In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey which he later recorded in “Ktaadn,” the first part of his 1864 book The Maine Woods. The book describes trips over an eleven year period and Thoreau worked on these essays a further fifteen years. The Maine Woods now exists as three essays, though if Thoreau had lived longer, he may have revised them into a more cohesive whole. The essays provide one of the author’s most detailed accounts of the process of change in the American hinterland. As critic Paul Theroux explains, “Thoreau reveals how to write about nature; how to know more, how to observe, and even gives instructions on how to live. The book illustrates the powerful lesson of the truthfulness of dogged observation: that when the truth is told, the text is prophetic.”
The essay “Allegash and the East Branch” provides a particularly useful excursion on which to examine Thoreau’s wilderness ideology. It is one of the final works in the Thoreau corpus and presents his mature vision. On this trip he spent significant time in intimate contact with what he considered to be wild nature. He travelled in the company of Joe Polis, a Penobscot Indian, who was literate in white culture as well as an expert in his own culture’s ways of being at home in nature. On the trip Thoreau employed Polis as both a guide through the woods and a mentor in Penobscot culture. “I told him,” he explained, “that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew, and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed.”