SOURCE: “‘The Red Face of Man,’ the Penobscot Indian, and a Conflict of Interest in Thoreau's Maine Woods,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1993, pp. 20-46.

[In the following essay, Frost examines Thoreau's romantic notion of Native Americans and the inevitable disappointment he felt when confronted with actual Indians who could not live up to his expectations.]

In his introduction to The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks, Richard Fleck interprets Thoreau's fascination with the American Indian:¹

If [Thoreau] could only gain insight during his life into a people whose origins and very existence stemmed from the mystical depths of nature, then, perhaps, he as well as his literary audience could renew themselves during an age when civilization had become stagnantly materialistic. This mystical “arrow-headed” character of Indian culture had to be deciphered, not destroyed, so that our civilization would not obliterate itself with its own expanding, mechanistic bulk.²

The polarizing adjectives Fleck uses to describe Indian and Euro-American culture are familiar; Indians have their roots in the “depths of nature” and the Indian character is “mystical,” while “our civilization” is “materialistic” and “mechanistic.” For Fleck, Thoreau's primary interest in the indigenous peoples of North America lies in preserving his own Euro-American culture from a future robbed of spirituality.

Fleck's book presents selections from Thoreau's “Indian Notebooks,” eleven volumes of quotations and notes taken from texts about American Indians that Thoreau studied intensively during the 1840s and 1850s. Fleck praises the effort: “These eleven volumes contain 2,800 handwritten pages or over 500,000 words which constitute, probably, the largest body of knowledge on American Indian culture in the nineteenth century. In this respect Thoreau's deep involvement far exceeded any other eighteenth or nineteenth-century ‘primitivist’ including Rousseau or Diderot.”³ Thoreau's “involvement” consists largely of marginalia, a lengthy written conversation with other Euro-American writers concerned with native peoples, not just of North America, but of South America, Canada, Greenland, the Pacific Islands, and Africa as well. “The notebooks,” Fleck asserts, “are more than just a collection of extracts but are indeed a writer's notebook.” While concentrating on Thoreau's frequent use of notebook materials as grist for finished writings, he also organizes his text around a list of subjects Thoreau made that indicates to Fleck and other scholars the intention to someday write a book about Indians.⁴

Edwin Fussell goes further, posing the question “What would Thoreau's Indian book have been like?” and then proceeding to answer it, given “what [Thoreau] had already written” about the Indians. For Fussell, the Indian was the key to Thoreau's attempt at “nothing less than the epic of the New World” and, as such, held for Thoreau “one or another of five ‘uses,’” use-values Fussell himself employs to answer his question. These include “The Indian as the Past,” “The Indian as Fundamental Man,” “The Indian as Nature,” “The Indian as Language,” and “The Indian as the Frontier.”⁵

The disappearance of the Indian, Fussell argues, held great meaning for Thoreau's project. He notes in a gesture not wholly dissimilar to Fleck's that Thoreau wanted to preserve the Indian in his own art, thereby counteracting what is depicted as the race's impending extinction: “Thoreau must do for the Indian what he cannot do for himself—leave his mark—by means of the civilized attribute, art, or the ability of the mind to affect nature, which the Indian lacks, yet the very lack of which strangely constitutes his value for us.”⁶ For Thoreau the artist, the Indian's greatest asset—and the very foundation, in fact, for all five of Fussell's listed uses and symbolic values—is his “lack,” his very absence. It is also a lack of ability—the ability to produce art in the Western sense of the word, an art Fussell consistently represents in terms of “poetry.”

The absence of Thoreau's Indian book is equally important for Fussell, who calls it Thoreau's “unconsummated masterpiece” and claims that he dwells on it “for Thoreau's sake”: “I am convinced too few of us have yet realized the scope of his ambition, nor how tragic was his death at 44.”⁷ Fleck suggests more: had Thoreau “lived to write his poetic and scholarly Indian book, our deplorable treatment of the red man during the nineteenth century might have been altered.”⁸ Thoreau begins to look messianic; unable to save himself, he might have given his artistic life to save an entire population. Conclusions like this seem rather odd, though, since as both of these scholars indicate, Thoreau's attention was focused much less on the Indian's actual survival than on what was irretrievably lost once Europeans arrived on America's shores: the mystical origins of the “true” American.

As for conjecture about this book that never was, I tend to agree with Robert Sayre: “If there was to be one book about Indians, then the other books are less so. People can speculate about that book and continue to neglect the references to Indians in the finished work. Indians remain, in Thoreau as elsewhere, ‘forgotten Americans.’”⁹ In fact, the texts that comprise The Maine Woods tell a different version of Thoreau's difficulty in attempting to “reduce his response to the Indian to manageable poetic status.”¹⁰ While Fussell contends that, had Thoreau finished his projected study, based almost solely on secondhand accounts, he probably would have been remembered as “the greatest historian of the age,” Fleck reminds us that “Thoreau's experience was not limited to books”—as the texts he did compose certainly show.¹¹ Indeed, the heart of The Maine Woods is really Thoreau's conception of the Indian, although that conception changes considerably over the course of the text's three narratives.

In the nineteenth-century cultural imagination, the Indian existed in light of Rousseau's “noble savage,” and also in light of savagism, which stressed the implicit inferiority of the native and thereby validated the European conquest of the American continent (as well as American manifest destiny); together these images superimposed a sense of inevitable tragedy and nostalgia over the disappearing or disappeared “good, simple” Indian.¹² Marianna Torgovnick presents a helpful list of tropes that define the Western conception of the primitive, one she argues persists: “Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces—libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the ‘lowest cultural levels’; we occupy the ‘highest.’”¹³ Aligned as it is with nature, the notion of the primitive evokes powerful images of sexuality (repressed in society, released in the wild) and gender (Mother Nature and, specifically, the feminized American wilderness the male pioneer conquers). In America, these tropes gain momentum from what Francis Jennings calls a “conquest myth” that justifies a “simple … fact”: “Incapable of conquering true wilderness, the Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people, and that is what they did. They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.”¹⁴

That Thoreau was working within and at the same time counter to these ideas has been noted.¹⁵ But his romanticization of the Indian (a romanticization reenacted in Fussell's list of five images) is not an isolated element in his texts. It both relies on and is problematized by a nature/culture dualism. In the three narratives of The Maine Woods, the text that contains Thoreau's most sustained and intimate observations of “real” Indians, he often chooses to disregard rather than confront the disparity between the Indians he encounters and those whom he had hoped to encounter. As Bruce Greenfield claims, in “Ktaadn,” the first narrative, “Thoreau's discovery of America is an event which happens in spite of prior European and Indian interactions with the place and with each other.”¹⁶ Here, Greenfield contends that what Thoreau omits—an omission I contend becomes central to all three texts—is any sustained engagement with what Jennings calls “the symbiotic interdependence that prevailed between the two societies in America for well over two centuries.”¹⁷ Moreover, Thoreau's insistence on a rhetorical rather than material figure of the Indian partly arises from a theory of language put forward in Walden, an exclusionary theory Fussell echoes when he asserts that “poetry was the expression of civilization, and would only be written by civilized man.” Finally, as Fussell indicates, Thoreau's “nature” is intimately connected with the Indian in his texts.¹⁸ It follows, then, that as Thoreau's characterizations of the Penobscots of Maine change, so too does his conception of nature.

In his journeys to the Maine forests, recorded in “Ktaadn,” “Chesuncook,” and “The Allegash and East Branch,” Thoreau encounters a natural world that he describes in progressively less mythical terms; absences are filled with presences as his overdetermined representations of that world break down.¹⁹ In “Ktaadn,” he replaces what he sees—and what he doesn't see—with fixed, totalized mythical entities. In “Chesuncook,” he preaches containment, for essentially aesthetic use, of what he acknowledges as alien to his own world. In “The Allegash,” his opposition between nature and culture effectively crumbles as he travels with a Penobscot Indian, Joe Polis, who is both literate and a potential reader of that very text. In fact, as the story goes, Thoreau balked at printing the piece precisely because he was afraid Polis might read it.²⁰

Eric Sundquist observes that the word “Indian” becomes for Thoreau “almost an empty label for whatever phenomena, artifactual or fantastic, were presently missing from the landscape.”²¹ But Greenfield holds that Thoreau's ability to ignore the effects of historical time (as, for example, in the varying degrees to which the actual Indians he encounters have been assimilated into Anglo society and culture) and his replacement of history with a mythic, idealistic rhetoric of non-time “should not surprise readers of Walden, where the replacing of historical event with its personal significance almost becomes a mannerism.”²² In Walden, Thoreau is indeed clear about his desire to ignore the historically bound material world in order to capture in his texts a more “universal” prize:²³ “In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. … That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.”²⁴ “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he proclaims (W, 98). And by way of Walden's seasonal structure, he suggests that nature is the entity most profitably mined for universal, immortal truth.²⁵

“Nature,” however, is conceptually possible only in relation to its antithesis: “civilization” or “culture.” The train's intrusion in Thoreau's pastoral pond paradise, for example, prompts him to claim that because of railroad culture, “your pastoral life [is] whirled past and away” (W, 122). The train is the primary agent and symbol of America's emergent industrialization, and this reminder increases his nostalgic desire for what he depicts as rapidly “disappearing.” “No yard!” he exclaims at the end of “Sounds,” in an expression of longing for something other than a cabin only one hundred rods away from the Fitchburg railroad tracks: “No yard! but unfenced Nature reaching up to your very sills …—no gate,—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized world!” (W, 128).²⁶ Part of what Thoreau disparages about the train is that its very presence is a constant reminder of time; farmers even set their clocks by its whistles (W, 117-18). As sounds heard from a great distance create “one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre” (W, 123), myth likewise enables the mythmaker to forego the historical moment, forestall change, supplant death, proclaim universal truth, and write the best book possible.

The writer of worth, declares Thoreau in “Reading,” “speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him” (W, 102). The classic Greek and Latin texts contain “the noblest recorded thoughts of man” (W, 100), and the “best books” in general, according to Thoreau, transcend both historical specificity and physical presence—an idea that becomes the basis for his distinction between spoken and written language:

It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which [books] were written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

(W, 101)

For Thoreau as for Jacques Lacan's more recent critics, then, the language of the “father” forgoes the body and is “too significant to be heard by the ear.” It seems to override physical presence, culminating in “a chain of signifiers that refer, not to things, but always to other signifiers.”²⁷ Thoreau's “father tongue” is an elevated and written form of this language, inaccessible to the “crowds of men” in antiquity and part of what ensures the “natural and irresistible aristocracy” of authors (W, 101, 103).²⁸ The opposition, though, depends on a limitation inherent in spoken language itself: it requires two physical beings speaking. Mothers teach this language via presence and the students of this teaching are likened to “brutes,” savage beings who remain more closely linked with nature precisely because of their still limited access to the written language of culture. Sundquist notes that Thoreau prioritizes “the power of the written, the father tongue whose stylus registers an advance in cultivation and necessarily joins forces with the masculine domination civilization inflicts upon the primitive.”²⁹ This hierarchy will in part determine Thoreau's responses to the Penobscot tribe of Maine; as “brutes” who may speak but cannot write the language of culture, they remain fixed as predominantly natural beings, part of a larger entity Thoreau himself is able to “read.” But the Indian who can read will in effect dissolve this opposition and complicate Thoreau's definition of nature itself.

Nature in Walden constitutes, of course, another kind of language, but one that is inherently passive and characteristically “feminine.” Thoreau implores us to remember that, while engaged in reading culture's superior texts, “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” (W, 111), the very presence and body of nature. He contends that we must not limit ourselves to reading the conventionally printed page: “Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?” (W, 111). But to describe what you see—as Thoreau does—necessitates an elevated kind of reading, so that nature likewise becomes a potential literary resource.³⁰ Despite his accusations in The Maine Woods that often people desire nature merely for what they can extract from “her” (for example, the lumbermen who come to Maine to “harvest” the white pine), in “Walking,” Thoreau reveals that as a writer, he himself commits a similar offense:

He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.³¹

Here, the masculine author forces nature to do his linguistic bidding, even to reproduce happily, something he cannot do except in the world of texts.³² Thoreau's desire for power over this body of nature is precipitated, though, by nature's elusiveness: “What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside” (W, 200). Nature's skittishness sustains his desire: “For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only.”³³ The farther away nature is, the greater Thoreau's desire to possess “her”—an old story.³⁴

This feminized nature is exactly what Thoreau seeks—and finds—in the transcendental adventure of “Ktaadn.” Accompanied by five white men in a batteau (a flat-bottomed “white man's canoe”), Thoreau journeys through various lakes and rivers on the way to Mt. Ktaadn (Thoreau's spelling). He notes with distress the damage done to the “virgin forest,” primarily by lumberers (“The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country”), yet in his own texts, he shrouds the landscape with romanticized images that culminate in his description of the ascent of the mountain itself.³⁵ The mountain is, of course, the text's “peak,” Ktaadn's dark side “like a permanent shadow” over the batteau as the party approaches (MW, 54). When they first camp on the mountainside, Thoreau ventures out on his own, transforming his journey into a Miltonic one, his path “scarcely less arduous than Satan's anciently through Chaos” (MW, 60). The next day, when he climbs again, the low-hanging clouds that obscure his vision heighten the mystical quality of the region, and the inability to see what's in front of him energizes his mythologizing.

Thoreau casts his second climb as a classical quest: “It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus … æschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this” (MW, 64).³⁶ He shifts into the third person, becoming at once both author and character: “Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. … Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage” (MW, 64). While hero-Thoreau might be stripped of “some of his divine faculty,” author-Thoreau is able to sustain his intellect through prose, constructing a moment of burning-bush truth in which the deific Mother Mountain addresses him in triumphantly archaic diction: “I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. … Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear” (MW, 64).

Since he has so completely removed himself physically from his text, it is perhaps not surprising that Thoreau would express the disoriented fear of bodies in general that appears in the famous “Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” passage: “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them” (MW, 71). But in the context of this narrative, the danger he fears is not very immediate; most of the “bodies” he imagines meeting—the moose, the wolf, the bear, the primitive human inhabitant of the woods—don't cross his path. Having survived his encounter with “inhuman Nature” to render it in his own terms, Thoreau then seems to surrender it to what he suggests is its rightful domain: “It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we” (MW, 70-71). But despite his claim, in Thoreau's eyes only a man of the Western civilized world can confront and describe this formidable, feminized nature by way of texts considered classic in his culture.³⁷ The “men” to whom he leaves the mountain are themselves mythic constructs in this text; although Thoreau sees various members of the Penobscot tribe, he finds no one “nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.”

Thoreau had originally hoped to procure Indian guides for his party, but the two Penobscots, Louis Neptune and his companion, who initially agree to take them downriver, instead go on a drinking binge. Not only does Neptune not live up to the promise of his name, but the Indians Thoreau sees in the village of Oldtown generally disappoint him. For Thoreau, a man unloading his canoe is “a short shabby washerwoman-looking Indian,” bearing a look he contends is common among the Indians he sees: the “look of the girl that cried for spilt milk” (MW, 6). These Indians are ascribed the femininity disparagingly linked with the domesticated and domesticating women of civilization, not that of the sexually tantalizing and powerful nature.³⁸ They have neglected their more appropriate wild ways: “These were once a powerful tribe. Politics are all the rage with them now. I even thought that a row of wigwams, with a dance of pow-wows, and a prisoner tortured at the stake, would be more respectable than this” (MW, 7). Thoreau's fascination with an absent, precontact primitivism here culminates in a somewhat absurd desire.³⁹

Thoreau remains disappointed by his failure to find the “red man” of his expectations; Neptune and his companion never show up to act as guides, and when by chance the party runs into them at the end of the trip, Thoreau scoffs, “They were so disguised that we hardly knew them.” He likens them to Quakers or “fashionable gentlemen, the morning after a spree,” and then goes on to make yet another comparison: “Met face to face, these Indians in their native woods looked like the sinister and slouching fellows whom you meet picking up strings and paper in the streets of a city. There is, in fact, a remarkable and unexpected resemblance between the degraded savage and the lowest classes in a great city. The one is no more a child of nature than the other” (MW, 78). Despite this disturbing analogy and what it clearly implies, just a page later Thoreau defers to nostalgia, imagining a “still more ancient and primitive man,” one who lives in a wigwam (like he's supposed to) and eats “no hot-bread and sweet-cake, but musquash and moose-meat.” This “red face of man” is “lost” to Thoreau, yet it is a far more enticing image than the hung over, overdressed Neptune (MW, 79). It is significant that Thoreau chooses to leave his reader with this image, one that dismisses the obvious effects of European culture on what he does see, and that further supports the totalized nature he went to Maine to find: “the home of the moose, the bear, the caribou, the wolf, the beaver, and the Indian,” where “there still waves the virgin forest of the New World” (MW, 81, 83). Thoreau's brief and quickly forgotten analogy is replaced by nostalgia; he “overlooks the fact that primitives, as often as not, do not vanish but change into the urban poor, and thus can no longer serve as a locus for our powerful longings precisely because they have entered our own normative conditions of urban life.”⁴⁰

Thoreau may replace what he sees of The Maine Woods with this romanticized catalog of inhabitants precisely because he hasn't encountered their physical counterparts; during his trip, he never sees a moose, bear, caribou, or wolf, and he certainly doesn't meet the “Indian” that is their equivalent in the wilderness. Perceptions will change in the later texts, once these figures become something more than textual images. In “Ktaadn,” though, the truly wild nature of Maine remains elusive—a body, most obviously represented by the mountain itself, for the “seer” to read in terms of his own text. As he says about the howling of wolves his party doesn't experience, “if we did not hear, however, we did listen, not without a reasonable expectation” (MW, 38). “Ktaadn” is a story of expectation, presented as a totalized myth of unified, powerful, unseen nature.

In “Chesuncook,” the second narrative of The Maine Woods, Thoreau sheds his role of transcendental mythmaker and becomes, instead, a kind of poet-scientist. This time, he succeeds in obtaining an Indian guide—Joe Aitteon—who, he observes, is “apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race” (MW, 90). Thoreau's use of “ours” is telling; he employs Aitteon “mainly [to] have an opportunity to study his ways” (MW, 95), and the report he offers is clearly intended for Euro-American readers. Like Neptune, Aitteon disappoints Thoreau at times, using Anglo phrases like “Yes, Sir-ee,” whistling “Oh Susannah,” and displaying what strikes Thoreau as a pronounced ignorance of his wild ancestors (about whom Thoreau informs him). But Aitteon is a good specimen not only because he is “pure” Penobscot but because he remains beyond the borders of culture as Thoreau continues to define it; Aitteon can't read (MW, 107).

Thoreau stays in an Indian camp one night when the party converges with a group of Aitteon's acquaintances. The Indians are drying moose meat, “the whole heart, black as a thirty-two pound ball, hanging at one corner.” It is a satisfyingly alien setting for Thoreau, “about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed.” He is “carried back at once three hundred years” (MW, 134, 135). He tries to intensify this savagery by suggesting that human flesh was once roasted on similar frames, but the Indians only briefly discuss Mohawk cannibalism, and Thoreau is disgruntled: “They knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any” (MW, 135-36).⁴¹ Again, Thoreau's use of the word “history” is exclusive, referring to a kind of prehistory, a precontact, primitive time before the appearance of Europeans in America. Only the language the Penobscots share, “a purely wild and primitive American sound, as much as the barking of a chickaree,” convinces him “that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets” (MW, 136). Finally, however, Thoreau is able to revel in their otherness and transcend his own historical moment:

There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race, than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. … These were the sounds that issued from the wigwams of this country before Columbus was born; they have not yet died away; and, with remarkably few exceptions, the language of their forefathers is still copious enough for them. I felt that I stood, or rather lay, as near to the primitive man of America, that night, as any of its discoverers ever did.

(MW, 136-37)

It is significant that this atypically favorable response to Aitteon and his companions takes place as a result of language and Thoreau's “reading” of it. He is careful to point out his inability to decipher this code, then uses his exclusion to prompt a transhistorical escape. The Indians may have invited him to their camp, but they do not, or cannot, invite him into their language, thus allowing Thoreau to remain the voyeuristic “seer” he valorizes in Walden. This language as language is absent for him, devoid of meaning, a bodily presence he can replace with his own signifying figures.⁴² He may be able to do this, in part, because his text is inaccessible to the illiterate and, at least here, appropriately “savage” Indian.

Penobscot illiteracy, however, is much more than a metaphor designating cultural status, as shown by John E. Godfrey's “Ancient Penobscot, or Panawanskek,” an account written almost twenty years after Thoreau's “Allegash” trip.⁴³ On one level, Godfrey's essay is fixated on language; the first paragraph outlines the history of ways to spell the “original name of Penobscot” (3). More obviously, though, it is a narrative that charts the whittling away of Penobscot-owned property.⁴⁴ Under debate is a section of land surrounding the Penobscot River called the “Head of the Tide,” a departure point for most river navigators. According to Godfrey, “the Indians made peculiar claim to the territory extending from that point up the river, and held it, with wonderful tenacity, for years, against the efforts of the white settlers and the Government to obtain it” (7). The story that follows is predictable.

Representatives of the Massachusetts militia enlist the political support of the Penobscots during the Revolutionary War (Massachusetts governed Maine until Maine gained statehood in 1820); afterward, Godfrey tells us, the Indian claim to this tract becomes “an obstacle to the settlement of the country” (8). As a result, a conference is held in 1786 with the leaders of the tribe to obtain release of the property in question. The Penobscots agree to accept blankets and artillery in exchange for the land, but the treaty is not ratified at that time. In the summer of 1788, the Governor of Massachusetts sends Rev. Daniel Little with a party of six officials to finish the job, but this second meeting is far less successful.

In his report, as transcribed by Godfrey, Little notes that he began the proceedings held at “Indian Oldtown” by addressing the tribal chiefs “in written words, declaring the design of [his] visit to them by the appointment of Government” (14). After recounting the offer he made of various goods in exchange for the tribe's signed release of the land, Little transcribes the response of the designated Penobscot speaker, Orsong Neptune. Neptune explains that the tribe has decided not to ratify the treaty, in part, he says, because “General Court and General Washington told us … they would let us know” if any lands were to be taken, and also because, at the earlier conference, they “had not a right understanding of matters,” but were “pressed to make that Treaty contrary to [their] inclinations” (15).

Little reminds the tribe that it is the government of Massachusetts, and not General Washington, who has jurisdiction over the land. He presses the gathered leaders: “Will you make your marks for your names against the seals on this paper, which tells what land you give to Government?” It is clear that the chiefs cannot read the document; Neptune answers Little by saying, “We dont [sic] know anything about writing. We have put our hands to many papers at Albany, New York, and elsewhere; but we will not put our hands to that paper, now, nor any more papers, now, nor any other time forever hereafter.” Little speaks with a bureaucrat's authority, informing the “Brother Sachems” that while they may ignore the document, they “may expect Government will abide by it, and expect the same from you.” He then threatens the Christian Indians with the loss both of “prosperity from Heaven” and of “any future favors from Government” if they do not comply (17). Despite Little's persistence, the treaty is not ratified, and the next attempt to obtain the land, in 1796, ends when the Penobscots agree to receive, in exchange for 189,426 acres, goods including “one hundred pounds of powder, one hundred bushels of corn, thirteen bushels of salt, thirty-six hats, one barrel of rum” and an “annual stipend” of other items (19).

In Little's transcription, Neptune repeatedly uses the phrase “We don't know anything about writing,” indicating not simply the Penobscots' inability to read the documents they are required to sign, but more profoundly, an unfamiliarity with this discourse of power. Neptune tells Little and his men: “We don't know anything about writing. All that we know, we mean to have a right heart and a right tongue” (15). As Thoreau holds, however, speech does not endure, and Little's party wields the power of a legalistic discourse that is quite literally “the law of the Father.” The Penobscots do not trust the absent political network Little claims to represent (“You must remember,” he tells them, “that the lands you now hold is by the doings of Massachusetts Government” [16]); instead, they insist on dealing only with “General Washington,” the so-called “father of our country.” It is interesting that when Little refers to the authority behind him, he seems to personify it, using “government” as a proper name: “If you fulfil Treaties faithfully, in time of future want or distress, you might expect Government would be kind to you and help you” (17). Clearly, the legalistic discourse on the paper behind which Little hides is the language of power that stems from an abstract, absent entity.

The distance that Little maintains between his party and the Penobscot leaders is paralleled by the distance Thoreau can maintain from Aitteon and his comrades because their conversation is unintelligible to him. While Thoreau is certainly not on the trail of Penobscot land, he does seek property of sorts, a property he describes in “Ktaadn” as “cast up on the rocks on some distant and unexplored stream,” uncontained and perhaps unattainable, yet undeniably his own (MW, 53).⁴⁵ In “Chesuncook,” however, he is not as interested in an uncontained nature. It is here that we encounter the story of the moose Aitteon slaughters and skins (MW, 112-20). Thoreau's description of the skinning is frequently produced as proof of his profound love of nature: “Our life,” he proclaims after forecasting nature's revenge for Aitteon's transgression, “should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower” (MW, 120). But the bloody scene is precisely the kind of validation of the primitive he imagined in “Ktaadn.” In “Chesuncook,” nature comes too close for comfort.

As nature becomes more fragmented and draws uncomfortably close, Thoreau returns to a conception of “seeing” that affords him physical distance: “Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have ‘seen the elephant’?” (MW, 121). The reality of the Maine wilderness begins to violate the borders of Thoreau's definition of it, prompting him to struggle all the more strongly for its containment. The question at the end of “Chesuncook” is not, as it was in “Ktaadn,” what we might find if we dare to enter the “virgin forest,” but who has the right to go there at all. Thoreau recalls the forests that English kings kept “for sport or food” (a practice he mentions in “Ktaadn” [MW, 80]), and though villages were often removed “to create or extend” these preserves, Thoreau defends the impulse behind them:

Why should not we, who have renounced the king's authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be “civilized off the face of the earth,”—our forests, not to hold the king's game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,—not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?

(MW, 156)

If in “Ktaadn” Thoreau supports his distinction between nature and culture by highlighting the otherworldiness of true nature, here he actually proposes a physical separation to maintain the opposition. This nature functions like a library or an art museum, a place where the poet can “drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness” (MW, 156).⁴⁶ The nature Maine represents could fulfill this function, but Thoreau no longer wants to live there; it is too indelicate, too unstable, even “barren,” suggesting a loss of sexual possibility along with the loss of the primitive as he has previously envisioned it. Moreover, Thoreau actually breathes a sigh of relief at the thought of returning to his comparatively pastoral Concord: “For a permanent residence, it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background” (MW, 155).

“The Allegash and East Branch,” the third Maine Woods narrative, contains Thoreau's most intimate record of the Penobscots. Critics argue over whether Thoreau's depictions of his guide, Joe Polis, belittle or valorize him.⁴⁷ In Emerson's eulogy of Thoreau, he holds up Polis as one of the three most important figures in Thoreau's life, critically affirming the notion of Polis as a new kind of “representative man” and perpetuating a romantic reading of his character. But these are not the issues I find most compelling in “The Allegash.” I believe Polis complicates Thoreau's conception of nature itself, his access to written texts of Anglo culture actually upsetting the nature/culture dualism. Rather than a mystical landscape or even an artistic watering hole, in “The Allegash” the woods become a place to live, work, survive. Certainly at times Thoreau fills them with spiritual presence, but like the phosphorescent twigs he finds and reveres “like ‘a pagan suckled in a creed’ that had never been worn at all,” those moments fade (MW, 181). Rather, he explains that it is difficult to be a poet in the woods. Often, the business of survival simply doesn't allow time, and the night cold inhibits him from even holding a pen; ironically, it is Polis who fashions a candle for Thoreau one evening when it is too dark to read or write (MW, 276, 281-82). The woods are also quite dangerous at times. Once when his companion, Edward Hoar, is lost, Thoreau is seized by a very untranscendental state of panic (MW, 258-62). He shudders at Polis's childhood story of near starvation in the forest, and when Polis kills a moose, Thoreau depicts it as being butchered like a steer, noting that the danger its death poses is not retribution from nature but the added weight of the meat in the canoe (MW, 279, 267).

Thoreau's descriptions of the forest further illustrate the more realistic tone in this text. He frequently distinguishes between what the woods are like and what the tourist might like them to be. He explains that when making camp, “you have no time to explore or look around you before it is dark,” that “there is no sauntering off to see the country, and ten or fifteen rods seems a great way from your companions” (MW, 275). The inability to move beyond his own perspective as a member of “civilization” frustrates him: “Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend [including the sound of a waterfall], passed for a sound of human industry. … Our minds anywhere,” he surmises, “when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises” (MW, 203).⁴⁸ In perhaps the most interesting qualification of this sort, Thoreau notes that despite the traveler's desire to encounter the large forest beast, typically “only a puny red squirrel” remains to “bark at you,” and that “generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveller that does the howling” (MW, 219). Most importantly, though, Thoreau begins to recognize the need for the Penobscots who live in that wilderness to contend with the society that exerts power over them.

Polis is heavily steeped in Euro-American culture, as Thoreau explains from the very beginning; not only does he live in “a 2-story white [house] with blinds, the best looking [in Oldtown], and as good as an average one on a New England village street,” but he is “one of the aristocracy” (MW, 157-58), a figure of power in the town (Polis's name, of course, itself signals his connection to civilization and the city). Thoreau makes a pact with “the Indian” at the start of the journey: “I told him that in this voyage I would tell him all I knew, and he should tell me all he knew, to which he readily agreed” (MW, 168). What Thoreau learns, though, is the extent to which the Penobscot has been modified by Thoreau's own culture; he sarcastically describes, for example, Polis's observance of the Sabbath: “He said that he did no work, that he went to church at Oldtown when he was at home; in short, he did as he had been taught by the whites” (MW, 182). But he relates with interest and even admiration Polis's representation of his tribe at a meeting in Washington, D.C., and his consulting activities in Augusta concerning the boundary dispute over eastern Maine (MW, 197). As Thoreau records, Polis voices a desire to live in “Boston, New York, Philadelphia, &c., &c.,” respects academic institutions, and inquires about white property law (MW, 197, 173-74)—in short, he expresses wide-ranging interest in white institutions of power.

In fact, Thoreau's comments on Polis's adaptation to Euro-American culture are often uncharacteristically positive. He describes how Polis would pack up “his gun and ammunition, axe and blanket, hard bread and pork,” take the stage into the forest, and get off “at the wildest place on the road, where he was at once at home, and every rod was a tavern-site for him. … Thus,” Thoreau observes, “you have an Indian availing himself cunningly of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but proving himself the more successful hunter for it” (MW, 201). But Polis wants to move even more easily in Thoreau's society; though Thoreau notes that he is “very clever and quick to learn anything in his line,” Polis suspects that he would cope less successfully in an urban setting: “I suppose, I live in New York, I be poorest hunter, I expect” (MW, 201, 197). Just as Thoreau is conscious of his own ineffectual tracking skills, he claims that the Penobscot “underst[ands] very well both his superiority and his inferiority to the whites” (MW, 197). While Thoreau continues to desire the life of the explorer, his text makes apparent the absolute necessity that Polis master the practices of Thoreau's culture. Like everything else in “The Allegash,” it is simply a matter of survival, as the drama that occupies Thoreau in the narrative's final pages most powerfully illustrates.

Prior to this drama, at the end of “Chesuncook,” Thoreau visits Governor Neptune in Oldtown's Indian village, where he learns of a controversy between two factions in the village—“one in favor of schools, and the other opposed to them.” The Governor's son-in-law tells Thoreau, “If Indians got learning, they would keep their money” (MW, 148, 149). Thoreau is not unsympathetic, necessarily; he simply doesn't say much more about it and instead waxes nostalgic about the Penobscot of the past: “Alas for the Hunter Race! the white man has driven off their game, and substituted a cent in its place” (MW, 146). In “The Allegash,” by contrast, Thoreau gives the school controversy much more attention, in part because Polis proves to be so central to it.

Polis's stance on Anglo education is the same as that of the governor's son-in-law: it is essential for the Penobscots if they are going to retain their property. But a priest who exerts tremendous influence over the Catholic portion of the tribe frightens them into believing that if they kept their Protestant schoolmaster, “they would go to the bad place.” The teacher is sent away, and Polis fights to keep the “school party” alive, telling them that “they must not give up, must hold on, [as] they were the strongest.” In response to the priest's move to cut down the symbolic liberty pole, Polis

got ready fifteen or twenty stout young men, “stript 'em naked, and painted 'em like old times,” and told them that when the priest and his party went to cut down the liberty-pole, they were to rush up, take hold of it and prevent them, and he assured them that there would be no war, only a noise, “no war where priest is.” He kept his men concealed in a house near by, and when the priest's party were about to cut down the liberty-pole, the fall of which would have been a death-blow to the school party, he gave a signal, and his young men rushed out and seized the pole. There was a great uproar, and they were about coming to blows, but the priest interfered, saying, “No war, no war,” and so the pole stands, and the school goes on still.

(MW, 293-94)

Thoreau is impressed: “We thought that it showed a good deal of tact in him, to seize this occasion and take his stand on it; proving how well he understood those with whom he had to deal” (MW, 294). Three pages later, he ends the narrative simply: “This was the last I saw of Joe Polis. We took the last train and reached Bangor that night” (MW, 297). Unlike “Chesuncook” or “Ktaadn,” “The Allegash” makes no final textual nod toward nature; in fact, as Polis has literally redefined Maine's borders for those who live in it, so has he metaphorically redefined the borders of nature and culture in Thoreau's text. Thoreau actually applauds Polis's manipulation of a “white's” myth of the “red,” despite the fact that the point behind Polis's action is to bring the Indian even further into Anglo culture.

The central position of language in this struggle for power is, in fact, the topic of Montague Chamberlain's “Penobscot Indians: A Brief Account of their Present Condition,” which appeared in the Cambridge Tribune in 1899. Chamberlain's piece is a call for help—for donations of books, funds to build a library, even teachers for the Penobscot children.⁴⁹ While Chamberlain requests gifts that would encourage the Penobscots' access to the language of the culture that wields power over them, he also asks that this same language not be used against them: “The authorities of Old Town kindly open their schools to those who apply for admission, but these people need a little more than this—they need encouragement, advice and sympathy, and above all, their proud and sensitive natures need protection from injustice and abuse—and this latter, they do not always receive from the people and press of Maine.”⁵⁰

Like “the people and press of Maine,” Thoreau keeps the Indian person at arm's length, ignoring the historical conditions that have shaped and continue to shape tribal life and culture in his attempt to find a prehistoric ideal that, as Fussell says, makes for better poetry. Thoreau's own position on language enables him to pursue an aesthetic ideal that simultaneously endangers the position of the Indian in culture itself, excluding the non-English writer from the power manifested in the language of Euro-America. It is only by calling into question these mythologizing ideals, recognizing the material effects of history, and seeking equal access to the language of the dominant culture that Polis's people can continue to exist. Thoreau may have lost his “red face of man,” but he seems to have realized what would be required to ensure the Penobscots' survival. Polis may very well be regarded as one of the key figures in Thoreau's life simply for prompting this revelation.

Notes

1. I have chosen to retain the terms “American Indian” and “Indian” throughout this essay because of their function as signifiers in Thoreau's texts. I use the more historically specific and appropriate “Penobscot” when discussing issues relevant to that tribe.

2. Richard F. Fleck, ed., introduction to The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks (Albuquerque: Hummingbird Press, 1974), 1. The image of the Indian in Thoreau's work has also been examined in the following: Philip F. Gura, “Thoreau's Maine Woods Indians: More Representative Men,” American Literature 49 (1977-78): 366-84; Albert Keiser, The Indian in American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), 209-32; Donald M. Murray, “Thoreau's Indians and His Developing Art of Characterization,” ESQ 21 (1975): 222-29; and Robert F. Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).

3. Fleck, Indians of Thoreau, 3. Fleck's selection of extracts is undoubtedly telling as to how he reads Thoreau's “deep involvement” with the natives of America; it is noteworthy, for example, that the “Tradition and History” section consists primarily of Indian myths and folklore, the first of which states how the “Indians consider the earth their univeral mother” (22), reiterating the common gendering of nature.

4. Fleck, Indians of Thoreau, 4-5. For the connections between Thoreau's Cape Cod essays and the notebooks, see Linck C. Johnson, “Into History: Thoreau's Earliest ‘Indian Book’ and His First Trip to Cape Cod,” ESQ 28 (1982): 75-88.

5. Edwin S. Fussell, “The Red Face of Man,” in Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 143, 144, 149, 152, 153, 156.

6. Fussell, “Red Face,” 158-59.

7. Fussell, “Red Face,” 144, 159.

8. Fleck, Indians of Thoreau, 6.

9. Sayre, American Indians, 105.

10. Fussell, “Red Face,” 153.

11. Fussell, “Red Face,” 148; Fleck, Indians of Thoreau, 2.

12. For a good overview of nineteenth-century savagism, see Sayre, American Indians, 3-27.

13. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 8.

14. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), 15. In Jennings's view, “the basic conquest myth postulates that America was virgin land, or wilderness, inhabited by nonpeople called savages,” who were essentially demonic and therefore without either right to the land or the possibility of acquiring that right (15). See also Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1953), for a study of philosophical implications; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), for a more psychoanalytic treatment; and Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), for a thematic account focused on violence.

15. Sayre contradicts Fussell's claim that Thoreau “intended to write a book about Indians, ‘free of prejudice, rhetoric, and melodrama, depending instead upon poetry, or the exact imitation of real life in the right images.’ … [O]n this subject,” Sayre argues, “he was not free of ‘prejudice, rhetoric, and melodrama.’ No savagist was, and Thoreau certainly began his literary vocation and his early pursuit of Indian relics and lore under the spell of savagism” (American Indians, 18; quoting Fussell, “Red Face,” 148). Yet Sayre goes on to contend that despite the appearance of this essentially racist conception in Thoreau's writing, “good books can sometimes be made from bad ideas” (American Indians, 27).

16. Bruce Greenfield, “Thoreau's Discovery of America: A Nineteenth-Century First Contact,” ESQ 32 (1986): 92.

17. Jennings, Invasion of America, ix. Jennings sounds perhaps too generous here, but he works counter to mutually exclusive ideas of the American Indian and the Euro-American, describing instead a mutual and constant transformation of both cultures. See Invasion of America, 32-42, 171-74.

18. Fussell, “Red Face,” 152-53. Work on Thoreau's theories of language abounds. Some of the more central arguments include Stanley Cavell's famous poetic reading in The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking Press, 1972); Walter Benn Michaels's deconstructive treatment of both Thoreau and Cavell in “Walden's False Bottoms,” Glyph 1 (1977): 132-49; Lawrence Buell's description of the philosophically based literary tradition in which Thoreau was working in Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), esp. 55-74 and 297-310; Philip F. Gura's contextualization of Thoreau's linguistic theories within the proliferating theological discourses of the nineteenth century in The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1981), 109-44; and Henry Golemba's delineation of a wholly natural discourse in “Unreading Thoreau,” American Literature 60 (1988): 385-401, and Thoreau's Wild Rhetoric (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1990).

19. Thoreau made his three trips to Maine in 1846 (during his stay at Walden), 1853, and 1857. While both the long period between these journeys and the roughly fifteen-year span over which the corresponding narratives were composed certainly account for much of the difference between the narratives, William Howarth describes the increasing difficulty Thoreau apparently experienced revising them (The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer [New York: Viking Press, 1982]). The famous myth of Thoreau's dying words, “moose” and “Indian,” seems to stem from his preoccupation with the final “Allegash” narrative, which he did not see in print. According to Joseph J. Moldenhauer, judging from surviving “Allegash” drafts, “it is apparent that when Thoreau died he left something very much like a finished (though not a fair) copy of the last essay” (“Textual Introduction” to The Maine Woods, in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972], 364). For more on Thoreau's compositional techniques and the narrative they tell, see Robert C. Cosbey, “Thoreau at Work: The Writing of ‘Ktaadn,’” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 65 (1961): 21-30; and Stephen Adams and Donald Ross, Jr., Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau's Major Works (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1988).

20. Howarth calls this “concern for Polis's feelings … a flimsy pretext” for Thoreau's own distrust of his editor, James Russell Lowell (Book of Concord, 147). For Thoreau's commentary on the situation, see The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1958), 504, 520-21.

21. Eric Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), 48.

22. Greenfield, “Thoreau's Discovery,” 91.

23. I am using “history” in a historical materialist sense; for a more Thoreauvian reading, see James McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), who sees Thoreau's nature as creating alternative perceptions of history. Joan Burbick follows McIntosh's line of thought and focuses on a Thoreauvian natural history in Thoreau's Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

24. Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 99; hereafter cited parenthetically as W.

25. See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 166-71, for the standard argument concerning Walden's cyclical structure.

26. Lawrence Buell argues that Thoreau's “‘subjective’ romanticization of distances” is often actually a kind of self-satire that both mystifies and demystifies his Walden experiment (New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986], 325).

27. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 8. For Homan's theoretical reworking of Lacan's ideas, see Bearing the Word, 1-39.

28. In “Reading,” Thoreau presents a historical precedent for the literary classes he sees in Concord: “The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the middle ages were not entitled by an accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages. … They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature” (W, 101).

29. Sundquist, Home as Found, 66. Sundquist uses the image of the stylus to represent Thoreau's own “tool of cultivation, a literary plow which is at once a brutal weapon of incision and an instrument of insemination. … Thoreau's insertion of himself into the feminized landscape of America is marked by the imperialistic eroticism which Annette Kolodny has observed throughout American literature and so accurately summed up in the commonplace phrase, ‘the lay of the land’” (Home as Found, 59). See Sundquist (Home as Found, 54-66) and Kolodny for her important tracing of this metaphor in American writing in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975). Also compare Gregory M. Pfitzer's framing of Thoreau's mountain ascent as a rape attempt in “Thoreau and Mother Nature: ‘Ktaadn’ as an Oedipal Tale,” ATQ [American Transcendental Quarterly] 2 (1988): 301-11.

30. I disagree with Michael's assertion that in favoring “the one articulation of Nature” (W, 83), Thoreau actually privileges a literal discourse. Michaels claims that “Nature's voice is known precisely because it resists interpretation” (“Walden's False Bottoms,” 145). I would say that nature becomes something more of a victim of interpretation simply because it cannot articulate; Michaels himself anthropomorphizes nature here, interpreting, like Thoreau, through metaphor.

31. Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions (New York: Corinth Books, 1962), 194.

32. Christine Froula calls this impulse “womb envy” in “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983-84): 321-47, esp. 332.

33. Thoreau, “Walking,” 207.

34. Golemba describes this in his own romantic terms: “Only through a language of desire could truth's dimensions be suggested, and its definition would always remain elusive, thereby creating a greater sense of its desirability and tantalizing power” (Wild Rhetoric, 17).

35. The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), 6, 5; hereafter cited parenthetically as MW.

36. Torgovnick claims that “the West's history with regard to primitives is anticipated in Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus meets Polyphemous”; she also notes that, like The Odyssey, many of the expeditions she recounts encompass a symbolic ten-year duration (Gone Primitive, 23, 293 n. 21). Thoreau, in fact, makes mention of Polyphemous as he confronts what he describes as primeval nature on Ktaadn (MW, 64), and Fleck calls the “Indian Notebooks” project “Thoreau's Homeric undertaking” (Indians of Thoreau, 6).

37. According to Thoreau, mountaintops are off-limits for primitives: “Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains—their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them” (MW, 65).

38. In The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), 50-62, Leslie A. Fiedler offers a detailed analysis of these tropes.

39. Sayre calls these remarks of Thoreau's “cliché” (American Indians, 160-61).

40. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 192.

41. Cannibalism is, as Torgovnick points out, one of the primary images associated with the primitive, and it is often attributed to cultures and societies where, in fact, it has never been documented (Gone Primitive, 22).

42. Later that night, the Indians discuss place names with the traveling party and, though fascinated, Thoreau also notes: “I observed their inability, often described, to convey an abstract idea. Having got the idea, though indistinctly, they groped about in vain for words with which to express it” (MW, 140). Abstraction is, of course, part of a list of characteristics associated with a higher, masculine intellectual capacity. Thus Thoreau's remark strikes the reader as pejorative, not merely descriptive.

43. John E. Godfrey, “The Ancient Penobscot, or Panawanskek,” Collection of the Maine Historical Society 7 (1876): 2-22; hereafter cited parenthetically. “Panawanskek” is the conjectured Indian name for the Penobscot village on Oldtown Island (6).

44. Fleck observes that in reading John Heckewelder's Mission to the Delaware and Mohegan Indians (1820), Thoreau would have received “a clear picture of the missionary process,” a process of conversion that also entailed the loss of land; Fleck also points out, however, that “the legends and traditions of the Delaware and Mohegan tribes were the most interesting to Thoreau” (Indians of Thoreau, 29, 30).

45. Greenfield observes that Thoreau often “turns economic activities into metaphors for his own imaginative possession” (“Thoreau's Discovery,” 89).

46. The museum itself as a site of cultural representation is a loaded and interesting topic. See Torgovnick's chapter “But Is It Art?” (Gone Primitive, 75-84), which she begins with a provocative epigraph by Michel Leiris: “Nothing seems to me so like a whorehouse as a museum.” See too Donna Haraway's “reading” of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26-58.

47. Sayre remarks that Thoreau tries to “present Polis exactly as he was, without romanticizing him as a savage or playing down his acceptance of civilization,” the result being “as intimate a portrait of another person as Thoreau ever wrote.” Nevertheless, he also contends that Thoreau “frequently seems to condescend to Polis,” and that “it is hard to realize from Thoreau's narrative that Polis was 48 and clearly his employees' [sic] senior by so many years” (American Indians, 184, 186). According to the somewhat more romantic Gura, “not one of Emerson's representative men had displayed the same genius as the American Indian, Joe Polis” (“Thoreau's Maine Woods Indians,” 384).

48. In “Chesuncook,” Aitteon makes an opposite assumption about a sound the party hears at twilight (MW, 99-100).

49. In “Note to Article I., entitled ‘The Ancient Penobscot,’” Collection of the Maine Historical Society 7 (1876): 103-5, John E. Godfrey likens the first Penobscot students in the missionary school to animals—“They were like rabbits in their movements” (103)—while those more recently observed are “as orderly and studious as those of many of our common schools” (104). He also remarks that in general the tribal members are beginning to look more and more European in complexion and dress (103).

50. Montague Chamberlain, The Penobscot Indians: A Brief Account of their Present Condition (The Maine State Library, 1899), 4; first published in the Cambridge Tribune, 4 February 1899.

My thinking in this article has been greatly influenced by Marianna Torgovnick's recent study of the concept of the primitive in Western thought and art; see Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990). I would also like to thank several people for their help with this piece: Robert Burkholder, who directed me to a number of very valuable texts; Steven Putzel, whose encouragement has always been as important as his criticisms; and Michael Sprinker, who has seen the essay through its infancy and from whose meticulous readings I have always benefited enormously. This article was supported financially by a research development grant by The Pennsylvania State University.