The case of
the rather Indiany nose
[
by
Barry Kritzberg
I would like to begin by considering
two documents—a personal letter and an entry in a private journal, written by
the same hand, some eighteen years apart.
It is not
likely that the documents have ever been linked together before, for to do so
runs counter to the popular and scholarly image of the man.
The letter,
written in 1837 when my subject was a twenty-year-old, begins in this fashion:
Musketaquid
two hundred and two summers—two moons—eleven suns since the coming of the Pale
faces. Tahatawan—Sachimausan—to his brother sachem—Hopeful—of
the
Brother,
it is many suns that I have no seen the print of thy moccasin by our great
council fires, the Great Spirit has blown more leaves from the trees and many
clouds from the land of snows have visited our lodge—the earth has become hard
and like a frozen buffalo skin, so that the trampling of many herds is like the
Great Spirit’s thunder—the grass on the great fields is like the old man of
eighty winters—and the small song sparrow prepares for his flight to the land
whence summer comes….
There are
sixteen more paragraphs—nine of which begin with the exhortation, “Brother”—in
the same vein.
It is a
private letter, but without a doubt it is one that one that would make any
friend of the Indian blush to see it in print.
The letter
was intended to be humorous, to be sure, but it is hard to ignore the
condescension that is implied in the characterization of Indian speech in the
letter, which barely rises above the level of the “ughs” and “hows” of
Hollywood Indians.
One might
forgive it as a youthful effusion of a young man who was momentarily carried
away with his own wit, but let us move ahead eighteen years, to October 2,
1855, when our young man’s age has advanced to thirty-eight.
Here is the
relevant excerpt from the mature man’s journal. He was travelling with a
friend, identified only as “R” in the journal:
Returning along the shore, we saw a
man and woman putting off in a small boat, the first that we had seen. The man
was black. He rowed and the woman steered. R called to them. They approached
within a couple of rods in shallow water.
“Come nearer,” said R. “Don’t be
afraid; I ain’t a-going to hurt you.”
The woman answered, “I never saw a
man yet that I was afraid of.”
The man’s name was Thomas Smith, and
in answer to R’s very direct questions as to how much he was of native stock,
said that he was one-fourth Indian.
He then asked the woman, who sat
unmoved in the stern, with a brown dirt-colored dress on, a regular country
woman with half an acre of face (squaw-like), having first inquired of Tom if
she was his woman, how much Indian blood she had in her.
She did not directly answer so home a
question, yet at length as good acknowledged to one-half Indian, and said that
she came from Carver, where she had a sister; the only half-breeds there. Said
her name was Sepit, but could not spell it.
R said, “your
nose is rather Indiany.”
The journal entry then moves directly to turtles and pickerel and the
peculiar construction of the boat in which Thomas Smith and his woman were
sitting.
And then our thirty-eight-old journal writer adds:
R told the squaw that we were
interested in those of the old stock, now they were so few.
“Yes,” she said, “and you’d be glad
if they were all gone.”
Our thirty-eight year old journal writer’s next line is about a “singular wooden grapple” on the
boat, which is so strange that he pauses in his narrative to provide, not one,
but two sketches of it.
He writes nothing about the
outrageous rudeness of his companion.
The writer of passage might be
defended as merely objectively reporting what he saw and heard, but his own
words suggest that he was not out-of-sympathy with the thinking of friend R.
His first observation about the man
in the boat is that he is “black,” and he adds that the woman’s “half-acre
face” was “squaw-like.”
Our writer seems as oblivious to his
friend’s complete lack of sensitivity as he is to the rather obvious hostility
that is apparent in the woman’s responses.
When she replies, to being summarily
called back to shore by perfect strangers, that she never yet met a man that
she was afraid of, a prudent man might beat a hasty retreat or, at the very
least, be on his guard.
And yet R proceeds to ask, with the
matter-of-fact tone that one might use in asking the time of day of a stranger,
how much Indian blood Thomas Smith has in him.
Thomas Smith was obliging enough, but
his woman is reported as simply sitting “unmoved in the stern.”
One might readily imagine her as
being furious at such an unmannerly interrogation, just as one might see her as
raging quietly at those who speak to her indirectly, as though she were not
even there.
And how could they have missed the
contempt that is evident in her response to R’s interest in “the old stock, now
that they are so few?”
All of this, I submit, might be
shrugged-off as no more than one more instance of Nineteenth Century racism, if
the words were written by someone other than the subject of my talk.
This Harvard-educated man, whose
final death-bed words were “moose” (from the Algonquin language) and “Indian,”
left at his death some eleven notebooks—approximately 2800 manuscript pages,
some 540,000 words—about others who may also have had “rather Indiany noses.”
Scholars who have examined the
notebooks have suggested, however, that he was remarkably free of prejudice and
that, if he had lived to complete the projected book about American Indians, it
would have surpassed the work of Lewis Morgan, Henry Schoolcraft and George
Catlin and been the definitive Nineteenth Century study of what has been
quaintly and conveniently called “the disappearing race.”
The man who penned the 1837 letter,
the man who wrote in his journal about the “squaw-faced” woman is the
same man, of course, who diligently kept the Indian notebooks.
The man that I speak of, usually
known for better things, is the author of The
There is no denying that Thoreau had
a passion for almost all things Indian.
Thoreau found arrowheads and other
Indian relics (some nine hundred in all) under the very feet of those who never
looked down for them. No wonder, then, that he was perceived by friends,
neighbors and acquaintances, as having some uncanny Indian-like abilities, some
intuitive “wood-sense” sagacity that set him apart from the “civilized” portion
of the world.
Some, to be sure, thought it rather
odd for a Harvard-educated man to take so readily to the woods. Oliver Wendell
Holmes (also a product of Harvard) gruffly described Thoreau as “half-college
graduate and half-Algonquin.” George
Willis Cooke, a Unitarian clergyman of the neighboring town of
Scholars, too, have enhanced and perpetuated
the legend that Henry Thoreau was one of rare Nineteenth Century Americans to
view Indians with sympathetic eyes.
Albert Keiser, in The Indian in American Literature
(1933), lamented that “fate had robbed the world of a great work dealing in a
sanely realistic yet sympathetic and poetic manner with the child of nature on
the American continent.” If Thoreau had lived, Keiser believed, the volume
derived from his Indian Notebooks would have been a book of “unprejudiced
accuracy.”
A similar idea was expressed by Edwin
S. Fusel, in American Literature and the
American West (1965). “There is no
question of the humility and decency with which the author of Walden approached the Indian,” Fusel
asserted. “nor that these qualities would have
informed every page of his ambitious book. Because [Thoreau] was so free of
prejudice, rhetoric, melodrama, depending instead on poetry, or the exact
imitation of real life in the right images, he would have written more useful
history than [William Hickling] Prescott or [Francis] Parkman.”
Richard Fleck, after making a
thorough examination of the 2800 pages of the Indian Notebooks, contended, in The Indians of Thoreau (1974), that the
eleven manuscript notebooks provided the basis for what might have become
Thoreau’s “definitive book on North American Indians.”
Walter Harding, the leading Thoreau
scholar of the Twentieth Century, admitted that “it is doubtful whether he
would have made any startlingly new contributions to our knowledge of the
Indian.”
“But,” Harding wrote in The Days of Henry Thoreau (1962), “since
he was one of the first to view the Indian with anything other than disdain,
his projected book might have hastened the day of recognition of the Indians’
cultural contributions and of his rights.”
Robert D. Richardson, in his
biography, Thoreau: A
Life of the Mind (1986), joined the chorus in praise of the book which was
never written. “The quality of [Thoreau’s] information,”
Such a book, Harding and Richardson
agree, would have compelled us to, at the very least, see Thoreau in an
altogether new light as a formidable anthropologist.
All of these scholars, it seems, did
not take note of that “rather Indiany nose.” It was not that they didn’t see
it, for none of these academic toilers could ever be accused of failing to do
their homework. They failed to see it, however, in the same sense that
Elizabeth Peabody failed to see the tree she smacked into one pre-occupied
afternoon on the Boston Commons.
“I saw it,”
The Indian Notebooks, which have
generated these scholarly speculations, are certainly a curiosity. Thoreau did
not have access, of course, to a Xerox machine or the Internet, and most of the
2800 manuscript pages consist of verbatim excerpts from other books. Only about
five per cent of the Notebooks have been published.
Thoreau took all of these notes in
long-hand, of course, and his handwriting wins no prizes for penmanship. To my
eyes, at least, his manuscripts are virtually indecipherable.
The work Thoreau took extracts from
most frequently was the six volumes of Henry Schoolcraft’s History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the
Thoreau would occasionally summarize
or paraphrase but, as a rule, he would quote verbatim, translating into
English, with great ease and facility, the Latin and French passages of the Jesuit Relations.
There are occasional, but very
infrequent notes in his own voice on the texts he was perusing. Of one, for
example, he said quite bluntly, that the author “had no original observations
of value.” After examining Catesby’s History of Carolina, Thoreau tersely noted, “Not much in him.
Got his Indian facts from Larson.”
Some books, Thoreau realized, were
more useless than others.
“The library [is] a wilderness of books,”
Thoreau wrote in his journal on
March 16, 1852. “Looking over books on
A few of the passages recorded in the
Indian Notebooks were used, in much revised form, in Walden.
Two scholars—Joan Sherako Gimlin and
Robert Sayre—have produced book-length studies of how Thoreau used the Indian
Notebooks in the writing of his major works, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, Walden, and The Maine Woods.
Both Gimlin and Sayre suggest that
Thoreau absorbed, at least initially, many of the stereotypical views of
Indians held by his contemporaries. They argue, in other words, that Thoreau’s
extensive reading about Indians did not make him any wiser than his ignorant
contemporaries. Both Gimlin and Sayre, however, attribute Thoreau’s later (and
more enlightened) attitude toward Indians to his direct contact with his
Penobscot Indian guides, Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, on
separate excursions to the
Thoreau’s personal experience with
Aitteon and Polis provided him with a kind of epiphany, which allowed him to
transcend, in the words of Richard Fleck, “the savagistic and romantic concept
of the Indian.” Thoreau, in short, by virtue of meeting the Indian
face-to-face, came to have an appreciation of Indian ways that soared far
beyond that of his limited contemporaries.
One didn’t have to fly nearly as high
as Icarus to soar beyond the way Thoreau’s contemporaries looked at Indians.
Francis Parkman, the historian who
wrote splendidly of the French in
“For the most part,” Parkman wrote,
“a civilized white man can discover few points of sympathy between his own
nature and that of an Indian. With every disposition to do justice to their
good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him
and his red brethren. Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that having
breathed for a few months the magic air of this region, he begins to look upon
them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast, and if expedient he
could shoot them with as little compunction as they themselves would experience
after performing the same office for him.”
James Fenimore Cooper, in the
introduction to the revised version of The
Last of the Mohicans (1850), offered a representative example of the
romantic view of the Noble Red
“Few men exhibit greater diversity,
or if we may express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native
warrior of
Both the “savagistic” and romantic
advocates agreed, however, that the Indian was doomed by the steady westward
march of superior white civilization.
George Catlin, who went to the West
specifically to paint the Indians before they all vanished, saw the romantic
demise of Indian and buffalo alike.
The Indian and the buffalo had fled
to the
Now, according to Gimlin and Sayre,
Thoreau thought about the Indians much as everyone else in the Nineteenth
Century did until, on his three Maine Woods ventures over a period of a dozen
years, he made contact with the real Indian in the persons of Joe Aitteon and
Joe Polis.
Sayre argues, for example, that his
three separate accounts of the Maine Woods “record his progress in breaking
through any prejudices of savagism to a point where he could present Joe
Aitteon and Joe Polis as both Indians and [as] complex, interesting
individuals.”
Gimlin and Sayre reached such
conclusions, however, by focusing on the relation of the Indian Notebooks to
Thoreau’s published works, particularly The
Maine Woods. Neither scholar, however, takes into consideration the three
dozen or so references to Indians in Thoreau’s Correspondence, nor to the more
than two hundred references to Indians which are scattered through Thoreau’s
Journal.
Neither Gimlin nor Sayre make
mention, then, of the two passages quoted at the beginning of this talk.
Thoreau made excursions to the Maine
Woods in 1846, 1853, and 1857.
One might expect to find, then, some indication of the
changed outlook towards Indians in Thoreau’s Correspondence or Journal, but the
letters and Journal entries lend
little support to the claims of Gimlin and Sayre.
The earliest entry about Indians in Thoreau’s Journal (April 26, 1841) sounds one motif,
which will echo through all of his writings.
The Indian is important to Thoreau as a foil, a counterfriction, a
useful weapon against the evils of civilization.
“The charm of the Indian to me,” Thoreau wrote, “is
that he stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her
guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the
habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself
imprisoned and confined, not sheltered and protected."
There are more than two dozen references in the
journal to the finding of various
Indian relics. These discoveries, for the most part, are merely noted, like any
other fact observed. Occasionally,
however, even Thoreau betrays the gleeful passion of the collector—odd, no
doubt, for a fellow who, during his Walden stay, refused the gift of a doormat,
fearing it would clutter his simple existence there.
The finding of an arrowhead sometimes led him into
reflecting about the people who made them.
“Everywhere in the fields, in the corn and grain land,
the earth is strewn with the relics of a race which has vanished as completely
as if trodden into the earth,” Thoreau wrote in 1842. We see him here, then,
expressing the conventional romantic view of the inevitably doomed race.
It was, indeed, sad that the Indian was rapidly
passing from the American scene, but (sigh!) it could not be helped: the Indian
could be romanticized because he was, in the minds of Thoreau’s contemporaries,
already dead and gone, rosily bracketed in a quaint past with Pocohantas,
Squanto and George Washington and the cherry tree.
Laissez-faire individualism and manifest destiny
relieved the consciences of all and virtually no one, in the middle of the
Nineteenth Century, anticipated that Helen Hunt Jackson would, a few decades
later, brand the American treatment of the Indians as “a century of dishonor.”
It is odd that Thoreau, who could unerringly cut
straight through the nonsense that distracted his neighbors, could so often
miss the mark when he directed his attention to “the vanishing race.”
After reading an account by French missionary, Father
LeJeune, in the Jesuit Relations,
Thoreau observed: “What do our anniversaries commemorate but white man’s
exploits? For Indian deeds there must be an Indian memory; the white man will
only remember his own.”
It is a shrewd, rather modern-sounding insight, but
Thoreau almost immediately slips back into the conventional wisdom of the day.
“For the Indian,” Thoreau continued,
“there is no safety but in the plow. If he would not be pushed into the Pacific, he must seize
hold of the plow-tail and let go his bow-and-arrow, his fish-spear and rifle.
That is the only Christianity that will save him.”
There is an implicit acceptance, too, of the Indian as
savage, for Thoreau readily adopted the language employed by the French and
English chroniclers whom he read. A savage, furthermore, was not to be confused
with the civilized white man.
“The savage lives simply through ignorance and
idleness or laziness,” Thoreau asserted, “but the philosopher lives simply
through wisdom.”
These excerpts from Thoreau’s Journal, all from the
period before his contact with Joe Aitteon and Joe Polis, are enough, surely,
to suggest that Thoreau thought of the Indian in ways very much like his
contemporaries. “To a great extent,” as
Robert Sayre observed, “Thoreau was prejudiced, favorably and unfavorably, by
the white stereotypes of Indian life. He did not study Indians in all their
variety and social relationships; he studied the Indian, the ideal solitary figure that was the white Americans’
symbol of the wilderness and history.”
Thoreau’s comments in his journal
about Joe Aettion, after he had hired him as a guide in 1853, are few and, for
the most part, neutral and cautious.
One passage, however, suggests that he might have been
thinking about Indians in new ways.
“Why is [it] that we look upon the Indian as the man
of the woods?” Thoreau asked. “There are races half-civilized, and barbarous
even, that dwell in towns, but the Indians we
associate in our minds with the wilderness.”
A month later, however, when a
This artistic decoration was evidence, for Thoreau, of
“the first steps toward a complete culture” and, with it, he saw that the
Indian was “leaving off to be savage. Enough of this would have saved him from
extermination.”
There can be little doubt that “leaving off to be savage” meant to Thoreau exactly what it did to his
contemporaries: adopting the Christian ways of the white man. The condescension, also, is unmistakable.
Somehow, it is hard to imagine that an Indian arts and
crafts movement, no matter how wonderful the baskets and beadwork might have
been, would save them from destruction by the white man. Thoreau seems to put
rapacity and racism out of the picture entirely. This is not to suggest that Thoreau could
not, on occasion, be sympathetic to the Indians, but when he did,
he almost invariably referred to them in past tense, as if they were already
gone.
The journal passage about the “Indiany nose” came two
years after he had had Joe Aettion for his
Eight months later, on another visit to Ricketson in
Martha Simons was described by Thoreau as having a
“peculiarly vacant expression, perhaps characteristic of the Indian.” Perhaps
that vacant expression was caused by questions about her “Indiany nose.” We
can’t know definitely, however, for Thoreau moved on to other things and Martha
Simons, alas, seems not to have kept a Journal to tell us what she thought of her visitors.
Thoreau
was not pleased, however, by the white man they incidentally met on their quest
to converse with the last “pure bred left about
“[We
met] a conceited old Quaker minister, her neighbor,” Thoreau wrote, “[who] told
me with a sanctified air, ‘I think that the Indians were human beings; dost
thee not think so?’ He only convinced me of his doubt and narrowness.”
The
Quaker minister, you will note, used past tense to describe a time when Indians
were human beings. In those halcyon days
when the Indians were human, the arts and crafts must have been fantastic.
In
December of 1856, Thoreau sounded much more like James Fenimore Cooper than a
man who had an epiphany in the Maine Woods via Joe Aettion. He wrote of “savages like our
Indians” and, in reflecting on the Iroquois, their ferocity in war and their
dignity in peace, he added that “these savages are equal to us civilized men in
their treaties and, I fear, not essentially worse in their wars.”
The
word “savages” seems to be quite unconscious, almost as though there could not
be any other term for Indians.
A
short time later, on another excursion, Thoreau asked a man for directions. The
man, to Thoreau’s eye, seemed to have some Indian blood in him.
“When
I observed to him that he was one of the aboriginal stock,”
Thoreau continued, “[the man] answered, ‘I suppose so.’”
Was
Thoreau, that master of English prose rhythms, tone deaf when an Indian spoke
to him?
Even
after his twelve days in the woods with Indian guide Joe Polis, he sounded
quite conventional in his views of the Indian. He had no doubts about the
superiority of the white man:
“I
thought [he wrote] of ‘Lo, the poor Indian! whose
untutored mind,’ etc. There is always a slight haze of mist on the brow of the
Indian. The white man’s brow is clear and distinct.”
He
was convinced, too, like the Quaker minister whom he scorned, that the days of
Indian glory were over. When he made his last trip to the Maine Woods, with Joe
Polis as his guide, he also visited
After
returning home to
In 1858, after
the last of his trips to the Maine Woods, Thoreau still appeared much more
conventional in his thinking about the Indian, and not at all like someone who,
through first-hand experience and study, had come to have a deeper
understanding and appreciation of an alien culture.
“Who can doubt
this essential and innate difference between man and man,” Thoreau wrote, “when
he considers a whole race, like the Indian, inevitably and resignedly passing
away in spite of our efforts to Christianize and educate them? The fact is the
history of the white man is a history of improvement, that of the red man a
history of fixed habits and stagnation….The dog is to the fox as the white man
is to the red.”
Thoreau had sounded very similar themes in the Indian
Notebooks. Here is a passage, probably dating from 1852 or 1853, where he sees
the demise of the Indian as inevitable and the superiority of the white man as
almost axiomatic.
“The Indian, like the muskrat” Thoreau suggested, “fee
[ds] on fresh water clams apparently—Both had a strong
hold on life naturally—but are alike exterminated at last by the white man’s
improvements…. What a vast difference between a savage and a civilized people.
At first it appears but a slight difference in degree—and the savage excelling
in many physical qualities—we underrate the general superiority of the
civilized man…. Perhaps what the Orientals were to the Greeks—barbarians—the
Indians are to some extent to us.”
Thoreau acknowledged that the white man could, indeed,
learn something from the Indian, but he seemed to be more comfortable approaching
the subject as an antiquarian than as a friend. The old stereotypes, in other
words, were so deeply and unconsciously ingrained in his being that it seems
reasonable to doubt that his Penobscot guides provided him with the epiphany
claimed for him by enthusiastic scholars.
Fanny Eckstorm, however, in two books about the
Penobscot Indians, did not join the chorus of those singing the praises of
Thoreau as the great friend of the Indian.
Her words should not be taken lightly, for Walter
Harding (who knew virtually every thing about Thoreau) said that Mrs. Eckstorm,
the life-long
She saw something quite different and even suggested
that Thoreau’s much-celebrated portraits of Aitteon and Polis in The Maine
Woods are quite wide of the mark.
“If ever Henry Thoreau showed himself lacking in
penetration,” Eckstorm observed, “it was when he failed to get the measure of
Joseph [Aitteon]….But Thoreau hired an Indian to be an aboriginal. One who said
‘By George!’ and made remarks with a Yankee flavor was contrary to his
hypothesis of what a barbarian ought to
be….All of the cardinal virtues without aboriginality would not have sufficed
Mr. Thoreau for a text.”
Thoreau’s experience with Aitteon, Eckstorm added, did
not help him to understand Polis. “At the end of the fortnight [that Thoreau
and Polis spent together],” she wrote, “it is probable that Polis had a clearer
idea of the limitations of Thoreau than Henry David did of Polis. Thoreau never
understood how near he was to primitive man; he saw keen intelligence, business
acumen, ambition, outward propriety and religious observance—quite likely a
piety largely assumed until Polis should discover whether Henry D. was not like
his kinsman George A. Thatcher, who had introduced him; for Joe understood how
to make a good impression.”
Perhaps Thoreau sensed that he never really got much
beyond the surface with his Penobscot guides, for he complained, in a Journal entry from March 1858, that “we might have learned [much more] of
the aborigines if they had not been so reserved.”
He continued: “Suppose they had generally become the
laboring class among the whites, that my father had been a farmer and had an
Indian for a hired man, how many aboriginal ways we children should have
learned from them!”
Henry Thoreau, then, in seeing Indiany noses and
squaw-like brows, is not my candidate for anthropological sainthood. His
interest in the Indian was more academic than personal, but he was otherwise
not very different in his attitudes toward the Indians than the American
Everyman.
[end4982]