Savage Brothers
Toward the end of a Sunday afternoon in late September 1837, a few weeks after he quit his job teaching, Henry and his brother John went tramping in search of Indian relics. John was enjoying a short break from teaching in Taunton, more than fifty miles to the south. Intoxicated with the unwritten history that had saturated the banks of the Musketaquid River before white settlers confidently renamed it the Concord, the brothers walked to the mouth of Swamp-Bridge Brook and thence toward, as usual, the nearest steep rise, Fair Haven Hill.
Their Concord neighbors were used to seeing the Thoreau boys ranging the hillsides and loafing on the ponds—short, muscular Henry, lean but rather thick-waisted, with his steady unusual stride; John slight and underweight, taller but not stronger. His quick sympathy,1 his optimism and easy humor—including a lighthearted patience with children, the elderly, the infirm—inspired affection. John was more traditionally religious, not the questioner that Henry had been since childhood. He was considered to have a clean, gentlemanly mind, although he clearly enjoyed the company and attentions of girls. He remonstrated when a friend called the girls around them “flat and insipid.”2 Like Henry, John enjoyed playing the flute3 that their father had bought two years earlier—a handsome instrument made of warm reddish-brown fruitwood, with shiny metal keys and ivory trim. John had his gloomy days, although he didn’t talk much about them. He was known to frequent graveyards in solitary meditation. He insisted, however, that they made him think not of the decaying mortal body but of the immortal spark within that transcended natural laws.
Sometimes they were kept indoors by illness. John frequently suffered4 digestive problems he called colic, and for several years he had occasionally suffered from nosebleeds so sudden and violent that he passed out. Every family knew what these symptoms might mean. Consumption, or tuberculosis,5 haunted many New England families. It was more prevalent there than in most parts of the country, and at the time was the leading cause of death in the Boston region. In Europe one death in four was attributed to consumption. It stalked mostly young adults, especially women. People watched anxiously as a cough developed, or a fever, but the disease was not considered contagious, so victims were seldom isolated. Henry and John’s grandfather had died of consumption.6
The most common prescription was outdoor activity, fresh air, and a wholesome diet, all of which the Thoreau family tried to maintain. As often as possible, the brothers tramped the fields and woods. They followed dainty overlapping mink tracks in the snow and watched dense gray flocks of passenger pigeons fly straight across a clearing. They fished and hunted. Henry bragged that he could carry a rifle7 all day without finding it heavy, even if he seldom got around to firing it. He had developed a strong, muscular body8 at an early age and maintained it with ascetic devotion—little meat, no tobacco, no spirits, and a glory in sweaty manual labor and tramping outdoors. Although every year he had less interest in hunting for sport, he felt grateful for his childhood introduction to hunting and fishing—adventures9 with a fowling piece before his teen years, solitary hours angling on the river—which resulted in early acquaintance with animals and places he might otherwise never have known intimately. Henry had a good sense of direction and seldom got lost—not that he could lose himself around Concord, where he knew all the land from Merrick’s Pasture to the Andromeda Ponds, from Bear Garden Hill to Beck Stow’s Swamp.
From childhood, Henry had been the more guarded of the two, but he loved John and valued his respect. Henry enjoyed the company of his parents and sisters, and was devoted to them—especially to younger Sophia—but John he idolized. Outdoors with him, away from other human beings, Henry relaxed. His face lost its stiffness, its frequent mask of superiority that hid the uncertainties behind it. Throughout their early years an ardor for the past had grown as well, and by the time Henry was twenty and John twenty-two, they were knowledgeable about the region’s history. John was first to develop a passionate interest in Indians, but Henry soon followed, as he often followed his brother in other ways. Recently they had discovered a pestle and other shards to add to their collection, a find that had stoked their zeal.
The hills and valleys that Henry and John explored differed greatly from those that the Indians had silently trod in deerskin moccasins. Early white settlers quickly turned the rich Concord meadows to hay for their livestock, but the sandy and less fruitful uplands to the south, especially around Walden Pond, yielded mainly firewood.10 This region had been subdivided into lots and each generation inherited one for wood. Henry couldn’t walk around the pond during daylight hours without hearing an ax attacking a tree trunk. For many years Concordians had also been cutting down other trees at an ever greater pace, for cordwood and for construction of new homes. During Henry’s two decades, the townsfolk had enjoyed their strong share in the national economic boom before the recent crash.
These straight-edged buildings and treeless clearings were visible from the hill that Henry and John climbed that day in the autumn of 1837. The serpentine meander of the Concord River lay to the left, Walden Pond reflecting shore and sky to their right. Ahead, beyond the village,11 stretched Punkawtasset and Hubbard’s and Buttrick’s hills, and beyond them the faint outline of larger rises, Mount Monadnock and Mount Wachusett. When down on mundane earth beside them, Henry considered buildings an artificial blot on the natural curves of his beloved landscape, but he had to admit that from this prospect they became a soothing focus for a pensive gaze. Hay-makers were not as visible as earlier in the season, changing the tint of a green-brown field as they scythed across it; cut buckwheat, for example, looked red from a distance. But across the almost treeless village the brothers could see small figures leading lumber-hauling oxen or driving brisk shays. More than a quarter of the land was pasture marked off with straight stone or post-and-rider fences. Along the Mill Brook heading into the Mill Dam, plots were outlined by brooks straightened into angular drainage ditches. Houses and cattle were visible in every direction. Herds had to be driven down the roads, so fences lined each side to keep them from wandering astray. Old pastures were thick with scrub pine and barberry. Houses, barns, sheds, brick schoolhouse, the yellow-painted spire of Reverend Ripley’s church—the map of their daily life was visible from up there, as if they had been lifted from two dimensions into three.
The Thoreau brothers’ imaginations were full of primary-colored scenes that seemed more heroic and savage than pastel Concord. Numerous books gathered folklore, legends, and one-sided accounts of Indians. A few authors even made an effort to accurately describe what was known of the lives of North American natives prior to the arrival of Europeans. Most of these, however, were tinted by Romantic melancholy about doomed innocents, tangled with misconceptions about what the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had referred to almost a century before, in his Second Discourse, as the “noble savage.” In their natural world, Rousseau maintained, all human beings exist in a state of amoral virtue, prior to either the corruptions of civilization or the development of higher moral laws that curb human beings’ inborn drift toward depravity. Smugly civilized and with moral criticism of Europe in mind, Rousseau found American Indians a useful metaphor.
In 1828, when Henry was nine, the lexicographer Noah Webster defined savagism in his American Dictionary as “the state of rude uncivilized men;12 the state of men in their native wildness and rudeness,” without suggesting that often it might exist more in the minds of the civilized than in the realities of the uncivilized. With a broad brush, Webster sketched Indians as his example: “The savages of America, when uncorrupted by the vices of civilized men, are remarkable for their hospitality to strangers, and for their truth, fidelity and gratitude to their friends, but implacably cruel and revengeful toward their enemies.”
Henry devoured stories about Indians and there were many from which to choose. Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, for example, published Tales of the Indians in 1831, followed four years later by Indian Traits: Being Sketches of the Manners, Customs, and Character of the North American Natives. Thatcher included information on every topic—hunting and divorce, toys and weapons, tattooing and snowshoe making. From the first page of the later book, he established an Edenic vision of what he regarded as a fated race:
Two centuries ago, the entire surface of this vast American continent was covered with an Indian population. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and from the broad waters of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, the Red Man roamed in his native wilderness, fearless and free as the deer that fled from the sound of his footstep. The smoke of his wigwam rose peacefully from every hill-side and every riverbank. . .
Some accounts were less poetic. The 1832 volume Indian Biography was a thick compilation of alphabetical listings, ranging from Acoompanet, “one of the Eleven Christian Indians accused as concerned in the murder of the people of Lancaster, 22d Aug. 1675,” to Yumanum, “the last Sachem of the Pequots.” It was written by Samuel Gardner Drake, who in Boston in 1828 had founded the first antiquarian bookstore in the twenty-four United States.
From books such as their neighbor Lemuel Shattuck’s History of the Town of Concord, which had been published while Henry was at Harvard, Henry and John learned much local Indian folklore. They loved the story of the chief, or sachem, Nanepashemet. According to Shattuck’s account, just before the coming of the first Europeans, little more than two centuries earlier, Nanepashemet ruled the Pawtucket confederation of Indian tribes. His influence reached from the Piscataqua in what became New Hampshire, westward to the Musketaquid, and eastward to the Mattacuset—a river that Charles I later renamed for himself—around what became Boston. Shattuck estimated that in 1612 pestilence reduced the natives’ numbers by ninety percent and he reported that some villages disappeared entirely. “This great mortality,”13 he wrote, “was viewed by the first Pilgrims, as the accomplishment of one of the purposes of Divine Providence, by making room for the settlement of civilized man, and by preparing a peaceful asylum for the persecuted Christians of the old world.”
The local sachem had been Tahatawan, although his name was recorded with various spellings. After Nanepashemet died in 1619, his widow—who was called merely Squaw Sachem in most early records—and Tahatawan negotiated the sale of the Concord region to the European settlers. The official Colony Records duly reported:
5th. 6mo. 1637. Wibbacowett; Squaw Sachem; Tahattawants; Natanquatic, alias Old Man; Carte, alias Goodmand; did express their consent to the sale of the Weire at Concord over against the town: and all the planting-ground which hath been formerly planted by the Indians, to the inhabitants of Concord; of which there was a writing, with their marks subscribed given into court, expressing the price.
To the Thoreau brothers, the Indians personified a need for wildness, and in their imaginations they still hunted the riverside at dusk.
To the east across the little valley, beyond the Concord Academy and the western end of Main Street, rising just beyond the river, was Nawshawtuct Hill. From its height Henry had surveyed his local cosmos many times. The previous summer, in August 1836, shortly after turning nineteen, he had beached his small homemade boat, the Red Jacket, beneath Nawshawtuct following an amateurish ten-minute sail on the river.
This name, too, was a tribute to Indians. Henry christened the boat after a Seneca chief—an act in itself deliberately confrontational and a testament to his passion for native history. The Seneca had sided with Britain during the Revolution. The Wolf clan chief Sagoyewatha took the nickname “Red Jacket” after a handsome embroidered coat he was given by the Crown to honor his services during the war. After England’s defeat, he played an important role as a representative of Indian concerns in dealing with the new United States government. Henry admired resistance to dogmatism, of which Red Jacket was an example eloquent enough to stand with Cicero. He was best known for his reply to the Christian missionaries who, at a Buffalo, New York council in 1825, informed the gathered Indians that they had always lived in darkness, unaware of their need to worship the same god as the Europeans, and that they could never be truly happy without adopting the white man’s religion. In the twelve years since its delivery, and the seven since Red Jacket’s death, his polite appeal to reason and tolerance had become legendary. The Great Spirit made this land for his red children because he loved them, said Sagoyewatha, and they had always worshipped him with thankfulness. Just as the Great Spirit had made for his red and white children different skins and customs, so must he have given each the religion he wanted them to have:
Brother, you say that there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book . . . Brother, we are told that you have been preaching to white people in this place. These people are our neighbors; we are acquainted with them. We will wait a little while and see what effect your preaching has on them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest, and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will then consider again what you have said.
At the end of his speech, Red Jacket added, “As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand, and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey, and return you safe to your friends.” But the head missionary refused to shake hands with the Indians. Witnesses reported that he said “that there was no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil, and therefore could not join hands with them.” The same reporters noted that after the missionary’s rejection was translated to them, “they smiled, and retired in a peaceable manner.”
To the childhood friend who would later become a partner in his graduation speech, Charles Wyatt Rice, Henry had recounted his Red Jacket expedition in mock-heroic terms and parodied his own vessel. “If men have dared14 the main to tempt in such frail barks, why may not wash-tub round or bread-trough square oblong Suffice to cross the purling wave and gain the destin’d port?” He described the local response to the boat’s landing: “Natives, a harmless, unoffensive race, principally devoted to agricultural pursuits—appeared somewhat astonished that a stranger should land so unceremoniously on their coast.”
On the day that Henry and John neared the top of the rise that looked down on the panorama of the Concord River, Henry was contrasting the present bucolic view with the savage woodlands of the past. “There on Nawshawtuct,”15 he said, gesturing dramatically toward the east, “was their lodge, the rendezvous of the tribe.”
Henry pointed in a different direction. “And yonder, on Clamshell Hill, their feasting ground. This was, no doubt, a favorite haunt. Here on this brow was an eligible lookout post. How often,” he speculated, “have they stood on this very spot, at this very hour, when the sun was sinking behind yonder woods and gilding with his last rays the waters of the Musketaquid, and pondered the day’s success and the morrow’s prospects—or communed with the spirit of their fathers gone before them to the land of shades.”
He always found it easy to imagine himself into the past life of the natives. “Here stood Tahatawan!” he exclaimed to his brother, gesturing wildly. “And there”—he pointed at a spot nearby on the ground—“is Tahatawan’s arrowhead!”
Agreeable John went along with this fancy, and they sat on the rough ground where Henry had pointed. To further his little joke, Henry reached down, pretending to pick up Tahatawan’s legacy. He grabbed the nearest stone and held it up for his brother to see.
To their astonishment, it was indeed an arrowhead. Its flint was so sharp it seemed to have just been chipped, as if its maker lurked in the forest nearby—a ghost watching from the past.
The discovery of what he thought of as Tahatawan’s arrowhead furthered Henry’s sense that he was not only surrounded by the past but might in fact be part of it. He continued to devour all he could find to read about Indians, and he and John watched the ground more than ever. Often Henry kept his eyes on a path as he walked, and he was famous for finding more arrowheads than anyone else. Once during their walk a friend remarked, “I do not see where you find your Indian arrowheads.”16
Henry stooped to pick up something from the ground and held it out. “Here is one.”
Soon John returned to the school in Taunton. In mid-November,17 Henry wrote him a playful letter that was saturated with their current favorite topic. It was in the style of treaties and Indian speeches as they appeared in Shattuck and other writers. The style also resembled that of James Fenimore Cooper, the New Jersey novelist whose sagas about heroic frontiersman Natty Bumppo had appeared during Henry’s childhood and achieved international popularity, despite being ridiculed by critics as vulgar and silly.
Musketaquid two hundred and two summers—two moons—eleven suns since the coming of the Pale Faces. Tahatawan—Sachimausan—to his brother sachem—Hopeful of Hopewell—hoping that he is well.
Brother, it is many suns that I have not seen the print of thy moccasins by our council-fire, the Great Spirit has blown more leaves from the trees and many clouds from the land of snows have visited our lodge—the earth has become hard like a frozen buffalo skin, so that the trampling of many herds is like the Great Spirit’s thunder—the grass on the great fields is like the old man of many winters—and the small song sparrow prepares for his flight to the land whence the summer comes.
Brother—I write thee these things because I know that thou lovest the Great Spirit’s creatures, and wast wont to sit at thy lodge door—when the maize was green, to hear the bluebird’s song. . .
Henry went on to apprise John of the goings-on in Concord, referring to the Boston State House as a “council house” and describing solemn and large-nosed Samuel Hoar as “Eaglebeak.” He signed the letter “Tahatawan.” Under the signature he wrote His mark and drew a bow arcing like two hills above a horizontal bowstring, across them an arrow pointing toward the sky.