Footnotes

'WHERE THE MOOSE AND BEAR AND SAVAGE DWELL': A FAMOUS AND OFT-QUOTED SECTION FROM THOREAU'S MAINE WOODS, in which he meditates on the American wilderness, its native peoples and the destruction wrought by modern civilization: "How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow points hatchets and guns to point his savageness with"; the section running into the next paragraph where Thoreau writes at his most vividly descriptive: "The solid and well defined fir tops, like sharp and regular spear-heads, black against the sky, gave a peculiar dark and somber look to the forest. The spruce tops have a similar but more ragged outline, their shafts also merely feathered below. The firs were somewhat oftener regular and dense pyramids. I was struck by this universal spiring upward of the forest evergreens...". (One is reminded that, as Paul Theroux puts it in his introduction to the Princeton edition: 'In Maine his subjects were, as he listed them in a letter, "the Moose, the Pine Tree & the Indian." The last words he spoke on his deathbed were "Moose . . . Indian."'; see The Maine Woods, 2004, edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer, p. xi).

The Maine Woods is 'one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the process of change in the American hinterland. Thoreau showed us how to write about nature; how to know more; how to observe, even how to live .... Because Thoreau was so faithful in recording what he saw and heard, his writing suggested what the future had in store. In this book he illustrates the powerful lesson of the truthfulness of dogged observation: that when the truth is told, the text is prophetic' (Theroux, pp. xxiv-xxv). What was to become The Maine Woods was written over a fifteen year period, begun shortly before Thoreau left Walden Pond in 1846 and remaining incomplete at the time of his death in 1862. It was published posthumously in 1864. 'Chesuncook', of which the present leaf forms a part, is the second of the three essays that make up the volume, each of which describes a journey made into the woods of Maine. Ours, describing the journey made in 1853, was first published as a stand-alone essay in the Atlantic Monthly in three instalments, for June, July, and August, 1858. The text in our leaf was split between the June and July issues, with the first paragraph concluding the June instalment; a pencilled annotation in an editorial hand at the end of the first paragraph reading: "To be continued". Our text agrees (except for punctuation) with that printed in the Riverside Edition of Thoreau's works, iii, pp. 146-7.

J.R. Lowell, who has docketed the sheet for distribution as an autograph – and dismemberment as an integral manuscript – was the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly and in January 1858 had solicited a Maine narrative for the new magazine. Thoreau offered 'Chesuncook'. Lowell and Thoreau had been acquainted since Harvard days, but relations between them had never been warm. Thoreau was to have no more dealings with him after Lowell struck out and refused to reinstate the now famous ending of 'Chesuncook', in which Thoreau celebrates the pine tree: 'It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still'.