foot an effort for emancipation, you would wish them success, and bid them God-speed. Let us test that! In 1858, the emancipation party of Missouri, with Frank Blair at their head, tried to get up a movement for that purpose, and having started a party contested the State. Blair was beaten, apparently if not truly, and when the news came to Connecticut, you, who knew that Frank Blair was taking hold of this thing by the right end, and doing the only thing that you say can properly be done to remove this wrong — did you bow your heads in sorrow because of that defeat? Do you, any of you, know one single Democrat that showed sorrow over that result? Not one! On the contrary every man threw up his hat, and hallooed at the top of his lungs, “hooray for Democracy!” [Great laughter and applause.] Now, gentlemen, the Republicans desire to place this great question of slavery on the very basis on which our fathers placed it, and no other. [Applause.] It is easy to demonstrate that “our Fathers, who framed this government under which we live,” looked on Slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted. In forming the Constitution they found the slave trade existing; capital invested in it; fields depending upon it for labor, and the whole system resting upon the importation of slave-labor. They therefore did not prohibit the slave trade at once, but they gave the power to prohibit it after twenty years. Why was this? What other foreign trade did they treat in that way? Would they have done this if they had not thought slavery wrong? Another thing was done by some of the same men who framed the Constitution, and afterwards adopted as their own act by the first Congress held under that Constitution, of which many of the framers were members; they prohibited the spread of Slavery into Territories. Thus the same men, the framers of the Constitution, cut off the supply and prohibited the spread of Slavery, and both acts show conclusively that they considered that the thing was wrong. If additional proof is wanting it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution. When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning. In all matters but this of Slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language. But the Constitution alludes to Slavery three times without mentioning it once! The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical. They speak of the “immigration of persons,” and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so. In establishing a basis of representation they say “all other persons,” when they mean to say slaves — why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say “persons held to service or labor.” If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction. Why didn’t they do it? We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose. Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution — and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other — they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours! [Great applause.] I will dwell on that no longer. I see the signs of the approaching triumph of the Republicans in the bearing of their political adversaries. A great deal of their war with us now-a-days is mere bushwhacking. [Laughter.] At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon’s cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY squares. The Democrats are in that sort of extreme desperation; it is nothing else. [Laughter.] I will take up a few of these arguments. There is “THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT.” [Applause.] How they rail at Seward for that saying! They repeat it constantly; and although the proof has been thrust under their noses again and again, that almost every good man since the formation of our government has uttered that same sentiment, from Gen. Washington, who “trusted that we should yet have a confederacy of Free States,” with Jefferson, Jay, Monroe, down to the latest days, yet they refuse to notice that at all, and persist in railing at Seward for saying it. Even Roger A. Pryor, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, uttered the same sentiment in almost the same language, and yet so little offence did it give the Democrats that he was sent for to Washington to edit the States — the Douglas organ there, while Douglas goes into hydrophobia and spasms of rage because Seward dared to repeat it. [Great applause.] This is what I call bushwhacking, a sort of argument that they must know any child can see through. Another is JOHN BROWN! [Great laughter.] You stir up insurrections, you invade the South! John Brown! Harper’s Ferry! Why, John Brown was not a Republican! You have never implicated a single Republican in that Harper’s Ferry enterprise. We tell you that if any member of the Republican party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable not to designate man and prove the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair; but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrines, and make no declarations, which were not held to and made by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live, and we cannot see how declarations that were patriotic when they made them are villainous when we make them. You never dealt fairly by us in relation to that affair — and I will say frankly that I know of nothing in your character that should lead us to suppose that you would. You had just been soundly thrashed in elections in several States, and others were soon to come. You rejoiced at the occasion, and only were troubled that there were not three times as many killed in the affair. You were in evident glee — there was no sorrow for the killed nor for the peace of Virginia disturbed — you were rejoicing that by charging Republicans with this thing you might get an advantage of us in New York, and the other States. You pulled that string as tightly as you could, but your very generous and worthy expectations were not quite fulfilled. [Laughter.] Each Republican knew that the charge was a slander as to himself at least, and was not inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. It was mere bushwhacking, because you had nothing else to do. You are still on that track, and I say, go on! If you think you can slander a woman into loving you or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied! [Tremendous applause.] Another specimen of this bushwhacking, that “shoe strike.” [Laughter.] Now be it understood that I do not pretend to know all about the matter. I am merely going to speculate a little about some of its phases. And at the outset, I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to [Cheers,] where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! [Cheers.] I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. [Tremendous applause.] One of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Applause.] When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY a flat-boat — just what might happen to any poor man’s son! [Applause.] I want every man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system. Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is not another such place on earth! [Cheers.] I desire that if you get too thick here, and find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have a chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded, nor have your family corrupted by forced rivalry with negro slaves. I want you to have a clean bed, and no snakes in it! [Cheers.] Then you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth! [Prolonged applause.] Now, to come back to this shoe strike, — if, as the Senator from Illinois asserts, this is caused by withdrawal of Southern votes, consider briefly how you will meet the difficulty. You have done nothing, and have protested that you have done nothing, to injure the South. And yet, to get back the shoe trade, you must leave off doing something that you are now doing. What is it? You must stop thinking slavery wrong! Let your institutions be wholly changed; let your State Constitutions be subverted, glorify slavery, and so you will get back the shoe trade — for what? You have brought owned labor with it to compete with your own labor, to under work you, and to degrade you! Are you ready to get back the trade on those terms? But the statement is not correct. You have not lost that trade; orders were never better than now! Senator Mason, a Democrat, comes into the Senate in homespun, a proof that the dissolution of the Union has actually begun! but orders are the same. Your factories have not struck work, neither those where they make anything for coats, nor for pants, nor for shirts, nor for ladies’ dresses. Mr. Mason has not reached the manufacturers who ought to have made him a coat and pants! To make his proof good for anything he should have come into the Senate barefoot! (Great laughter.) Another bushwhacking contrivance; simply that, nothing else! I find a good many people who are very much concerned about the loss of Southern trade. Now either these people are sincere or they are not. (Laughter.) I will speculate a little about that. If they are sincere, and are moved by any real danger of the loss of Southern trade, they will simply get their names on the white list,4 and then, instead of persuading Republicans to do likewise, they will be glad to keep you away! Don’t you see they thus shut off competition? They would not be whispering around to Republicans to come in and share the profits with them. But if they are not sincere, and are merely trying to fool Republicans out of their votes, they will grow very anxious about your pecuniary prospects; they are afraid you are going to get broken up and ruined; they did not care about Democratic votes — Oh no, no, no! You must judge which class those belong to whom you meet; I leave it to you to determine from the facts. Let us notice some more of the stale charges against Republicans. You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your section — gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very year. [Applause.] The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started — to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your 4. Lincoln was referring to a movement on the part of certain business interests to help along the Southern boycott of antislavery New England manufactures by preparing a list of “white” (which is to say, proslavery Democrats, whom it would be politically correct to patronize) rather than “black” (which is to say, opposed to human slavery, firms which would be politically incorrect to patronize) New England manufacturing concerns. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No? Then you really believe that the principle which our fathers who framed the Government under which we live thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is, in fact, so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment’s consideration. Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress, enforcing the prohibition of Slavery in the northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of Government upon that subject, up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it he wrote LaFayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should some time have a confederacy of Free States. Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it. [Applause.] But you say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You have considerable variety of new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the Judiciary; some for the “gur-reat pur-rin-ciple” that “if one man would enslave another, no third man should object,” fantastically called “Popular Sovereignty;” [great laughter,] but never a man among you in favor of Federal prohibition of Slavery in Federal Territories, according to the practice of our fathers who framed the Government under which we live. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. And yet you draw yourselves up and say “We are eminently conservative!” [Great laughter.] It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them? Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation. The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [Applause.] This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them, from HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that Slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of all taint of opposition to Slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. So long as we call Slavery wrong, whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever a master cuts his slaves with the lash, and they cry out under it, he will overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt, and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist. [Great laughter.] I am quite aware that they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, “Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about Slavery.” But we do let them alone — have never disturbed them — so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying. I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of Slavery, with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding as they do, that Slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality — its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlargement. All they ask, we could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? Wrong as we think Slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care — such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance — such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington did. Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it. SLAVERY

March 8. 2.30 P.M. — 50°. To Cliffs and Walden. See a small flock of grackles on the willow-row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering! for it cannot be called singing, and no improvement from age to age perhaps. Yet, as nature is a becoming, their notes may become melodious at last. At length, on my very near approach, they flit suspiciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. This is the first flock of blackbirds I have chanced to see, though Channing saw one the 6th. I suspect that I have seen only grackles as yet. I saw, in Monroe’s well by the edge of the river, the other day, a dozen frogs, chiefly shad frogs, which had been dead a good while. It may be that they get into that sort of spring-hole in the fall to hibernate, but for some reason die; or perhaps they are always jumping into it in the summer, but at that season are devoured by some animal before they infest the water. Now and for some days I see farmers walking about their fields, knocking to pieces and distributing the cow- dung left there in the fall, that so, with the aid of the spring rains, they fertilize a larger surface and more equally. To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude; for there is grass in some warm exposures and in springy places, always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little further every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk-cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing [IN] the maples in midwinter in some days, perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life or motion or growth is to be detected every winter. There is something of spring in all seasons. There is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be new growth of the spring. At the pool on the south side of Hubbard’s Grove, I notice that the crowfoot, i. e. buttercup, leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere. In some respects our spring, in its beginning, fluctuates a whole month, so far as it respects ice and snow, walking, sleighing, etc., etc.; for some years winter may be said to end about the first of March, and other years it may extend into April. That willow-clump by railroad at Walden looks really silvery. I see there that moles have worked for several days. There are several piles on the grass, some quite fresh and some made before the last rain. One is as wide as a bushel-basket and six inches high; contains a peck at least. When I carefully remove this dirt, I cannot see, and can scarcely detect by feeling, any looseness in the sod beneath where the mole came to the surface and discharged all this dirt. I do feel it, to be sure, but it is scarcely perceptible to my fingers. The mole must have filled up this doorway very densely with earth, perhaps for its protection. Those small green balls in the Pout’s-Nest—and in the river, etc.—are evidently the buds by which the Utricularia vulgaris are propagated. I find them attached to the root as well as adrift. I noticed a very curious phenomenon in this pond. It is melted for two or three rods around the open side, and in many places partly filled with a very slender thread-like spike-rush (apparently Eleocharis tenuis?) which is matted more or less horizontally and floating, and is much bleached, being killed. In this fine matting I noticed perfectly straight or even cuts a rod or more in length, just as if one had severed this mass of fine rush as it lay [?] with some exceeding sharp instrument. However, you could not do it with a scythe, though you might with scissors, if it were ruled. It is as if you were to cover a floor with very fine flaccid grass and tread it to one inch in thickness, and then cut this web straight across. The fact is, this floating matting (it also rests partly on soft mud) was not cut at all, but pulled apart on a straight line, producing the exact appearance of a cut, as if you were to pull a piece of felt apart by a force on each side and yet leave the edge as straight as if it had been cut. It had been frozen in, and when the ice cracked it was in an instant thus pulled apart, without further disturbing the relative position of the fibres. I first conjectured this, and then saw the evidence of it, for, glancing my eye along such a cut, which ran at right angles with the shore, I saw that it exactly corresponded at its termination to an old crack in the ice which was still unmelted and which continued its course exactly. This in the ice had been filled and cemented so as to look like a white seam. Would this account for such a crack being continued into the meadow itself, as I have noticed? I meet some Indians just camped on Brister’s Hill. As usual, they are chiefly concerned to find where black ash grows, for their baskets. This is what they set about to ascertain as soon as they arrive in any strange neighborhood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

March 9, Friday: Thaddeus Hyatt submitted a 20-page document in which his lawyers contended that the Senate investigation constituted a judicial trial; therefore, the legislative body had overstepped its powers under the federal Constitution, as it only had judicial power in the cases of evaluating the qualifications of its members, expelling Senators, and conducting impeachment trials. The document argued that “to compel witnesses to attend before a committee to give information in regard to proposed legislation, is not a power given by the Constitution.” The New-York Times reported that due to its sheer length (it needed to be read aloud on the Senate floor) a couple of Senate clerks had become exhausted. Anyway, most of the Senators made themselves scarce during this required oral reading. Then the Senate voted to confine Hyatt to the Washington DC jail until he agreed to testify. The prisoner would decline to petition the Supreme Court for habeas corpus.

If you take John Shepard Keyes of Concord at his own self-evaluation, he was a key player in the final disposition of the longstanding flowage controversy involving the Middlesex Canal and the waters of the Concord River and Sudbury River:

John Shepard Keyes –Thoreau’s Harvard classmate, fellow abolitionist, river sympathizer, and a powerful political force in Concord– claimed that during the final month before passage, he played a key role in this legislative victory by getting the charter of the Middlesex Canal Corporation “forfeited” by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. “Then,” he added, “I drew the bill for the relief of the meadow owners by taking down the Billerica dam.” Quoting his self-aggrandizing autobiography: “I had many hearings before the committees about it,” and “after much consultation, a hearing and a view &c &c with lots of lobbying [I] carried it successfully through both houses and saved it from a veto by my influence with [Governor] Banks, to whom I explained it satisfactorily and had the satisfaction of a great triumph with Gov Brown in this vital interest of Concord.” — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 211

March 9. Snows this forenoon, whitening the ground again.

2 and 3 P.M. — Thermometer 41°. MINOT PRATT I have seen three or four pieces of coral in the fields of Concord, and Mr. Pratt has found three or four on his farm. How shall they be accounted for? Who brought them here? and when? These barns shelter more beasts than oxen and horses. If you stand awhile in one of them now, especially where grain is piled, you will hear ever and anon a rustling in it made by the mice, which take the barn to be their home, as much as the house is yours. As I recall it, February began cold, with some dry and fine driving snow, making those shell-shaped drifts behind walls, and some days after were some wild but low drifts on the meadow ice. I walked admiring the winter sky and clouds. After the first week, methinks, it was much milder, and I noticed that some sounds, like the tinkling of railroad rails, etc., were springlike. Indeed, the rest of the month was earine, river breaking up a part and closing again, and but little snow. About 8th and 12th, the beauty of the ice on the meadows, partly or slightly rotted, was noticeable, with the curious figures in it, and, in the coolest evenings, the green ice and rosy isles of flat drifts. About the 9th, noticed the very black water of some open reaches, in a high wind and cold. About the middle of the month was a moist, lodging snow, and the 18th a fine granular one, making about a foot,—the last. Then sudden warm weather and rain come and dissolve it all at once, and the ruts, flowing with melted snow, shone in the sun, and the little sleighing was all gone. And from the 25th to 27th the river generally HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY broke up. March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light- tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert for several days to hear the first birds. For a few days past it has been generally colder and rawer, and the ground has been whitened with snow two or three times, but it has all been windy. You incline to walk now along the south side of hills which will shelter you from the blustering northwest and north winds. The sidewalks are wet in the morning from the frost coming out.

April 4, Wednesday: On the day after the attempt to seize Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry Thoreau made a typically laconic comment about this in his journal: “Lodged at Sanborn’s last night after his rescue, he being away.” His entry is so subdued, one wonders that he bothered to mention the incident at all — unless he was using this laconic entry as a reminder to himself of the relative weight which should be assigned in one’s life to events of such nature:

April 4: Wednesday morning. Lodged at Sanborn’s last night after his rescue, he being away. It is warmer, an April-like morning after two colder and windy days, threatening a moist or more or less showery Thoreau as day, which followed.The birds sing quite numerously at sunrise about the villages, –robins, tree sparrows, and methinks I heard a purple finch. The birds are eager to sing, as the flowers to bloom, after raw weather has held Ornithologist them in check.

Walt Whitman, who had come to Boston to republish his book, was present at the Supreme Court hearing in the Sanborn matter. The record made by Louisa May Alcott was somewhat more succinct than Sanborn’s but nowhere near as laconic as Thoreau’s:

Sanborn was nearly kidnapped for being a friend of John Brown; but his sister rescued him when he was handcuffed, and the scamps drove off. A meeting and general flurry.

At the meeting in Concord which Louisa May Alcott mentions above, Thoreau had spoken for resistance to unjust law. None of our three diarists here, not Sanborn, not Alcott, and not Thoreau, considered this worthy of mention.

John S. Keyes, John Andrew, Samuel E. Sewall, and Robert Treat Paine, acting together as legal counsel on Sanborn’s behalf, went before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. Walt Whitman, who had come to Boston to republish his book, was present at the Supreme Court hearing, as was Wendell Phillips. The court room was filled with my Concord and Boston friends, including the always elegant Mr. Wendell Phillips and, in his workingman’s outfit, Mr. Walt Whitman. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Walt Whitman would allege later that he had been at the hearing specifically to help rescue Sanborn had this become necessary. There were plenty of others, Whitman would indicate, who also had come to take action should the hearing go sour. With Whitman were his publishers, Charles Thayer and William Eldridge, at whose place of business an abolitionist group known as the Black Strings sometimes held their meetings. Another of their authors, James Redpath, was present also.

The journalist Richard J. Hinton who had recommended LEAVES OF GRASS to Thayer and Eldridge was present. William Douglas O’Connor, who had received an advance on his forthcoming antislavery manuscript HARRINGTON, was in attendance. When Judge Lemuel Shaw declared that no one but an officer of the Senate had the legal authority to undertake such an arrest, it became clear that violence would not be appropriate. Sanborn returned to Concord a hero, lauded by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Waldo Emerson at a spontaneous homecoming celebration held at Town Hall. Thoreau received applause when he opinioned that the government ought to have been out arresting slave kidnappers, rather than attempting to kidnap Sanborn.

April 4, 1860 was a day of jubilee for the meadowland farmers. After nearly a half-century of lawsuits, they finally won their case. “An Act in Relation to the Flowage of the Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers” authorized the governor to appoint a third commission of three officers to permanently “remove the dam across the Concord River at north Billerica” to a level “thirty-three inches below the top of an iron bolt” that had long since marked the top of the reservoir pool. The act also protected the commission from potential lawsuits associated with the dam lowering [scheduled for September 1st]. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 211 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

April 25, Wednesday: Charles Darwin wrote to Professor Asa Gray of Harvard College about a review of ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAV OR ED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE that had appeared in the North American Review, by the Reverend Professor Francis Bowen, a professor of natural religion at Harvard (which is to say, a “religionocrat,” engaged in the pretense that religion is a science) and a bosom friend of Professor Louis Agassiz (which is to say, a “scienceocrat,” engaged in the pretense that science is religion): “It seems to me to be clever, & I do not doubt will damage my book.”

The 1860 breakup of the river came late, owing to a particularly brutal, long winter. Though the flowage controversy was now officially over (so it seemed), Henry continued to monitor river stage relative to his datum. It’s possible he wanted baseline data to see how the permanent lowering of the dam –scheduled for September 1– would change the long-term hydrology. So on April 25 he reset the datum at his boat place and calibrated it against several other points: “I fix a stake on the west side of the willows at my boat’s place, the top of which is at summer level and is about ten and a half inches below the stone wharf there.” From that day forward, and with gaps of up to a week or more, he tracked the river level for the next five months through September 27, 1860. By that time, the dam teardown was back in legal limbo, and the river was nearly three feet above the top of the stake, making it difficult to measure. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 211-212

April 25, 1860: A cold day, so that the people you meet remark upon it, yet the thermometer is 47 at 2 P.M. We should not have remarked upon it in March. It is cold for April, being windy withal. I fix a stake on the west side the willows at my boat’s place, the top of which is at summer level and is about ten and a half inches below the stone wharf there. The river is one and one fourth inches above summer level to-day. That rock northwest of the boat’s place is about fifteen inches (the top of it) below summer level. Heron Rock top (just above the junction of the rivers) is thirteen inches above summer level. I judge by my eye that the rock on the north side, where the first bridge crossed the river, is about four inches lower than the last. Mr. Stewart tells me that he has found a gray squirrel’s nest up the Assabet, in a maple tree. I resolve that I too will find it. I do not know within less than a quarter of a mile where to look, nor whether it is in a hollow tree, or in a nest of leaves. I examine the shore first and find where he landed. I then examine the maples in that neighborhood to see what one has been climbed. I soon find one the bark of which has been lately rubbed by the boots of a climber, and, looking up, see a nest. It was a large nest made of maple twigs, with a centre of leaves, lined with finer, about twenty feet from the ground, against the leading stem of a large red maple. I noticed no particular entrance. When I put in my hand from above and felt the young, they uttered a dull croak- like squeak, and one clung fast to my hand when I took it out through the leaves and twigs with which it was covered. It was yet blind, and could not have been many days old, yet it instinctively clung to my hand with its little claws, as if it knew that there was danger of its falling from a height to the ground which it never saw. The idea of clinging was strongly planted in it. There was quite a depth of loose sticks, maple twigs, piled on the top of the nest. No wonder that they become skillful climbers who are born high above the ground and begin their lives in a tree, having first of all to descend to reach the earth. They are cradled in a tree-top, in but a loose basket, in helpless infancy, and there slumber when their mother is away. No wonder that they are never made dizzy by high climbing, that were born in the top of a tree, and learn to cling fast to the tree before their eyes are open. On my way to the Great Meadows I see boys a-fishing, with perch and bream on their string, apparently having good luck, the river is so low. The river appears the lower, because now, before the weeds and grass have grown, we can see by the bare shore of mud or sand and the rocks how low it is. At midsummer we might imagine water at the base of the grass where there was none. I hear the greatest concert of blackbirds, –red-wings [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] and HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY crow blackbirds nowadays, especially of the former…. The maples and willows along the river, and the button- bushes, are all alive with them. They look like black fruit on the trees, distributed over the top at pretty equal distances. It is worth while to see how slyly they hide at the base of the thick and shaggy button-bushes at this stage of the water. They will suddenly cease their strains and flit away and secrete themselves low amid these bushes till you are past; or you scare up an unexpectedly large flock from such a place, where you had seen none. I pass a large quire in full blast on the oaks, etc., on the island in the meadow northeast of Peter’s. Suddenly they are hushed, and I hear the loud rippling rush made by their wings as they dash away, and, looking up, I see what I take to be a sharp-shinned hawk just alighting on the trees where they were, having failed to catch one. They retreat some forty rods off, to another tree, and renew their concert there. The hawk plumes himself, and then flies off, rising gradually and beginning to circle, and soon it joins its mate, and soars with it high in the sky and out of sight, as if the thought of so terrestrial a thing as a blackbird had never entered its head. It appeared to have a plain reddish-fawn breast. The size more than anything made me think it a sharp-shin. When looking into holes in trees to find the squirrel’s nest, I found a pout partly dried, with its tail gone, in one maple, about a foot above the ground. This was probably left there by a mink. Minott says that, being at work in his garden once, he saw a mink coming up from the brook with a pout in her mouth, half-way across his land. The mink, observing him, dropped her pout and stretched up her head, looking warily around, then, taking up the pout again, went onward and went under a rock in the wall by the roadside. He looked there and found the young in their nest, — so young that they were all “red” yet.

April 26. Hear the ruby-crowned wren in the morning, near George Heywood’s. We have had no snow for a long long while, and have about forgotten it. Dr. Bartlett, therefore, surprises us by telling us that a man came from Lincoln after him last night on the wheels of whose carriage was an inch of snow, for it snowed there a little, but not here. This is connected with the cold weather of yesterday; the chilling wind came from a snow-clad country. As the saying is, the cold was in the air and had got to come down. To-day it is 53 at 2 P. M., yet cold, such a difference is there in our feelings. What we should have called a warm day in March is a cold one at this date in April. It is the northwest wind makes it cold. Out of the.wind it is warm. It is not, methinks, the same air at rest in one place and in motion in another, but the cold that is brought by the wind seems not to affect sheltered and sunny nooks. P. M.—To Cliffs and Well Meadow. Comptonia. There are now very few leaves indeed left on the young oaks below the Cliffs. Sweet-briar, thimble- berry, and blackberry on warm rocks leaf early. Red maples are past prime. I have noticed their handsome crescents over distant swamps commonly for some ten days. At height, then, say the 21st. They are especially handsome when seen between you and the sunlit trees. The Amelanchier Botryapium is leafing; will apparently bloom to-morrow or next day. Sweet-fern (that does not flower) leafing. The forward-rank sedge of Well Meadow which is so generally eaten (by rabbits, or possibly woodchucks), cropped close, is allied to that at Lee’s Cliff, which is also extensively browsed now. I have found it difficult to get whole specimens. Certain tender early greens are thus extensively browsed now, in warm swamp-edges and under cliffs,—the bitter cress, the Carex varia (?) at Lee’s, even skunk-cabbage. The hellebore now makes a great garden of green under the alders and maples there, five or six rods long and a foot or more high. It grows thus before these trees have begun to leaf, while their numerous stems serve only to break the wind but not to keep out the sun. It is the greatest growth, the most massive, of any plant’s; now ahead of the cabbage. Before the earliest tree has begun to leaf it makes conspicuous green patches a foot high. The river is exactly at summer level. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY September 1, Saturday: After all that hoo-hah, when the official date rolled around the Billerica dam did not get taken down. At the last moment there was a legal stay, one that simply infuriated John Shepard Keyes:

September 1, 1860 was the day scheduled for the teardown of the Billerica dam, as specified by state law. “Mesrs. Hudson of Lexington, Bellows of Pepperell, and Bigelow of New Bedford” were getting ready to execute the teardown when they were stopped by a court injunction. The factory owners, Talbot and Faulkner, had somehow convinced a judge to halt the process. Concord’s J.S. Keyes was outraged by this local strategic move; he believed that the owners of the “river meadows were being cheated out of all they had hoped from their bill,” which had state and national significance. “When the day came for these [commissioners] to take down the dam,” Keyes wrote in his autobiography, “they were met by a bill in equity asking for an injunction on them upon the pretense that the damagers were not secure by the obligation of the state to pay them.” This “pretense” typified the whole of the flowage controversy, which had always been more about legal maneuvers by vested interests than about the scientific causes behind the appearances that Thoreau was investigating. Keyes emphasized that the lateness of the injunction did not allow the petitioners time to “file an answer ... and have a hearing” that summer, because key members of “the board took that opportunity to go West and be gone.” This put off any hope of a hearing until “it was too late that season to do anything more with the dam.” Keyes suspected that bribery was involved: “Who paid their expenses of the trip I wish I knew.” Simon Brown, president of the Meadow Association, was also outraged. Editorializing in the New England Farmer, he later accused the newly elected General Court of corruption. He wrote that the previous legislature considered the dam “a public calamity, destroying a vast amount of property and spreading desolation and death through one of the most lovely and fertile regions of the State.” But “in the meantime fall elections were corrupted by the test question ‘Will you pledge yourself to urge and vote for the repeal of the bill directing the dam be taken down?’” After the elections, he described a widely circulated anonymous pamphlet that was full of “gross misrepresentations.” He alleged that “most of the members” of the General Court “had been visited by the Dam-holders themselves, or their agents.” This he considered a “most shameful and unjustifiable ‘lobbying’.” — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 217-218

September 1: P.M. – To Walden. Saw a fish hawk yesterday up the Assabet. In one position it flew just like a swallow; of the same form as it flew. We could not judge correctly of distances on the mountain, but greatly exaggerated them. That surface was so novel,–suggested so many thoughts,–and also so uneven, a few steps sufficing to conceal the least ground, as if it were half a mile away, that we would have an impression as if we had travelled a mile when we had come only forty rods. We no longer thought and reasoned as in the plain. Now see many birds about E. Hubbard’s elder hedge,–bobolinks, kingbirds, pigeon woodpeckers,–and not elsewhere. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY Many pine stipules fallen yesterday. Also see them on Walden to-day. Hear that F. Hayden saw and heard geese a fortnight ago! I see within an oak stump on the shore of Walden tomato plants six or eight inches high, as I found them formerly about this pond in a different place. Since they do not bear fruit the seed must be annually brought here by birds, yet I do not see them pecking the tomatoes in our gardens, and this is a mile and a half from the village TOMATO and half a mile from the nearest house in Lincoln. River about eight inches above summer level yesterday. We are so accustomed to see another forest spring up immediately as a matter of course, whether from the stump or from the seed, when a forest is cut down, never troubling about the succession, that we hardly associate the seed with the tree, and do not anticipate the time when this regular succession will cease and we shall be obliged to plant, as they do in all old countries. The planters of Europe must have a very different, a much correcter, notion of the value of the seed of forest trees than we. To speak generally, they know that the forest trees spring from seeds, as we do of apples and pears, but we know only that they come out of the earth. See how artfully the seed of a cherry is placed in order that a bird may be compelled to transport it. It is placed in the very midst of a tempting pericarp, so that the creature that would devour a cherry must take a stone into its mouth. The bird is bribed with the pericarp to take the stone with it and do this little service for Nature. Cherries are especially birds’ food, and many kinds are called birds’ cherry, and unless we plant the seeds occasionally, I shall think the birds have the best right to them. Thus a bird’s wing is added to the cherry-stone which was wingless, and it does not wait for winds to transport it. If you ever ate a cherry, and did not make two bites of it, you must have perceived it. There it is, right in the midst of the luscious morsel, an earthy residuum left on the tongue. And some wild men and children instinctively swallow it, like the birds, as the shortest way to get rid of it. And the consequence is that cherries not only grow here but there, and I know of some handsome young English cherries growing naturally in our woods, which I think of transplanting back again to my garden. If the seed had been placed in a leaf, or at the root, it would not have got transported thus. Consider how many seeds of plants we take into our mouths. Even stones as big as peas, a dozen at once. The treatment of forests is a very different question to us and to the English. There is a great difference between replanting the cleared land from the super-abundance of seed which is produced in the forest around it, which will soon be done by nature alone if we do not interfere, and the planting of land the greater part of which has been cleared for more than a thousand years.5

5.Brad Dean published, in FAITH IN A SEED: For several years I have noticed small tomato plants growing in the woods in various places about Walden Pond, sometimes within hollow stumps, at least three-fourths of a mile from the nearest house or garden. The seeds may possibly have been carried there annually by picnic parties. Otherwise they must have been dropped by birds each year, for they do not bear fruit there. Yet I have not chanced to see the birds pecking at tomatoes in our gardens, nor have I ever seen seedling potato plants which were not sown by man, though they are a kindred plant and far more extensively cultivated. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Approximately one year before he died, Thoreau had a good laugh about the practice of law in general and water law in particular. “I hear the Judge Minott of Haverhill once told a client, by way of warning, that two millers who owned mills on the same stream went to law about a dam, and at the end of the lawsuit one lawyer owned one mill and the other the other.” This black humor from the April 11, 1861 entry in his journal nicely summarized the final result of the flowage controversy. When the gavel came down in the General Court at Boston on April 25, 1862, the result was a big fat zero, except for three years’ worth of gainful employment for the attorneys on opposite sides, and for those within the legislature. After more than 1,100 days of meetings, hearings, experiments, and writing sessions coordinated by half a dozen government- funded committees and commissions, the final result looped back to where it all started. The last of four legislative acts repealed the first. First came the act to appoint a Joint Committee to study the situation (April 1, 1859). Next, based on that study, came the act to tear down the Billerica dam (September 1, 1860). After that came the act to suspend the teardown and study the matter once again (April 9, 1861). Finally came the act to repeal the initial act, which brought everything back to the beginning (April 25, 1862). All of this time and money, especially during preparations for Civil War, could have been saved by asking one local genius to weigh in. Of course, Thoreau would not have rendered the Solomon-like judgment that the law so craves. Rather, after eighteen months of river investigations, he had become convinced that the entire watershed of Musketaquid above its natural outlet was behaving as one big coherent system within which humans were pervasive and ubiquitous players. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 231 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1861

Many Canadian blacks moved to Haiti as a part of a larger emigration movement.

James Redpath’s A GUIDE TO HAYTI (G.W. Colton; Boston: Haytian Bureau of Emigration, 221 Washington Street).6

Early in this year Harriet Tubman and several others established a Fugitive Aid Society in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada West.

Nearly 50 men closely connected with Concord, Massachusetts would perish in the Civil War.

In Billerica, Massachusetts, during this year in which the local boys were marching south to war, a 2d-hand pipe organ with 6 pipes was obtained as a replacement for the little melodian, and the violin and bass viol, that

6. Here’s a cute note: during the Civil War they were drafting people, but Redpath never needed to cough up the dough to hire himself a substitute, since all he needed to do was play his “Hey, I’m a British subject” card, or his “Hey, I’m a Scotsman” card, or whatever. –Never a player, always a commentator. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY had previously accompanied the town church’s choir.

That dam was the main battleground for a statewide fight between meadowland farmers and textile industrialists. Before that local war was over, the Union and Confederate armies were engaged in a national civil war over secession and slavery. Armed militias from formerly competing towns of Middlesex County were now riding the rails together in route to battle. The South had become a common enemy that united valley residents. The flowage controversy dropped off the list of state priorities. The wet, degraded meadows above the Billerica Dam were given up for lost. Left largely unnoticed, they continued to deteriorate for the next half century. Less hay was cut each year, and then only in the driest places. Meanwhile, the channels were being heavily polluted by factory chemical waste and sewage effluent until cleanup began in the late 1960s. ...in the present century, the momentum has shifted toward river emancipation — even when the generation of hydroelectric power is a clear gain. Hundreds of rivers throughout the United States are being unshackled, thanks to river science. Fish ladders around th Billerica dam are being seriously considered for the first time in centuries. Henry Thoreau should be credited for his pioneering river studies and his prophetic leadership for river liberation. And the Concord River should be cited as the place where it all began in earnest. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 247-248

Lydia Maria Child’s attitude toward the Civil War as she expressed it in a letter to Jesse Freemont was “If we rightly exert the power which God has put into our hands, this may prove the last great battle, in open field, between the forces of Despotism and the forces of Freedom.” Well, there must have been, then, some wrongness in the manner in which these abolitionists would exert the power which God had put into their hands, right? –Because, by the summer of 1865, Child’s dream that each black family would be able to tend its own plot of land would be replaced, in a number of the defeated states, by new apprenticeship systems known as “Black Codes” which, in addition to radically restricting the employment possibilities for black Americans, would limit their freedom of movement, their opportunity to purchase or rent property, and so on and so forth. How sad that the civil war would not prove to be the last great battle, in open field, between the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY forces of Despotism and the forces of Freedom! Who could have predicted such an unfortunate outcome?

The census data as of 1790 had indicated that about 8 percent of the American black population had been free. The rise in manumissions in the post-Revolutionary period had raised the proportion of free blacks to about 13.5 percent by 1810, where it remained through 1840. By this point just prior to the Civil War, a decline in manumissions, combined with the lesser fecundity of free black Americans, was lowering the free-to-enslaved proportion to about 11 percent.

Year % in Population

1790 8

1810 13.5

1840 13.5

1861 11

“In those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in no wise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery ... and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” — Alexis de Tocqueville HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

March 1, Thursday: An African American, Albert Lee, was hanged in San Francisco, California for having murdered his estranged wife Madelaine Delphine Aggie Pullier Lee on July 3d, 1859 after she had refused to reconcile with him. He had then attempted suicide. Sheriff of San Francisco Doane oversaw this execution in the jailyard.

The Honorable Henry Flagg French of Boston argued before the Joint Committee of the Legislature of Massachusetts on the Petition for the Repeal of “an Act in Relation to the Flowage of the Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers” (the Legislature would approve this argument on April 4th).

The Confederate constitution. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

Mrs. Varina Davis and children arrived at Montgomery, Alabama and settled in at the First White House of the Confederacy. US CIVIL WAR W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: The attempt, initiated by the constitutional fathers, to separate the problem of slavery from that of the slave-trade had, after a trial of half a century, signally failed, and for well-defined economic reasons. The nation had at last come to the parting of the ways, one of which led to a free-labor system, the other to a slave system fed by the slave-trade. Both sections of the country naturally hesitated at the cross-roads: the North clung to the delusion that a territorially limited system of slavery, without a slave- trade, was still possible in the South; the South hesitated to fight for her logical object — slavery and free trade in Negroes — and, in her moral and economic dilemma, sought to make autonomy and the Constitution her object. The real line of contention was, however, fixed by years of development, and was unalterable by the present whims or wishes of the contestants, no matter how important or interesting these might be: the triumph of the North meant free labor; the triumph of the South meant slavery and the slave-trade. It is doubtful if many of the Southern leaders ever deceived themselves by thinking that Southern slavery, as it then was, could long be maintained without a general or a partial reopening of the slave-trade. Many had openly declared this a few years before, and there was no reason for a change of opinion. Nevertheless, at the outbreak of actual war and secession, there were powerful and decisive reasons for relegating the question temporarily to the rear. In the first place, only by this means could the adherence of important Border States be secured, without the aid of which secession was folly. Secondly, while it did no harm to laud the independence of the South and the kingship of cotton in “stump” speeches and conventions, yet, when it came to actual hostilities, the South sorely needed the aid of Europe; and this a nation fighting for slavery and the slave-trade stood poor chance of getting. Consequently, after attacking the slave-trade laws for a decade, and their execution for a quarter-century, we find the Southern leaders inserting, in both the provisional and the permanent Constitutions of the Confederate States, the following article: — The importation of negroes of the African race, from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same. Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.7 The attitude of the Confederate government toward this article is best illustrated by its circular of instructions to its foreign ministers: — It has been suggested to this Government, from a source of unquestioned authenticity, that, after the recognition of our independence by the European Powers, an expectation is generally entertained by them that in our treaties of amity and commerce a clause will be introduced making stipulations against the African slave trade. It is even thought that neutral Powers may be inclined to insist upon the insertion of such a clause as a sine qua non. You are well aware how firmly fixed in our Constitution is the policy of this Confederacy against the opening of that trade, but we are informed that false and insidious suggestions have been made by the agents of the United States at European Courts of our intention to change our constitution as soon as peace is restored, and of authorizing the importation of slaves from Africa. If, therefore, you should find, in your intercourse with the Cabinet to which you are accredited, that any such impressions are entertained, you will use every proper effort to remove them, and if an attempt is made to introduce into any treaty which you may be charged with negotiating stipulations on the subject just mentioned, you will assume, in behalf of your Government, the position which, under the direction of the President, I now proceed to develop. The Constitution of the Confederate States is an agreement made between independent States. By its terms all the powers of Government are separated into classes as follows, viz.: — 1st. Such powers as the States delegate to the General Government. 2d. Such powers as the States agree to refrain from exercising, although they do not delegate them to the General Government. 3d. Such powers as the States, without delegating them to the General Government, thought proper to exercise by direct agreement between themselves contained in the Constitution. 4th. All remaining powers of sovereignty, which not being delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people thereof.... Especially in relation to the importation of African negroes was it deemed important by the States that no power to permit it should exist in the Confederate Government.... It will thus be seen that no power is delegated to the Confederate Government over this subject, but that it is included in the third class above referred to, of powers exercised directly by the States.... This Government unequivocally and absolutely denies its possession of any power whatever over the subject, and cannot entertain any proposition in relation to it.... The policy of the Confederacy is as fixed and immutable on this subject as the imperfection

7. CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA STATUTES AT LARGE, 1861, page 15, Constitution, Art. 1, sect. 9, §§ 1, 2. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY of human nature permits human resolve to be. No additional agreements, treaties, or stipulations can commit these States to the prohibition of the African slave trade with more binding efficacy than those they have themselves devised. A just and generous confidence in their good faith on this subject exhibited by friendly Powers will be far more efficacious than persistent efforts to induce this Government to assume the exercise of powers which it does not possess.... We trust, therefore, that no unnecessary discussions on this matter will be introduced into your negotiations. If, unfortunately, this reliance should prove ill-founded, you will decline continuing negotiations on your side, and transfer them to us at home....8 This attitude of the conservative leaders of the South, if it meant anything, meant that individual State action could, when it pleased, reopen the slave-trade. The radicals were, of course, not satisfied with any veiling of the ulterior purpose of the new slave republic, and attacked the constitutional provision violently. “If,” said one, “the clause be carried into the permanent government, our whole movement is defeated. It will abolitionize the Border Slave States — it will brand our institution. Slavery cannot share a government with Democracy, — it cannot bear a brand upon it; thence another revolution ... having achieved one revolution to escape democracy at the North, it must still achieve another to escape it at the South. That it will ultimately triumph none can doubt.”9

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR MARCH 1st]

8. From an intercepted circular dispatch from J.P. Benjamin, “Secretary of State,” addressed in this particular instance to Hon. L.Q.C. Lamar, “Commissioner, etc., St. Petersburg, Russia,” and dated Richmond, Jan. 15, 1863; published in the National Intelligencer, March 31, 1863; cf. also the issues of Feb. 19, 1861, April 2, 3, 25, 1863; also published in the pamphlet, THE AFRICAN SLAVE-TRADE: THE SECRET PURPOSE, etc. The editors vouch for its authenticity, and state it to be in Benjamin’s own handwriting. 9. L.W. Spratt of South Carolina, in the Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1861, XXXII. 414, 420. Cf. also the Charleston Mercury, Feb. 13, 1861, and the National Intelligencer, Feb. 19, 1861. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY April 9, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau was being written to by Parker Pillsbury of the Anti-Slavery Office, with a request that he provide a copy of each of his books The Massachusetts Legislature suspended the teardown of the Billerica dam and required that the matter once again be studied.

Approximately one year before he died, Thoreau had a good laugh about the practice of law in general and water law in particular. “I hear the Judge Minott of Haverhill once told a client, by way of warning, that two millers who owned mills on the same stream went to law about a dam, and at the end of the lawsuit one lawyer owned one mill and the other the other.” This black humor from the April 11, 1861 entry in his journal nicely summarized the final result of the flowage controversy. When the gavel came down in the General Court at Boston on April 25, 1862, the result was a big fat zero, except for three years’ worth of gainful employment for the attorneys on opposite sides, and for those within the legislature. After more than 1,100 days of meetings, hearings, experiments, and writing sessions coordinated by half a dozen government- funded committees and commissions, the final result looped back to where it all started. The last of four legislative acts repealed the first. First came the act to appoint a Joint Committee to study the situation (April 1, 1859). Next, based on that study, came the act to tear down the Billerica dam (September 1, 1860). After that came the act to suspend the teardown and study the matter once again (April 9, 1861). Finally came the act to repeal the initial act, which brought everything back to the beginning (April 25, 1862). All of this time and money, especially during preparations for Civil War, could have been saved by asking one local genius to weigh in. Of course, Thoreau would not have rendered the Solomon-like judgment that the law so craves. Rather, after eighteen months of river investigations, he had become convinced that the entire watershed of Musketaquid above its natural outlet was behaving as one big coherent system within which humans were pervasive and ubiquitous players. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 231

{No MS—from manuscript catalog}

A friend of mine away in New York, wishes very much a copy of each of your “Memoirs”—”In the Woods” and “On the Rivers”. . . . . Can you & will you cause a copy of each to meet me at the Anti- Slavery Office. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Thoreau’s last day as a boatman coincided with a day of victory for the industrialists. On April 9 he described “worm piles in grass at Clamshell,” a place that was far easier for someone in his weakened condition to access by boat than by foot, On that same day, the Act to Suspend “An Act in Relation to the Flowage of the Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers” cleared the desk of Governor [John Albion] Andrew. It stipulated that the previous law was suspended until at least May 1, 1862. It also appointed an official commission to conduct a new round of experiments at the Billerica dam, the fourth since the controversy began. The act mandated that the commission consist of “three suitable and competent persons, two of whom shall be civil engineers, experienced in the management and operation of water.” The results of those experiments were to be reported to the governor by January 1, 1862. The language of this legislative act sealed the river’s fate. Asking a majority of politically connected engineers allied with the hydropower industry to decide whether a perfectly good hydropower dam should be torn down is like asking oil executives to abandon a profitable petroleum reserve. Or like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. Would the decision have turned out differently if the law had mandated a committee of three agriculturalists experienced with soils? Or three naturalists experienced with meadows? Whether knowing or not, this legislation stacked the deck to ensure that the industrial lobby got the cards it wanted. Chairing the special committee was Charles S[torer] Storrow (1809-1904), arguably the most prominent engineer in the region after James B. Francis, the respondents’ chief consultant. Storrow, a Harvard graduate, learned his waterworks from the French School, attending the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. The second engineer on the committee was Joel Herbert Shedd (1834-1915), a politically connected professional colleague. The third member of the commission was the attorney Daniel Wells Alvord (1816-1871), a former state senator from Greenfield, a graduate of Cambridge School of law (related to Harvard Law School), and an appointed district attorney for western Massachusetts.... — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 221 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

... All three had conflicts of interest. The chairman of the commission, Storrow, was a wealthy textile-mill capitalist in the same business as the respondents, Talbot and Faulkner. After returning from France, he joined with six other hydropower industrialists to incorporate the Essex Company in 1845. Nearly from scratch they built a “New City on the Merrimack,” later named Lawrence after one of the wealthiest stockholders. That city’s economy was utterly tied to the Great Stone Dam across the Merrimack River. With a height of 35 feet and a length of 900 feet, it was the largest dam in the world at the time, and is now recognized as one of the great engineering feats of the Nineteenth century. Storrow was its chief project engineer. With his appointment to the 1861 engineering committee, Governor Andrew was asking the builder of the world’s largest factory dam to decide whether the lowly factory dam at Billerica was too big. The second engineer, Herbert Shedd, was linked to the respondents’ consultant James Francis through their co- leadership of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The society’s transactions also document Shedd’s previous paid experience with the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers and his work for the City of Boston’s water supply at Lake Cochituate, which required construction of the compensating reservoirs. Additionally, someone with the surname of Shedd was paid to supervise the field operations of the 1861 experiments, suggesting nepotism. The other appointed member, Daniel Alvord, was something of a third wheel to the mandated majority of engineers. As a state district attorney, pleasing the governor was part of his job description. Oddly, he, rather than Storrow, is credited as first author of the commission’s REPORT OF EXPERIMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONCORD AND SUDBURY RIVERS IN THE YEAR 1861. Was the writing mainly his? The American civil war began on April 12, 1861, with the shelling of Fort Sumter by Confederate troops. At the time, John Shepard Keyes wrote that “the Legislature ... was in a bad way” and that Gov. Andrew “was very busy equipping the militia with overcoats and corresponding and advising in every direction.” Despite his concerted lobbying efforts to gain “some relief for the river meadow case,” Keyes saw his attempts go nowhere. Understandably, a three-year-old investigation of wet meadows fell rather low on the list of government priorities. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 222

April 9. Small reddish butterflies common; also, on snow banks, many of the small fuzzy gnats and cicindelæ and some large black dor-bug-like beetles. The two latter are easily detected from a distance on the snow. The phœbe note of chickadee. White frosts these mornings. Worm-piles in grass at Clamshell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1862

March 27, Thursday: A newly appointed Joint Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature recommend that it repeal, as desired by Governor Andrew, the current law in regard to the lowering of the Billerica dam governing the flow of the Concord River and Sudbury River, “An Act in Relation to the Flowage of the Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers.”

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s 15-page pamphlet “Emancipation in the West Indies,” a lyceum lecture he delivered in Concord being reprinted there from the pages of Boston’s The Pine and Palm, offered that conditions were better on Antigua than on Jamaica because on Antigua the transition from slavery to freedom had been immediate, resulting in prosperity, whereas on Jamaica the transition had been by way of an extended period of “apprenticeship,” resulting in economic stagnation. It is immediacy that produces prosperity, whereas the curse that lies upon the shoulders those who postpone the doing of good is “the evil that men do lives after them.” What was good for the British to do in the West Indies is now good for the Northern states to do in the Southern states because it will cause free northern blacks to move toward the south — his prediction is that American blacks will concentrate themselves in a free South both for reasons of climate and for reasons of political economy, to an extent freeing up the white people of the North from needing to deal with them. Yes, folks, you can have it all: If the experience of Antigua and Jamaica teaches anything, it teaches that simultaneous and entire emancipation is the safest, the cheapest, and the wisest course.... It will attract more white men to the South than it will send black men to the North.... Why should the negroes come here after emancipation? On the contrary, reasons both of climate and of political economy will carry them South in great numbers, not only from the border States, but from the North and from Canada ... justice is always expedient. EMANCIPATION

April 25, Friday-May 1: As Federal ships came to anchor at New Orleans, Louisiana the population set the waterfront afire. US CIVIL WAR

On April 25, the General Court of Massachusetts passed An Act to Repeal “An Act in Relation to the Flowage of the Meadows on Concord and Sudbury Rivers.” Its language was brief and to the point: the previous ruling to tear the dam down “is hereby repealed,” effective immediately. Its passage, eleven days before Henry’s death, was also the death knell for meadowland farming as a way of life. Simon Brown, writing anonymously as the editor of the New England Farmer, called this finality an “unjust and wicked oppression upon an unoffending and long- suffering people.” — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 230 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

Approximately one year before he died, Thoreau had a good laugh about the practice of law in general and water law in particular. “I hear the Judge Minott of Haverhill once told a client, by way of warning, that two millers who owned mills on the same stream went to law about a dam, and at the end of the lawsuit one lawyer owned one mill and the other the other.” This black humor from the April 11, 1861 entry in his journal nicely summarized the final result of the flowage controversy. When the gavel came down in the General Court at Boston on April 25, 1862, the result was a big fat zero, except for three years’ worth of gainful employment for the attorneys on opposite sides, and for those within the legislature. After more than 1,100 days of meetings, hearings, experiments, and writing sessions coordinated by half a dozen government- funded committees and commissions, the final result looped back to where it all started. The last of four legislative acts repealed the first. First came the act to appoint a Joint Committee to study the situation (April 1, 1859). Next, based on that study, came the act to tear down the Billerica dam (September 1, 1860). After that came the act to suspend the teardown and study the matter once again (April 9, 1861). Finally came the act to repeal the initial act, which brought everything back to the beginning (April 25, 1862). All of this time and money, especially during preparations for Civil War, could have been saved by asking one local genius to weigh in. Of course, Thoreau would not have rendered the Solomon-like judgment that the law so craves. Rather, after eighteen months of river investigations, he had become convinced that the entire watershed of Musketaquid above its natural outlet was behaving as one big coherent system within which humans were pervasive and ubiquitous players. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 231 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1867

Construction began at St. Louis on the Eads Bridge that was to span the Mississippi River.

Captain Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’s REPORT UPON THE PHYSICS AND HYDRAULICS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER: UPON THE PROTECTION OF THE ALLUVIAL REGION AGAINST OVERFLOW; AND UPON THE DEEPENING OF THE MOUTHS: BASED UPON SURVEYS AND INVESTIGATIONS MADE UNDER THE ACTS OF CONGRESS DIRECTING THE TOPOGRAPHICAL AND HYDROGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE DELTA OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, WITH SUCH INVESTIGATIONS AS MIGHT LEAD TO DETERMINE THE MOST PRACTICABLE PLAN FOR SECURING IT FROM INUNDATION, AND THE BEST MODE OF DEEPENING THE CHANNELS AT THE MOUTHS OF THE RIVER.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.” Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Indeed, on June 26, 1775, Washington appointed Colonel Richard Gridley of Massachusetts to be the army’s first chief engineer. At the time, the principal concern was military fortification. This remained the case in 1802, when Thomas Jefferson stationed a corps of engineers at West Point, creating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1824, when Thoreau was a happy barefoot boy, the Corps broadened its scope into civil affairs, beginning a war against America’s rivers that intensified as the Corps became the default federal agency for river management. Initially the technical know-how came largely from the French School of hydraulic engineering. Not until 1835, midway through Thoreau’s college years, did Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York grant the first civilian American engineering degree. “Even up to the 1850s,” wrote Corps historian John Chambers, “nearly all of the engineers –military and civilian– had received their scientific education at West Point.” During peacetime, rivers dominated their mission. Charles Ellet Jr.’s THE MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RIVERS (1853) and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’s REPORT UPON THE PHYSICS AND HYDRAULICS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER (1867) summarized river civil engineering in their times. Everything was about control. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 239-240

FLOWAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1871

The 32d edition of Edward Hitchcock’s ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY.

As late as 1871 the nation’s most influential textbook, Edward Hitchcock’s thirty-second edition of ELEMENTARY GEOLOGY, gave almost no attention to river channels. At this time, Thoreau’s pioneering river work lay unpublished and unappreciated in his attic garret.... Thoreau, working as a lone genius, had correctly interpreted many of the key ideas of fluvial geomorphology a half century before the subject was invented. Much of this had been missed by Thoreau scholars, who have instead fixated on Thoreau’s well-known criticisms of institutional science for being falsely objective and detached from meaning. What scholars typically fail to see is that Thoreau was addicted to the puzzle-solving practice of science as a routine part of his daily sojourning life. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, page 242

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FABULATION, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1927

April 15, Friday: All the engineering ideas of Caleb G. Forshey were demonstrated to have been wrongheaded, when the US Army Corps of Engineers was forced to detonate about 30 tons of dynamite on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana in order to save New Orleans from inundation by the Mississippi River while facing the threat of the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States of America.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover would be in charge of flood relief after this “natural disaster” — and would be so much in the news that he would be able to make himself the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

This flood would be described in John M. Barry’s RISING TIDE: THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI FLOOD OF 1927 AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977): This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.” Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Indeed, on June 26, 1775, Washington appointed Colonel Richard Gridley of Massachusetts to be the army’s first chief engineer. At the time, the principal concern was military fortification. This remained the case in 1802, when Thomas Jefferson stationed a corps of engineers at West Point, creating the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1824, when Thoreau was a happy barefoot boy, the Corps broadened its scope into civil affairs, beginning a war against America’s rivers that intensified as the Corps became the default federal agency for river management. Initially the technical know-how came largely from the French School of hydraulic engineering. Not until 1835, midway through Thoreau’s college years, did Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York grant the first civilian American engineering degree. “Even up to the 1850s,” wrote Corps historian John Chambers, “nearly all of the engineers –military and civilian– had received their scientific education at West Point.” During peacetime, rivers dominated their mission. Charles Ellet Jr.’s THE MISSISSIPPI AND OHIO RIVERS (1853) and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys’s REPORT UPON THE PHYSICS AND HYDRAULICS OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER (1867) summarized river civil engineering in their times. Everything was about control. — Professor Robert M. Thorson, THE BOATMAN, pages 239-240

FLOWAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1969

February 18, Tuesday: Pakistani soldiers opened fire on anti-government demonstrators in Dacca, killing 7 and injuring 35.

Palestinian terrorists attacked an El Al airliner on the ground in Zürich, firing machine guns and throwing hand grenades. They wounded 6 on board the plane, one of whom would die. A terrorist was killed and the other 3 captured.

Senator Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson introduced Senate Bill 1075 for environmental protection. This bill would be considered by the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs.

July 10, Friday: Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and occupied an Israeli position near Port Taufiq.

The federal Senate unanimously approved Senator Henry Martin “Scoop” Jackson’s Bill 1075, for environmental protection.

September 23, Tuesday: The federal House of Representatives passed bill 372-15 for environmental protection.

December 17, Wednesday: The joint conference committee of the federal legislature reported a bill for environmental protection.

December 20, Saturday: A frustrated Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. quit his post as chief US negotiator at the Paris peace talks. By the end of this year America’s fighting strength in Vietnam would have been reduced by 115,000 men. At this point 40,024 Americans had been killed in Vietnam. Over the following few years, in accordance with our new “Vietnamization” policy in which we weren’t going to die any longer for them but instead they were going to have to die for themselves, the number of soldiers in the South Vietnamese Army would be being boosted to over 500,000 men.

The federal Senate agreed to the bill for environmental protection that had been reported by the joint conference committee of the federal legislature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY December 23, Tuesday: Activation of the initial General Electric Mark One nuclear reactor having the sort of “torus” design that would be used, unfortunately, in 5 of the 6 reactors at Fukushima Daiichi north of Tokyo.

Clean safe electricity generated by clean safe atomic power would safeguard the environment! On this day the federal House of Representatives agreed to a bill for environmental protection that had been reported by the joint conference committee of the federal legislature.

HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1970

January 1, Thursday: Public Law 91-190, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, was signed into law by President Richard Milhous Nixon.

December 2, Wednesday: In response to elevated concern about environmental pollution, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established. Australia would follow suit in 1974, Thailand in 1975, France in 1976, the Philippine Islands in 1978, Israel in 1981, and Pakistan in 1983. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

1992

June 14, Sunday: The UN’s Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, commonly known as the “Earth Summit,” formally recognized the role of environmental impact assessment as Principle 17 (out of 27 principles), signed by more than 170 nations: “Environmental impact assessment, as a national instrument, shall be undertaken for proposed activities that are likely to have a significant adverse impact on the environment and are subject to a decision of a competent national authority.” The impact of this would be, at a 1st order of approximation, nil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

2013

May 14, Tuesday: Brazil made itself the 15th nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

In Kenya, dozens of pigs were released in the street in front of the Parliament building, and it seemed that someone was using this as a way to protest against the greed of legislators.

Angelina Jolie announced that due to her family history of lethal breast cancer, she had undergone an elective double mastectomy.

An alleged CIA agent was taken into custody in Moscow after allegedly have attempted to recruit a Russian intelligence officer. Spy v. spy.

A Soyuz capsule landed in Kazakhstan, bringing 3 astronauts safely from the International Space Station to their home planet.

An overwhelmingly negative document had been posted on the internet, one that cited case after case of fraudulence worldwide in Environmental Impact Assessment studies. One of the contributors to this overwhelmingly negative report commented that, had a different, more positive question been posed to him by the author, he would surely have been able to come up with other, more positive accounts of Environmental Impact Assessments. I have written to these two sources, informing them that on page 32 of a recent book, Professor Robert M. Thorson’s THE BOATMAN (a study of Henry Thoreau’s late-life preoccupation with the flowage of the Concord River), the author asserts “To my knowledge, it [Thoreau’s study of the flowage of the river valley of the Musketaquid] is the closest nineteenth-century analogue for what, in the twentieth century, became known as environmental impact assessment.” One question I posed to them was, which particular professor should I contact, at Duke University or elsewhere, to find out what is the present condition of the teaching of Environmental Impact Assessment? I wrote that to date, all I had been able to find was some vague hand-waving about the enormous influence on the general public of Rachel Carlson’s SILENT SPRING, plus a whole bunch of newspaper stories about the fraudulence of this or that particular study. I wrote that I had been unable to find any reference whatever to any “prehistory” of such environmental impact studies (by “prehistory,” I explained, I meant environmental impact studies that had been completed prior to the enactment of the EIA). Another question I posed was, do the professors who teach these EIA classes know anything about Thoreau’s work in Environmental Impact Assessment? I suggested that if they do not (Professor Thorson’s work being new and groundbreaking), they and their students might benefit from learning of this, and I asked, what would be the best way of communicating with them? HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY

2017

“Everything was about control.”

— Professor Robert M. Thorson

April 24, Monday: Professor Robert M. Thorson’s THE BOATMAN: HENRY DAV ID THOREAU’S RIVER YEARS (Cambridge: Harvard UP). This was reviewed by Daegan Miller in the Los Angeles Review of Books as follows: In 1704, a mill dam was built in Billerica, Massachusetts, on the banks of the Concord River. It was a small dam, but the social ripples it sent intensified over the course of 150 years, especially after 1798, when the mill and its dam were sold to a group of early capitalists, who raised the dam’s height because a higher fall meant more power and thus better financial returns. This was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, and the Concord was at its epicenter; indeed, just a few miles downstream, near the confluence of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, stood the famous Lowell Mill complex, the United States’s first factory system. But there was a problem. The town of Concord, upstream from the dam, like many of its neighboring villages, was a farming town whose pastoral economy also revolved around water power. The Concord River is nearly flat, and when spring came it inevitably flooded, which was good for the farmers because when those yearly floods receded they left behind a nutrient-rich layer of silt. From this silt grew rich meadow hay, which fatted cows and livestock, which were sold to nearby towns, all of which left Concord’s farmers well off. But after the Billerica dam’s height was increased in 1798, farmers in Concord noticed that the floodwaters were slow to drain, and so spoiled their meadows’ hay. Thus began six decades of legal wrangling to determine whether the Concord River’s flow was best used to power a machine or to grow a blade of grass. In 1859, an association of Concord’s farmers hired Henry David Thoreau to measure the abutments of all the bridges that crossed the river upstream from Billerica. (Bridge abutments act as mini-dams, impeding a river’s flow.) The association’s plan was to have Thoreau figure out just how much the bridges contributed to the flooding, with the hope that the answer would be not very much. This evidence could then be taken to the State of Massachusetts, which was in the midst of conducting an investigation into the source of Concord’s flooding, and ultimately used to justify tearing the Billerica dam down. Though it has been generally forgotten, Thoreau was regarded in his own day as Concord’s preeminent land surveyor. He drew up scores of maps between 1849 and his death in 1862. (They’ve been scattered to archives throughout the Northeast, but the vast majority of them are held by the public library in his hometown, which has made them available, free to all, online.) As the literary critic Patrick Chura showed in his 2010 book Thoreau the Land Surveyor, surveying “was an essential […] component of the author’s life and character” that left its indelible mark HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY on nearly everything Thoreau wrote, from his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers — a literary map of the river running through his hometown — to the posthumous essays published in The Maine Woods. One of the last projects that Thoreau ever worked on — he fell ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him just a few months later — was an enormously detailed seven-and-a-half-foot map of the Concord River. This map has always been a mystery to Thoreauvians. It’s not clear why he made it, since Thoreau’s employers had no use for a map: they were after statistics, not cartography. Nor does it appear to be connected to any literary project. This mysterious map is at the center of Robert M. Thorson’s newest book, The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years. Thorson made his first Thoreauvian splash in 2014 with Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science, an insightful book that reads Walden; Or, Life in the Woods not as a literary or philosophical text but as a series of geological experiments. For Thorson, himself a professor of geology, the most impressive thing about Thoreau is what a gifted scientist he was, and it was to “counterbalance […] a recent trend in ecocriticism that refracts science through literature without being scientific” that Thorson wrote Walden’s Shore. The Boatman is, in essence, a 200-page coda to Thorson’s earlier book, but rather than geology, Thorson turns his attention to potamology, the study of rivers. In it, Thorson argues that Thoreau “properly interpreted most of the key ideas of fluvial geomorphology a half century before the subject was invented.” He was, in Thorson’s words, “a lone genius” whose contributions to science we’ve too long ignored. Thorson anchors that claim with an astonishing reading of Thoreau’s river map, supplemented by dozens of relevant entries from the author’s 47-volume journal as well as his handwritten notes preserved in the Concord Free Public Library. These are rich troves for the potamologically literate: the map itself is covered in a riot of detailed jottings on river depth, width, and the composition of the bottom, and one can find among Thoreau’s ephemera dozens of pages of minute figures and calculations. Part of what makes Thorson’s work on Thoreau so unusual is that he hardly bothers with literary, political, or intellectual approaches to his subject at all — he’s after data, and when he finds it, he checks it, weighing it against today’s best practices. (Thorson has generously posted all of this research online.) He comes away from his historical data- crunching deeply impressed with Thoreau’s skill: “[W]orking on his own, Thoreau inaugurated a truly scientific investigation of the largest, most powerful and wildest thing in his life, the Concord River.” But it’s what Thoreau did next that confirms the extraordinary character of his scientific achievement, according to Thorson. Once Thoreau had his measurements in hand, he “generated a half dozen thought experiments that he tested” against his findings. He then combined these with his understanding of the deep geological history of Concord, supplemented by hours of painstaking research in Harvard’s library into cutting-edge French hydraulics, to come up with a general theory of river dynamics. Thoreau had figured out exactly how his river worked, from its subsurface currents to its eddies to the way it carves the bed in which it lies. As Thorson puts it, he “may have known HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY more about rivers […] than anyone else in America.” The Boatman is an impressive feat of empirical research, and Thorson’s conclusions are an important contribution to the scholarship on Thoreau as natural scientist. Had he stopped here, it would be one of those books frequently and admiringly cited by a small circle of academic specialists. The Boatman, however, has grander ambitions: Thorson hopes that his Thoreau can lead us, slide rule in hand, through the hot times of the Anthropocene. Yet this is where he starts to run into trouble. There are any number of definitions of “the Anthropocene,” a term popularized in 2000 by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, but most revolve around the notion that human-generated global climate change is a calamitous break in world history. That’s not quite Thorson’s take. Instead, he’s curiously, cautiously celebratory: for him, the Anthropocene is an age in which humans have at last become aware that our agency “is completely interwoven with nature.” Though global climate change, ocean acidification, rampant pollution, and deforestation may all have their negative consequences, Thorson wants us to keep in mind that Thoreau found “beauty in even the most devastated corners of nature,” and that his “positive attitude can help us brace for the global changes heading our way.” The Thoreauvian lesson of the Anthropocene, Thorson warns in his gently technocratic conclusion, is that we must learn to let “science lead the law when it comes to environmental management,” for only science can guide us safely through whatever lies ahead. (Though he doesn’t mention them, Thorson’s position is close to the Ecomodernists a group of technologists and social scientists who are quite sure that they can engineer a “good, or even a great, Anthropocene” for us, if only we let them.) The irony is that though Thoreau’s work may very well tell us a great deal about the Anthropocene, Thorson’s Thoreau — a Thoreau stripped of his literary, ethical, political, and philosophical complexity — doesn’t, and the problem lies with Thorson’s disinterest in all of Thoreau’s nonscientific work. In Walden’s Shore, Thorson described a Thoreau — “my Thoreau” — who was in need of “resuscitation”: a hardheaded scientist unconcerned with society, economics, politics, literature, economics, or psychology, who lived for objective data alone. It is true that one benefit of such ruthless simplification is clarity, and Thorson’s relentless pruning allows him dozens of glittering observations into Thoreau’s own world that have previously been missed. For instance, there is a passage in the essay “Walking” that has long puzzled scholars in its uncharacteristic (for Thoreau) celebration of Manifest Destiny, in which Thoreau tells us that every time he went for a walk, he inevitably headed southwest, because “the future lies that way.” To many scholars, this has seemed to be a veiled embrace of the American sea-to- shining-sea project. But Thorson points out that one of Thoreau’s favorite walking routes was along the Concord River, which, due to the underlying geology, runs to the southwest. Such simple material facts of Thoreau’s daily life, Thorson shows, often get lost in the thicket of humanistic criticism. But in jettisoning everything except for his scientific practice, Thorson leaves us with an impoverished Thoreau, one stripped of both connections to his time and relevance to ours. Thorson is clearly uncomfortable, for instance, with Thoreau’s HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY more radical, socially engaged side: there’s almost no mention of “Civil Disobedience,” one of the founding texts of an American anarchist tradition, with its declaration that government “can have no pure right over my person and property,” nor of the politically scorching “Slavery in Massachusetts,” which concludes: “[M]y thoughts are murder to the State.” Nor is there much about Thoreau’s ringing embrace of John Brown after Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Indeed, the only mention of Thoreau’s politics comes in a brief dismissal of Thoreau’s antislavery writing as “abolitionist rant.” One of the currents just below The Boatman’s surface is a narrative of a politically enraged young man who dreamed, in 1849, of direct action, of taking a crowbar to the dam that was at the center of the flowage controversy and liberating the river, but who eventually mellowed, exchanging the crowbar for the slide rule, revolutionary notions for dispassionate, scientific facts. It’s as if an Earth First! twentysomething of today grew up, went to grad school, and became an EPA field scientist dutifully taking water samples. “The younger Thoreau was a boatman with wild, agitated, idealistic ideas,” Thorson writes. “The older Thoreau was a boatman whose mature flow of thoughts was slower.” But when the rest of Thoreau’s work is brought back into focus, we find a strident critic as well as an accomplished scientist, a master of the slide rule and the crowbar, one of the earliest Americans to realize that our landscapes, our economy, and our politics are all indivisibly bound together. Far from mellowing as he aged, Thoreau remained scathingly acerbic in his criticism of American market-oriented society. A few months after he finished his river survey, he wrote a blistering critique of capitalism thinly veiled as a pleasant bit of nature writing called “Huckleberries.” “What sort of a country is that where the huckleberry fields are private property?” Thoreau asked, then elaborated: When I pass such fields on the highway, my heart sinks within me. I see a blight on the land. Nature is under a veil there. I make haste away from the accursed spot. Nothing could deform her fair face more. I cannot think of it ever after but as the place where fair and palatable berries, are [sic] converted into money, where the huckleberry is desecrated.

All environmental crises, Thoreau well knew, are also social crises, and a devastated corner of nature could only have as its complement a devastated corner of humanity. It is hard to see how this Thoreau can be reconciled with the ecomodern optimist who would embrace the Anthropocene as an age of scientific beauty, or science as the savior of our warming world. If Thoreau is to be our guide to the Anthropocene, then we must also be ready to accept his radicalism, his skepticism of “man’s improvements,” and his call for, as he puts it in “Walking,” “[a] people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand!” Errata List • Page 15: Diana rather than Diane • Page 27: “rather” not “more” HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY • Page 44: James Walter Goldthwait • Page 50: Prospect not Prospects • Page 77: September 15, 1838 • Page 83: Emerson was quoting Ellery Channing • Page 98: his Uncle Ned; his Uncle Bill (these New England characters were not Thoreau relatives) • Page 127: June 27, 1856 • Page 139: water lily blossoms do not make a popping sound as they open under the rays of the sun (refer to journal for July 17, 1854) • Page 197: did — did • Page 198: “deposited very slowly, only” • Page 202: H.G.O. Blake • Page 212: June 9 • Page 221: title, then a question mark • Page 223: TB patients did not go to Minneapolis in the summer for its dry air, but for its moist air • Page 224: dry western air • Page 257, footnote 30: 1991 rather than 2000 • Page 274, footnote 21: watch, June 16, 1854 • Page 289, footnote 8: remove word “Justly” • Page 289, footnote 9: replace word “Living” with “Justly” • Page 291: June 21, 1852 • Page 292, footnote 12: July 20, 1859

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: September 15, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY 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

FLOWAGE HYDROGRAPHY 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.