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The Seasons in Estabrook Country
AUTUMN [Part 2 of 2]
Oct. 20, 1857. Barefooted Brooks Clark. (His picture is the frontispiece herein.) Thoreau: "To the Easterbrooks Country. . . . There is a very strong northwest wind, Novemberish and cool, raising waves on the river and admonishing to prepare for winter. . . . Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees.
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"I had gone but a little way on the old Carlisle road when I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. . . . When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had n't anything to carry them in, he put 'em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry fruit in. How many he got in along toward the toes, I don't know. I noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. It pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days. Far be it from me to call it avarice or penury, this childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields and carrying it home in the October evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter's store. Oh, no; he was happy to be Nature's pensioner still, and bird-like to pick up his living. Better his robin than your turkey, his shoes full of apples than your barrels full; they will be sweeter and suggest a better tale. He can afford to tell how he got them, and we to listen. There is an old wife, too, at home, to share them and hear how they were obtained. Like an old squirrel shuffling to his hole with a nut. Far less pleasing to me the loaded wain, more suggestive of avarice and of spiritual penury.
"This old man's cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church's sacraments and momento mori's. It was better than a prayerful mood. It proves to me old age as tolerable, as happy, as infancy. I was glad of an occasion to suspect that this afternoon he had not been at 'work' but living somewhat after my own fashion (though he did not explain the axe),-had been out to see what nature had for him, and now was hastening home to a burrow he knew, where he could warm his old feet. If he had been a young man, he would probably have thrown away his apples and put on his shoes when he saw me coming, for shame. But old age is manlier; it has learned to live, makes fewer apologies, like infancy. This seems a very manly man. I have known him within a few years building stone walls by himself, barefooted. I keep along the old Carlisle road. The leaves having mostly fallen, the coun-try now seems deserted, and you feel further from home and more lonely. I see where squirrels, apparently, have gnawed the apples left in the road. The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them. They must make a principal part of their food now. . . .
"Warren Brown, who owns the Easterbrooks place, the west side of the road, is picking barberries. Allows that the soil thereabouts is excellent for fruit, but it is so rocky that he has not the patience to plow it. That is the reason this tract is not cultivated. The yellow birches are generally bare. . . .
"There was Melvin, too, a-barberrying and nutting. He had got two baskets, one in each hand, and his game bag, which hung from his neck, all full of nuts and barberries, and his mouth full of tobacco. Trust him to find where the nuts and berries grow. He is hunting all the year and he marks the bushes and the trees which are fullest, and when the time comes, for once leaves his gun, though not his dog, at home, and takes his basket to the spot. It is pleasanter to me to meet him with his gun or his baskets than to meet some portly caterer for a family, basket on arm, at the stalls of Quincy Market. Better Melvin's pignuts than the others' shagbarks. . . . Melvin says he has caught partridges in his hands. If there's only one hole, knows they've not gone out. Sometimes shoots them through the snow.
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"What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. Such great rocks and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little; but think of the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples-so fair both in flower and fruit-resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon. [fn.46] There are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could actually pick two bushels of berries without being seen by you on the other side. And they are not a quarter picked at last, by all creatures together. I walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side, seeming to issue from between the pines and other trees, as if it were they that were promenading there, not I.
"That very dense maple and pine grove opposite the pond-hole on this old Carlisle road-- . . . there are those alive who remember mowing there. . . . Melvin says that Sted [Buttrick] sold the principal log of one of those pasture oaks to Garty for ten dollars and got several cords besides. What a mean bribe to take the life of so noble a tree!"
Oct. 21-22, 1859. John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry and his death. Thoreau took what he called my "blustering walk over the Mason and Hunt pastures." He added, "The very surface of the earth has been imbrowned of late." The weather and color were appropriate. He had heard of John Brown's anti-slavery raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and of his capture. The country was in an uproar and Thoreau believed Brown's execution was inevitable-"I find myself most naturally thinking and speaking of him as physically dead." When Brown had visited Concord to raise funds, he had eaten lunch at Thoreau's house, and Thoreau had contributed a small sum. Brown's stunning raid and his imprisonment, which Thoreau discussed with Mason and others on these walks, filled his mind. The journals for these days have a few observations on nature but then become an outpouring of passionate thoughts. In the midst of national hysteria, Thoreau was preparing for his single most courageous public act, his address "A Plea for Captain John Brown," which he was to deliver on Oct. 30th. The journal extracts below, two of which I have run together, suggest the turmoil Thoreau was experiencing as he walked through the windy, lonely Estabrook countryside:
"To Mason's pasture. . . . That clump of mountain laurel in Mason's pasture is of a triangular form, about six rods long by a base of two and a third rods, -or seven or eight square rods,-beside some separate clumps. It is very cold and blustering to-day. It is the breath of winter, which is encamped not far off to the north. A great many shrub oak acorns hold on, and are a darker brown than ever.
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"Insane! [fn.47] A father and seven sons, and several more men besides,-as many, at least, as twelve disciples,-all struck with insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer grip than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors, his abetters, are saving their country and their bacon! . . . When the reporter to the Herald (!) reports the conversation [with Brown] 'verbatim,' he does not know of what undying words he is made the vehicle. [I] read his admirable answers to Mason and others. How [the reporter's words] are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! On the one side half-brutish, half-timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. They are made to stand with Pilate, and Gessler, and the Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech and action! And what a void their silence! . . .
"The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds; a small crew of slaveholders is smothering four millions under the hatches; and yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by 'the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity,' without any 'outbreak'! And in the same breath they tell us that all is quiet now at Harper's Ferry. What is it that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead, who have found deliverance. That is the way we have been diffusing humanity, and all its sentiments with it. . . . I know there have been a few heroes in the land, but no man has ever stood up in America for the dignity of human nature so devotedly, persistently, and so effectively as this man. . . . [Oct. 22, 1859:] The very surface of the earth has been rapidly embrowned of late . . . .Surely [Brown and his followers] were the very best men you could select to be hung. . . . A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a Transcendentalist above all, a man of ideals and principles,-that was what distinguished him. Of unwavering purposes, not to be dissuaded but by an experience and wisdom greater than his own. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life. . . . I rejoice that I live in this age, that I was his contemporary. . . . Though you may not approve of his methods or his principles, cease to call names, to cry mad dog."
On Oct. 30, 1859, Minot Pratt wrote from his house at Punkatasset to his wife Maria about having just heard Thoreau's address "A Plea for Captain John Brown":
"Dear Maria, I hope you are enjoying your visit, and making yourself useful in Chelsea. We are having a nice time here, every thing going on smoothly and comfortably. I have just returned, (most ten oclock), from hearing a sort of lecture from Henry Thoreau, on the subject of the affair at Harper's Ferry, or rather on the character of Captain Brown. Henry spoke of him in terms of the most unqualified eulogy. I never heard him before speak so much in praise of any man, and did not think his sympathies were so strong in favor of the poor slave. He thinks Capt. Brown has displayed heroic qualities that will cause him to be remembered wherever and whenever true heroism is admired. The lecture was full of Henry's quaint and strong expressions: hitting the politicians in the hardest manner, and showing but little of that veneration which is due our beloved president and all the government officials, who are laboring so hard and so disinterestedly for the welfare of the dear people. [Page 62] The church also, as a body, came in for a share of whipping, and it was laid on right earnestly. In the course of his remarks on Capt. Brown's heroic character, and the actions in the service of freedom, and the probability of his being killed therefore, he said he had been very strongly impressed with the possibility of a man's dying-very few men can die-they have never lived, how then can they die! The life they lived was not life-that constant endeavor after self-gratification, with no high aspiration and effort for the race, was too mean an existence to be called life. Brown was a man of ideas and action; whatever he saw to be right, that he endeavored to do with energy, without counting the cost to himself. Such a real live man could die.
"The lecture was full of noble, manly ideas, though, perhaps, a little extravagant in its eulogy of Capt. Brown. With much love to yourself and all others, and strong hopes for the convalescence of the sick, and the continued health of the well.
/s/ Minot" [095]
Oct. 26, 1849. Farmer D. B. Clark wrote in his diary about the hard land in the Estabrook country, "Helpt the blacksmith for a while. Held plow for Uncle Joseph Clark in among the rocks up on the lime kiln pasture." [096]
Oct. 29, 1860. Henry Thoreau and the life of the forest: the succession of forest trees. [097] Thoreau had inspected every woods in town and categorized them by age, history, and intensity of cut. Then he watched and tried to understand as the forest grew and changed. This example is from Estabrook country:
"To Eb. Hubbard's old black birch hill. Henry Shattuck's is a new pitch pine wood, say thirty years old. [098] The western, or greater, part contains not a single seed-bearing white pine. It is a remarkable proof of my theory [of how seeds are dispersed], for it contains thousands of little white pines but scarcely one little pitch pine. It is also well-stocked with minute oak seedlings. It [has] an oak wood on the north, from which the squirrels brought the acorns. A strip of nearly the same width of the pitch pine was cut apparently within a year . . . and has just been harrowed and sown with rye, and still is all dotted over with little oak seedlings between the [stumps], which are perhaps unnoticed by Shattuck, but if he would keep his plow and fire out he would still have a pretty green patch there next fall. A thousand little red flags (changed oak leaves) already wave over the green rye amid the stumps. The farmer stumbles over them in his walk, and sweats while he endeavors to clear the land of them, and yet wonders how oaks ever succeed to pines, as if he did not consider what these are. . . . [099]
"Again, as day before yesterday [fn.48], sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an [Page 63] acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on the limb of the oak [100], with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. The jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it.
"Yesterday and today I have walked rapidly through extensive chestnut woods without seeing what I thought was a seedling chestnut, yet I can soon find them in our Concord pines a quarter or half mile from the chestnut woods. Several have expressed their surprise to me that they cannot find a seedling chestnut to transplant. I think that [it] is with them precisely as with the oaks; not only [is] a seedling is more difficult to distinguish in a chestnut wood, but it is really far more rare there than in the adjacent pine, mixed, and oak woods. After considerable experience in searching for these and seedling oaks, I have learned to neglect the chestnut and oak woods and go only to the neighboring woods of a different species for them. Only that course will pay. . . . [101]
"There is more chestnut in the northern part of town than I was aware of. The first large wood north of Ponkawtasset is oak and chestnut. East of my house [his former Walden cabin]."
Nov. 1, 1858. Thoreau: "Stand on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high and the sky is clear . . . .We are not wont to see our dooryard as part of the earth's surface. The gardener does not perceive that some ridge or mound in his garden or lawn is related to yonder hill or the still more distant mountain in the horizon is, perchance, a humble spur of the last. We are wont to look on the earth as still a sort of chaos, formless and lumpish. I notice from this height that the curving moraine forming the west side of Sleepy Hollow is one of several arms or fingers that stretch away from the hill range . . . ; that this finger-like moraine is continued northward by itself almost to the river, and points plainly enough to Ponkawtasset Hill on the other side, . . . and so the sloping cemetery lots on the west side of Sleepy Hollow are related to Ponkawtasset. The smooth-shaven knoll in the lawn, on which the children swing is, perchance, only a spur of some mountains of the moon, which no traveler has ever reached, heaved up by the same impulse."Nov. 2, 1857. Thoreau: "To Bateman's Pond. . . . It is very pleasant and cheerful nowadays, when the brown and withered leaves strew the ground and almost every plant is fallen or withered, to come upon a patch of polypody on some rocky hillside in the woods,- as in abundance on hillside between Calla Swamp and Bateman's Pond, and still more hillside east of the callas,- where, in the midst of the dry and rustling leaves, defying frost, it stands so freshly green and full of life. The mere greenness, which was not remarkable in the summer, is positively interesting now. My thoughts are with the polypody a long time after my body has passed. The brakes, the sarsaparilla, the osmundas, the Solomon's-seals, the lady's-slippers have long since withered and fallen. The huckleberries and blueberries, too, have lost their leaves. The forest floor is covered with a thick coat of moist brown leaves. But what is that perennial and springlike verdure that clothes the rocks, of small green plumes pointing various ways? It is the cheerful community of the polypody. It survives at least as the type of vegetation, to remind us of the spring which shall not fail. These are the green pastures where I browse now.
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"I come to a black-snake in the wood-path, with its crushed head resting on a stone and its uninjured body trailing hence. How often I see where thus some heel has bruised the serpent's head! I think it some unnatural antipathy.
"Crossed over that high, flat-backed rocky hill, where the rocks, as usual thereabouts, stand on their edges, and the grain . . . by compass east-northeast, west-southwest,- is frequently kinked up in a curious manner, reminding me of a curly head. Call the hill Curly-pate.
"Bateman's Pond is agitated by the strong wind,-a slate-colored surface under the cloudy sky. . . . How contagious are boys' games! A short time ago they were spinning tops, as I saw and heard, all the country over. Now every boy has a stick curved at the end, a hawkie (?), in his hand, whether in yards or in distant lanes I meet them.
"The evergreen ferns and lycopodiums now have their day; now is the flower of their age, and their greenness is appreciated. They are much the clearest and most liquid green in the woods, more yellow and brown specked in the open places.
"The form of the polypody is strangely interesting; it is even outlandish. Some forms, though common in our midst, are thus perennially foreign as the growths of other latitudes; there being a greater interval between us and their kind than usual. We all feel the ferns to be further from us, essentially and sympathetically, than the phænogamous plants, the roses and weeds, for instance. It needs no geology or botany to tell us that. We feel it, and told them of it first. The bare outline of the polypody thrills me strangely. It is a strange type, which I cannot read. It only piques me. Simple as it is, it is as strange as an Oriental character. It is quite independent of my race, and of the Indian, and of all mankind. It is a fabulous, mythological form, such as prevailed when the earth and air and water were inhabited by those extinct fossil creatures that we find. It is contemporary with them, and affects [us somewhat as the sight of them might do]. [102]
"As I stood on Curly-pate, the air had become gradually thick with mist in the southwest. The sky was overcast, and a cool, strong wind blew from the same quarter, and in the mist I perceived the strong scent of smoke from some burning. Standing on one of those curly-headed rocks, whose strata are vertical, gives me a sense of elevation like a mountain-top. . . . The wild apples have lost some of their brilliancy now and are chiefly fallen."
Nov. 3, 1857. Thoreau: "To Easterbrooks moraine [103] via Ponkawtasset-top. Islands, pale-brown grassy isles, are appearing again in the meadow as the water goes down. From this hilltop, looking downstream over the Great Meadows away from the sun, the water is rather dark, it being windy, but about the shores of the grassy isles it is a lighter-colored smooth space. Pitch pine needles are almost all fallen. There is a wild pear tree on the east side of Ponkawtasset, which I find to be four and a half feet in circumference at four feet from the ground.
"Looking westward now, at 4 P. M., I see against the sunlight, where the twigs of the maple and black birch intermingle, a little gossamer or fine cobwebs, but much more the twigs, especially of the birch, waving slightly, reflect the light like cobwebs. It is a phenomenon peculiar to this season, when the twigs are bare and the air is clear. I cannot easily tell what is cobweb and what twig, but the latter often curve upward more than the other.
"I see on many rocks, etc., the seeds of the barberry, which have been voided by birds,- robins, no doubt, chiefly. How many they must scatter over the fields, spreading the barberry far and wide! That has been their business for a month.
"Follow up the Boulder Field northward, and it terminates in that moraine. As I return down the Boulder Field, I see the now winter-colored-i.e. reddish (of oak leaves) horizon of hills, with its few white houses, four or five miles distant southward, between two of the boulders which are a dozen rods from me, a dozen feet high, and nearly as much apart,-as a landscape between the frame of a picture. But what a picture frame! These two great slumbering masses of rock, reposing like a pair of mastodons on the surface of the pasture, completely shutting out a mile of the horizon on each side, while between their adjacent sides, which are nearly perpendicular, I see to the now purified, dry, reddish, leafy horizon, with a faint tinge of blue from the distance. To see a remote landscape between two near rocks! I want no other gilding to my picture-frame. There they lie, as perchance they tumbled and split from off an iceberg. What better frame could you have? The globe itself, here named pasture, for ground and foreground, two great boulders for the sides of the frame, and the sky itself for the top! And for artists and subject, God and Nature! Such pictures cost nothing but eyes, and it will not bankrupt one to own them. They were not stolen by any conqueror as spoils of war, and none can doubt but they are really the works of an old master. What more, pray, will you see between any two slips of gilded wood in that pasture you call Europe and browse in sometimes? It is singular that several of these rocks should be thus split into twins. Even very low ones, just appearing above the surface, are divided and parallel, having a path between them.
"It would be something to own that pasture with the great rocks in it! And yet I suppose they are considered an incumbrance only by the owner.
"I came along the path that comes out just this side of the lime-kiln."
"Coming by Ebby Hubbard's thick maple and pine wood, I see the rays of the sun, now not much above the horizon, penetrating quite through it to my side in very narrow and slender glades of light, peculiarly bright. It seems, then, that no wood is so dense but that the rays of the setting sun may penetrate twenty rods into it. The other day (November 1st), I stood on the sunny side of such a wood at the same season, or a little earlier. Then I saw the lit sides of the tree stems all aglow with their lichens, and observed their black shadows behind. Now I see chiefly the dark stems massed together, and it is the warm sunlight that is reduced to a pencil of light; i. e., then light was the rule and shadow the exception, now shadow the rule and light the exception.
"I notice some old cow-droppings in a pasture, which are decidedly pink. Even these trivial objects awaken agreeable associations in my mind, connected not only with my actual rambles but with what I have read of the prairies and pampas and Eastern land of grass, the great pastures of the world."
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Nov. 5, 1857. Thoreau: "Sometimes I would rather get a transient glimpse or side view of a thing than stand fronting to it,-- as those polypodies. The object I caught a glimpse of as I went by haunts my thoughts a long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not care to front it and scrutinize it, for I know that the thing that really concerns me is not there, but in my relation to that. That is a mere reflecting surface. It is not the polypody in my pitcher or herbarium, or which I may possibly persuade to grow on a bank in my yard, or which is described in botanies, that interests me, but the one that I pass by in my walks a little distance off, when in the right mood. Its influence is sporadic, wafted through the air to me. . . . At this season polypody is in the air. It is worth the while to walk in swamps now, to bathe your eyes with greenness. The terminal shield fern is the handsomest and glossiest green. . . .
"I think that the man of science makes this mistake, and the mass of mankind along with him: that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you as something independent on you, and not as it is related to you. The important fact is its effect on me. He thinks that I have no business to see anything else but just what he defines the rainbow to be, but I care not whether my vision of truth is a waking thought or dream remembered, whether it is seen in the light or in the dark. It is the subject of the vision, the truth alone, that concerns me. The philosopher for whom rainbows, etc., can be explained away never saw them. With regard to such objects, I find that it is not they themselves (with which the men of science deal) that concern me; the point of interest is somewhere between me and them (i. e. the objects) . . . "
Nov. 6, 1857. Thoreau: "To Curly-pate via old Carlisle road. . . . I passed through that chestnut wood in the hollow southeast of Curly-Pate. Turning over the wet chestnut leaves in the hollows, looking for nuts, I found a red-backed salamander, between three and four inches long, bluish-gray beneath (Salamandra erythronota). It jerked itself about in a lively manner, trying to hide itself under the leaves, and would quickly slip out of my fingers. Its motions appeared to partake of those of a snake and a frog,- between a squirm and a hop. It was not particularly swift, yet, from the character of the motion and its glossiness, it was glancing. . .
"When I came out on to the old Carlisle road in the dusk on my return, I saw Brooks Clark coming homeward, with his axe in his hand and both hands behind his back, being bent almost double. He said he was over eighty. Some years ago he bought some land up that way, and, the birches having sprung up there, he called it his birch pasture. There was enough birch wood there to carry him through the winter and he was now cutting it. He remembered when they started to burn lime there, and bought the right to get out stone of Easterbrooks more than sixty years ago. . . . But the stone was difficult to get out. He remembers the mowers at work in the meadow where Stedman Buttrick's handsome pine and maple wood is, seventy years ago . . . .As for the yellow birch cellar-hole, Ephraim Brown told him that old Henry Flint (an ancestor of Clark's wife) dug it, and erected the frame of a house there, but never finished it, selling out and going to live by the river. It was never finished. Clark's father told him that he remembered when there were no fences between his house and Lawrence's; it was all open. This road [the Estabrook Road] was the new one; the bridle road [Two Rod Road] was the old one."
Nov. 7 & 13, 1857. The corn hills: Thoreau as an archaeological observer. [104] Thoreau wrote: "To Bateman's Pond with R. W. E. [Emerson]. . . . I observed . . . between the site of Paul Adams's and Bateman's Pond, in quite open land, some very prominent Indian corn-hills. I should say that they were higher above the intermediate surface than when they were first made. It was a pasture, and they were thickly covered with grass and lichens. Perhaps the grass had grown better on the hillocks, and so they had grown while the intermediate spaces had been more trodden by the cows. These very regular round grassy hillocks, extending in straight rows over the swells and valleys, had a singular effect, like the burial-ground of some creatures." [Page 67]
Footnotes and Endnotes
Footnotes
Footnote 46. Thoreau's Wild Fruits (1999, p. 141) celebrates the barberry and says, "But if you would see what nature can do in the way of barberries, go to the Easterbrooks Country!" [Back to text.]
Footnote 47. Thoreau is reacting angrily to the conventional wisdom of the newspapers and the streets that John Brown was insane, and thus his actions were morally meaningless. Thoreau compares Brown's conduct--that of a man acting on principle--with the greater insanity of the slave owners or of northerners who either profited from slavery or denied the issue. [Back to text.]
Footnote 48. On Oct. 27th, Thoreau wrote the following (he later cross referenced this passage forward to the above entry of the 29th)--"As I am coming out of this [white pine wood], looking for seedling oaks, I see a jay, which was screaming at me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. This was one, perhaps the most effectual, ways in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which I saw under that dense white pine grove. Where will you look for a jay sooner than in a dense pine thicket? It is there that they commonly live, and build. By looking to see what oaks grow in the open land near by or along the edge where the wood is extensively pine, I can tell surely what kinds of oaks I shall find under the pines. What if the oaks are far off? Think how quickly a jay can come and go, and how many times in a day." Ernst Mayr spoke of these incidents during his remarks on May 10, 1999 above. [Back to text.]
Endnotes
95. "When Thoreau Lectured on John Brown," Concord Journal, V (Dec. 8, 1932): 49, p 1. [Back to text.]
96. Diary of Daniel Brooks Clark, (1984). The town's current records still refer to this lot as the lime kiln lot. [Back to text.]
97. Henry Thoreau and the life of the forest: the succession of forest trees. [Back to text.] Apparently prosaic and detailed journal passages from Estabrook are part of Thoreau's groping for facts to express a unifying vision of nature and creation. Henry Shattuck's woods were a demonstration plot of seed dispersion--and seed dispersion was the engine that drove natural selection and thus evolution. Though others had written about the principle of forest succession, Thoreau was the first to explain how the process worked for individual species and their seeds (Howarth, Book of Concord, 194). The prodigality of the acorns was part of a natural system that, if understood and respected, could redeem us, Thoreau hoped, both literally and spiritually.
The transition of species in the forest and the dispersion of seeds had become part of the debates about evolution and about Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, published the year before. Europeans found it remarkable that in America, when woods were cut, a wood of a different species often sprang up in its place. Some authorities had ascribed this to long-dormant seeds in the soil; others, such as Harvard's Louis Agassiz, ascribed it to the spontaneous generation of species whose ranges and habitats were a fixed part of God's design. To the contrary, in Shattuck's pitch pine wood, Thoreau finds "remarkable proof" of the opinion that he had held for some years: that it was not recognized how powerfully seeds are broadcast each year by wind or water or animals. In Shattuck's woods in Estabrook, it was the squirrels and jays that each year brought acorns from the nearby oak grove into their winters quarters in the pines, to "store" them for food--by burying them. Those acorns not eaten by their planters would sprout and, for a year or two, struggle to survive in the shadowy light of the pine grove. But if a storm or an axe created a break in the canopy, the young oaks would quickly grow to fill it and become the dominant species.
Thus, by annual dispersion of seeds by animals, wind or water--not by spontaneous generation--does the forest prepare itself for its renewal and a succession of species. As Robert Richardson says, "On the big issue [the theory of special creation], Agassiz was wrong and Thoreau was right. (Thoreau, Faith in a Seed, [Washington: Island Press, 1993] 8 [hereafter Faith].] See also Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau, A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: 1986), 362, 373-86; and "The Succession of Forest Trees," NHE, 77.)Thoreau knew that the profusion of seeds and the urgency of their dispersal were the engines of evolution. "The very earth itself is a granary and a seminary," Thoreau the naturalist realized, and Thoreau the transcendentalist continued "so that to some minds its surface is regarded as the cuticle of one great living creature" ("DS," Faith, 151). (Note the double-meaning of seminary--a place for sprouting seeds and a place to study divinity.) He said, "Nature works with such luxuriousness & fury that she follows the least hint" (Jan. 2, 1853). For him, as in Luke, the parable is this--the Seed is the word of God (Luke 8:11). Almost twenty years earlier, Thoreau had written, "Shall the earth be regarded as a graveyard; a necropolis merely, and not also as a granery filled with the seeds of life?...Fertile compost, not exhausted sand?" (March 11, 1842). And in Walden, the earth is "living poetry like the leaves of a tree...not a fossil earth but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic" (Walden, Princeton ed., p. 309). [Back to text.]
98. The Concord assessors' maps still refer to a lot deep in Estabrook beyond Hubbard's Hill as the "Shattuck wood lot." [Back to text.]
99. The stewardship of the forest. Human activities can mimic nature's opening of the canopy, but human mistakes often frustrate its regrowth. For example, as Thoreau explains, Farmer Shattuck cut his pine wood lot in Estabrook Country and, not noticing or understanding the significance of the tiny oak seedlings already growing there (planted by animals), wanted to grow a crop of grain on this land for quick cash before he let the land revert (he hoped) to a valuable oak wood lot. Thus, harrowing between the stumps, he would soon destroy nature's carefully-prepared, miniature, next forest: the squirrel-and-jay-planted oak seedlings. The pines now having been cut, the squirrels and jays would no longer bury their acorns in the now-open field. What resulted would be a starved pasture or a barren, pine-sick field, which for years would be no good for either pasture or hardwoods--and thus no good to the farmer ("DS," Faith, 121, 172-3). This was "a greediness that defeats its own ends, for Nature cannot now pursue the way she had entered upon. As if oaks would...come at his bidding!"
How drab, one might say, that the poet now thinks about squirrels, but Thoreau saw the poetry in it: "Yes, these dense and stretching oak forests, whose withered leaves now redden and rustle on the hills for many a New England mile, were all planted by the labor of animals....Consider what vast work these forest planters are doing!" (from "DS," Faith, 130). When "a squirrel goes a-chestnutting," Thoreau wrote, following a description of Estabrook's squirrels, "it is no transient afternoon's picnic but the pursuit of his life, a harvest that he gets as surely as the farmer his corn" ("DS," Faith, 128). The squirrels and jays would fill a nearby pine grove with chestnuts and acorns, and the passenger pigeon would carry an acorn a state away at the speed of a locomotive; to map a birch seed's flight in the wind would baffle a mathematician. [Back to text.]
100. Thoreau used this in "Succession of Forest Trees," (Natural History Essays , Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith (1980), p. 87), and "DS" Faith, p.114-116. [Back to text.]
101. And in "DS", Faith, p. 128-29. Thoreau asked, "Why not control our own woods and destiny more?" ("DS," Faith, 173, 166). He proposed to leave groves of various species and ages in proximity, where a natural rotation could be kept, calamity avoided, and connection with higher laws maintained. Where animals, wind, and water could do their work of planting--and be honored for it. Such mistreated and barren land symbolized man's disharmony with nature, which contributed to the poverty that was a barrier to a spiritual and moral life. (Other related passages from Estabrook are at "DS," Faith, 152, 154, 259 note.) [Back to text.]
102. This bracketed phrase is H. G. O. Blake's edit of Thoreau's text. [Back to text.]
103. The Easterbrooks moraine. Walking north from the Boulder Field, Thoreau would have come to a low N-S ridge, with well-defined slopes to wetlands on the east and west. It is shaped like a loaf of French bread, or like a straight esker. This "moraine" retains a clear identity for about a thousand feet and would have been a conspicuous feature in any pasture. A natural pathway would have run along the top, on which, I can testify, there is a perfectly situated sitting-rock. [Back to text.]
104. The old corn hills: Thoreau as a discriminating archaeological observer? [Back to text.] Remarkably, these corn hills were discovered again by the archeologists preparing a study for Middlesex School's federal wetlands permit. Unnoticed for a hundred years--though looked for by Thoreauvians--hundreds of gentle mounds are on the forest floor atop a rocky promontory above Bateman's Pond. In an afternoon light, they are mysterious. In 1997, an article written in part by the School's consultants was published in the journal Historical Archaeology (Garman, J.C., P.A. Russo, S.A. Mrozowski, and M.A. Volmar, "'The Great Wild Tract': Henry David Thoreau, Native Americans, and the Archaeology of Estabrook Woods," H.A. 31 [1997]: 59-80). Using sophisticated techniques, the report's authors could not verify that this hilled agricultural field was of native origin. The report concluded it is probably made by Thomas Estabrook in the middle of the 18th century, though an earlier Native field could not be precluded. (This was still a unique find and eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, according to the Mass. Historical Commission). Thus, they are about 250 years old.
I cannot comment on the technical portion of the article, but two aspects of it concern me. The first is its gratuitous and unwarranted eagerness to debunk Henry Thoreau's supposed attitudes about the landscape of Concord as an untamed wilderness. The second, which I will discuss here, is its incomplete citation of Thoreau's notes about hilled fields, thus both misperceiving these observations and missing a significant opportunity to provide a balanced critique of a rare, documented example of Thoreau's archaeology. As it was a single entry in Thoreau's journal that preserved the memory of this hilled field and led to its rediscovery, it should have been quoted in full and in context. Thoreau wrote,
"I observed on [Nov. 7, 1857, on a walk with Ralph Waldo Emerson] between the site of Paul Adams's and Bateman's Pond, in quite open land, some very prominent Indian corn-hills. I should say that they were higher above the intermediate surface than when they were first made. It was a pasture, and they were thickly covered with grass and lichens. Perhaps the grass had grown better on the hillocks, and so they had grown while the intermediate spaces had been more trodden by the cows. These very regular round grassy hillocks, extending in straight rows over the swells and valleys, has a singular effect, like the burial-ground of some creatures" (Nov. 13, 1857).
It is unfortunate that the JHA article omits not only the sentence that I italicized above but also makes no reference to Thoreau's other journal entries about corn hills. These entries, which I had provided to the article's principal author, demonstrate that as of November 1857 Thoreau was continuing to record observations about a phenomenon--the size of the corn hills as related to their origin--that had interested him at other hilled fields he had observed.
Thoreau's hilled field entries include those made in his journal in 2 J(Pr.) 39 (1842-44); about April 19, 1850; during May 1850; after Jan. 8 1851; Sept. 12 1851; Dec. 4 1856; Aug. 24 & Nov. 13, 1857; and Oct. 20 1860; and in Thoreau's Faith in a Seed [Washington: Island Press, 1993] p. 156; and in his essay Walking. Some of these entries demonstrate that a maturing Thoreau (who had compiled voluminous notebooks about native life) was trying to decide which characteristics indicated a hilled field of native origin and which indicated European origin. He discussed the fields' alignment, regularity, soil conditions, and size, and speculated about the tools used in their construction. Indeed, his reference to the prominence of the corn hills in Estabrook Country (quoted above), taken in context, may have represented a cautionary note to himself (these were raw journal entries, remember) that these hills might not be of native origin.
Thus, these entries reveal that Thoreau was a much more discriminating observer than the JHA authors suggest. It would have been a significant contribution (and indeed essential prior to critiquing generally Thoreau's attitude about Native Peoples) had the JHA authors, with their skills, discussed Thoreau's notes on this hilled field in light of all relevant entries, rather than incompletely quoting only one of them. Such a discussion, however, might have inconveniently contradicted the authors' simplistic, supercilious thesis that Thoreau had an archaeological "agenda of wistfulness and nostalgia" about both Estabrook Country and Native Peoples. If one is going to critique a important figure responsibly, one should quote him accurately and in context. It was an opportunity lost to add to scholarship. [Back to text.]