Thoreau’s
Reflections on the Indians and White Settlement
From A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “Sunday” section, 1849
In this Billerica [MA] solid men
must have lived, select from year to year; a series of town clerks, at least;
and there are old records that you may search.
Some spring the white man came, built him a house, and made a clearing
here, letting in the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old gray stones in
fences, cut down the pines around his dwelling, planted orchard seeds brought
from the old country, and persuaded the civil apple-tree to blossom next to the
wild pine and the juniper, shedding its perfume in the wilderness. Their old stocks still remain. He culled the graceful elm from out the
woods and from the river-side, and so refined and smoothed his village
plot. He rudely bridged the stream, and
drove his team afield into the river meadows, cut the wild grass, and laid bare
the homes of beaver, otter, muskrat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared
off the deer and bear. He set up a
mill, and fields of English grain sprang in the virgin soil. And with his grain he scattered the seeds of
the dandelion and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his English
flowers with the wild native ones. The
bristling burdock, the sweet-scented catnip, and the humble yarrow planted
themselves along his woodland road, they too seeking "freedom to worship
God" in their way. And thus he
plants a town. The white man’s mullein
soon reigned in Indian cornfields, and sweet-scented English grasses clothed
the new soil. Where, then, could the
Red Man set his foot? The honey-bee
hummed through the Massachusetts woods, and sipped the wild-flowers round the
Indian’s wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with prophetic warning, it stung
the Red child’s hand, forerunner of that industrious tribe that was to come and
pluck the wild-flower of his race up by the root.
The white man comes, pale as the dawn, with a
load of thought, with a slumbering intelligence as a fire raked up, knowing
well what he knows, not guessing but calculating; strong in community, yielding
obedience to authority; of experienced race; of wonderful, wonderful common
sense; dull but capable, slow but persevering, severe but just, of little humor
but genuine; a laboring man, despising game and sport; building a house that
endures, a framed house. He buys the
Indian’s moccasins and baskets, then buys his hunting-grounds, and at length
forgets where he is buried and ploughs up his bones. And here town records, old, tattered, time-worn, weather-stained
chronicles, contain the Indian sachem’s mark perchance, an arrow or a beaver,
and the few fatal words by which he deeded his hunting-grounds away. He comes with a list of ancient Saxon,
Norman, and Celtic names, and strews them up and down this river, —Framingham,
Sudbury, Bedford, Carlisle, Billerica, Chelmsford, —and this is New Angle-land,
and these are the New West Saxons whom the Red Men call, not Angle-ish or
English, but Yengeese, and so at last they are known for Yankees.
When we were opposite to the middle
of Billerica, the fields on either hand had a soft and cultivated English
aspect, the village spire being seen over the copses which skirt the river, and
sometimes an orchard straggled down to the water-side, though, generally, our
course this forenoon was the wildest part of our voyage. It seemed that men led a quiet and very
civil life there. The inhabitants were plainly
cultivators of the earth, and lived under an organized political government. The school-house stood with a meek aspect,
entreating a long truce to war and savage life. Every one finds by his own experience, as well as in history,
that the era in which men cultivate the apple, and the amenities of the garden,
is essentially different from that of the hunter and forest life, and neither
can displace the other without loss. We
have all had our day-dreams, as well as more prophetic nocturnal vision; but as
for farming, I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the
agricultural. I would at least strike
my spade into the earth with such careless freedom but accuracy as the
woodpecker his bill into a tree. There
is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness. I know of no redeeming qualities in myself
but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to
this ground. What have I to do with
ploughs? I cut another furrow than you
see. . . .
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom
of the forest and the outlaw. There may
be an excess of cultivation as well as of anything else, until civilization
becomes pathetic. A highly cultivated
man, —all whose bones can be bent!
whose heaven-born virtues are but good manners! The young pines springing up in the
cornfields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that
is not the name for his improvement. By
the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his
intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare
and peculiar society with Nature. He
has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim
only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars
compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of
candles. The Society-Islanders had
their day-born gods, but they were not supposed to be "of equal antiquity
with the atua fauau po, or night-born gods.” It is true, there are the innocent pleasures of country life, and
it is sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her increase, and gather the
fruits in their season, but the heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter
retirements and more rugged paths. It
will have its garden-plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the
earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its subsistence, or orchard
fruits with such heedlessness as berries.
We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse and
the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo. The Indian’s intercourse with Nature is at
least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a stranger in her
midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar.
There is something vulgar and foul in the latter’s closeness to his
mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former’s distance . . . .
. . . If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the
Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for
civilization. Nations are not
whimsical. Steel and blankets are
strong temptations; but the Indian does well to continue Indian.
From A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849, “Sunday” section
Courtesy of The
Thoreau Society, Lincoln, MA
ThoreauSociety@walden.org
The Thoreau Society