HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..."
“The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?”
from Ktaadn
At left: Mt. Katahdin looms over Chimney Pond in Baxter State Park.
THOREAU'S 3 TRIPS INTO THE NORTH WOODS
1846, KATAHDIN VIA THE WEST BRANCH: Thoreau left Bangor on Aug. 31 and spent the better part of the next two weeks in the woods. Trip included stops in Enfield, Mattawamkeag, Abol Stream and atop Katahdin itself. Returned to Bangor on Sept. 10 before departing for Boston.
1853, MOOSEHEAD TO CHESUNCOOK: Thoreau came to Bangor on Sept. 14 in preparation for a week on northern Maine waters. A steamer ship took him from Greenville to Northeast Carry, and then he, a friend and a Penobscot guide paddled a canoe down the West Branch of the Penobscot River to Chesuncook Lake before retracing their steps to Pine Stream and the Eastern shore of the West Branch. Thoreau spent four days in Bangor before returning to Concord, Mass.
1857, MOOSEHEAD TO INDIAN ISLAND: Thoreau’s longest and most difficult trip began when he and two others left Greenville on July 23 before heading into the Allagash. The group traveled the Kineo Peninsula, the west bank of the West Branch, Chamberlain Lake, Eagle Lake, the East Branch and Wassataquoik Stream. From Indian Island, Thoreau headed for Bangor, where he spent three days before returning to Massachusetts on Aug. 7.
— Courtesy of Maine Woods Forever
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“Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.”
— “The Maine Woods”
EDITORIALS AND COLUMNS
EDITOR'S NOTE
The Maine Woods occupied a very important place in the life of American author, philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1817 to 1862. Thoreau is justly famous for the two years (1845-1847) he spent in retreat at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, in a cabin on land owned by his friend and fellow philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent much of that time in quiet nature study of the pond and its surrounding ecology, but his trips to Maine in 1846, 1853 and 1857 exposed Thoreau to a huge, primitive wilderness distinctly different from the landscape of his beloved Walden Pond.
Thoreau and his native guides ventured to the Allagash, Chesuncook Lake, the Penobscot River and Mount Katahdin. These were serious expeditions, not the casual walks and hikes of his trips around his native Massachusetts. The high drama of the nature Thoreau encountered made its way into the equally dramatic prose of his book, “The Maine Woods.” In this selection of three essays, we mark the 150th anniversary of Thoreau’s 1857 trip as well as the legacy of this transcendentalist, nature lover and, as author Ted Williams writes here, contrarian who loved Maine in its wildest and most rugged incarnations.
The attentive Thoreau
The likeable Thoreau
A lead slug, a moose and Thoreau
After my grandmother died, we found a small jewelry box in her Orono farm with a note on it: “Nat would like this.” Inside was a lead slug ... Around it is tied a stained paper tag that reads in her own grandfather’s florid 19th century script, “A Moose shot with this bullet on Pima Stream by Geo A. Thatcher see Thoreau.”
- Nathaniel Wheelwright
Thoreau resources
Thoreau Society
Thoreau quotations
Walden Pond State Preservation
Concord, Mass., Thoreau's hometown
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