The Invention of Nature

The America that Thoreau called home had changed a great deal since Humboldt had met Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1804. In the intervening years, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had crossed the continent from St Louis to the Pacific coast and had returned from their expedition with reports of rich and vast lands which proved alluring prospects for the expanding nation. Four decades later, in 1846, the United States gained large parts of the Oregon Territory from the British, including the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho as well as parts of Montana and Wyoming. By then the country was embroiled in a war with Mexico after the annexation of slave-holding Texas. When the war concluded with a sweeping victory for the United States, just as Thoreau had moved out of his cabin, Mexico ceded a vast territory that included the future states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and most of Arizona as well as parts of Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Under President James K. Polk the country had expanded by more than a million square miles between 1845 and 1848, increasing by a third and for the first time extending across the whole continent. Gold was first found in California in January 1848, and the following year 40,000 people set out to make their fortunes in the West.

Meanwhile America had advanced technologically. The Erie Canal had been completed in 1825 and five years later the first section of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had opened. In April 1838 the Great Western, the first transatlantic steamship, arrived in New York from England and during the winter of 1847, as Thoreau returned to Concord, the Capitol in Washington, DC, was lit with gas for the first time.

Concord, Massachusetts (Illustration Credit 19.2)

Boston was still an important harbour and Thoreau’s hometown Concord just to the west was growing in tandem. Concord had a cotton mill, a shoe and a lead pipe manufactory as well as several warehouses and banks. Each week forty stagecoaches passed through the town which was also the seat of the county government. Wagons loaded with goods from Boston drove along Main Street towards the market towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Farming had long turned the wilderness here into open fields, pastures and meadows. It was impossible to walk through Concord’s woods, Thoreau noted in his journal, without hearing the sound of axes. New England’s landscape had changed so dramatically over the previous two centuries that few ancient trees remained. The forest had been cleared first for agriculture and fuel, and had then been devoured by locomotives with the advent of the railway. In Concord the railway had arrived in 1844, its tracks skirting the western edge of Walden Pond where Thoreau had often walked beside them. Wild nature was receding and humans were increasingly removed from it.

Life at Walden Pond suited Thoreau, for there he could lose himself in a book or stare at a flower for hours without noticing what else was happening around him. He had long praised the pleasures of a simple life. ‘Simplify, simplify’, he would later write in Walden. To be a philosopher, he said, is to live ‘a life of simplicity’. He was content on his own, and didn’t care about social pleasantries, women or money. His appearance mirrored this attitude. His clothes were ill-fitting, his trousers too short and his shoes unpolished. Thoreau had a ruddy complexion, a large nose, a straggly beard and expressive blue eyes. One friend said that he ‘imitates porcupines successfully’, and others described him as cantankerous and ‘pugnacious’. Some said that Thoreau had ‘courteous manners’ – although a little ‘uncouth and somewhat rustic’– while many thought him entertaining and funny. But even his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as ‘an intolerable bore’ who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read. Thoreau certainly was eccentric, but also refreshing ‘like ice-water in the dog days to the parched citizens’, another friend said.

All agreed that Thoreau was a man more at ease with nature and words than he was with people. One exception was his joy in the company of children. Emerson’s son, Edward, remembered fondly how Thoreau always had time for them, telling stories about a ‘duel’ of two mud-turtles in the river or magically making pencils disappear and reappear. When the village children visited him at his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau took them on long walks through the woods. When he whistled strange sounds, one by one animals would appear – the woodchuck peeped out from the underbrush, squirrels ran towards him and birds settled on his shoulder.