It appears that I saw about a dozen plants which had accompanied man as far into the woods as Chesuncook, and had naturalized them...selves there, in 1853. Plants begin thus early to spring by the side of a logging-path,--a mere vista through the woods, which can only be used in the winter, on account of the stumps and fallen trees,--which are at length are the roadside plants in old settlements. The pioneers of such are planted in part by the first cattle, which cannot be summered in the woods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It appears that in a forest like this the great majority of flowers, shrubs, and grasses are confined to the banks of the rivers a...nd lakes, and to the meadows, more open swamps, burnt lands, and mountain-tops; comparatively very few indeed penetrate the woods. There is no such dispersion even of wild-flowers as is commonly supposed, or as exists in a cleared and settled country. Most of our wild-flowers, so called, may be considered as naturalized in the localities where they grow. Rivers and lakes are the great protectors of such plants against the aggressions of the forest, by their annual rise and fall keeping open a narrow strip where these more delicate plants have light and space in which to grow. They are the protégés of the rivers. These narrow and straggling bands and isolated groups are, in a sense, the pioneers of civilization. Birds, quadrupeds, insects, and man also, in the main, follow the flowers, and the latter in his turn makes more room for them and for berry-bearing shrubs, birds, and small quadrupeds. One settler told me that not only blackberries and raspberries but mountain maples came in, in the clearing and burning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized ...man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light...,--to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here was a little of everything in a small compass to satisfy the wants and the ambition of the woods,... but there seemed to me, ...as usual, a preponderance of children's toys,--dogs to bark, and cats to mew, and trumpets to blow, where natives there hardly are yet. As if a child born into the Maine woods, among the pine cones and cedar berries, could not do without such a sugar-man or skipping-jack as the young Rothschild has.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fact, the deeper you penetrate into the woods, the more intelligent, and, in one sense, less countrified do you find the inhabi...tants; for always the pioneer has been a traveler, and, to some extent, a man of the world; and, as the distances with which he is familiar are greater, so is his information more general and far reaching than the villager's. If I were to look for a narrow, uninformed, and countrified mind, as opposed to the intelligence and refinement which are thought to emanate from cities, it would be among the rusty inhabitants of an old-settled country, on farms all run out and gone to seed with life-everlasting, in the towns about Boston, even on the high-road in Concord, and not in the back woods of Maine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pointing into the bay, he said that it was the way to various lakes which he knew. Only solemn bear-haunted mountains, with their ...great wooded slopes, were visible; where, as man is not, we suppose some other power to be. My imagination personified the slopes themselves, as if by their very length they would waylay you, and compel you to camp again on them before night. Some invisible glutton would seem to drop from the trees and gnaw at the heart of the solitary hunter who threaded those woods; and yet I was tempted to walk there. The Indian said that he had been along there several times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This hunter, who was a quite small, sunburnt man, having already carried his canoe over, and baked his loaf, had nothing so intere...sting and pressing to do as to observe our transit. He had been out a month or more alone. How much more wild and adventurous his life than that of the hunter in Concord woods, who gets back to his house and the mill-dam every night! Yet they in the towns who have wild oats to sow commonly sow them on cultivated and comparatively exhausted ground. And as for the rowdy world in the large cities, so little enterprise has it that it never adventures in this direction, but like vermin clubs together in alleys and drinking-saloons, its highest accomplishment, perchance, to run beside a fire-engine and throw brickbats. But the former is comparatively an independent and successful man, getting his living in the way that he likes, without disturbing his human neighbors. How much more respectable also is the life of the solitary pioneer or settler in these, or any woods,--having real difficulties, not of his own creation, drawing his subsistence directly from nature,--than that of the helpless multitudes in the towns who depend on gratifying the extremely artificial wants of society and are thrown out of employment by hard times!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just before night we saw a musquash (he did not say muskrat), the only one we saw in this voyage, swimming downward on the opposit...e side of the stream. The Indian, wishing to get one to eat, hushed us, saying, "Stop, me call 'em"; and, sitting flat on the bank, he began to make a curious squeaking, wiry sound with his lips, exerting himself considerably. I was greatly surprised,--thought that I had at last got into the wilderness, and that he was a wild man indeed, to be talking to a musquash! I did not know which of the two was the strangest to me. He seemed suddenly to have quite forsaken humanity, and gone over to the musquash side. The musquash, however, as near as I could see, did not turn aside, though he may have hesitated a little, and the Indian said that he saw our fire; but it was evident that he was in the habit of calling the musquash to him, as he said. An acquaintance of mine who was hunting moose in those woods a month after this, tells me that his Indian in this way repeatedly called the musquash within reach of his paddle in the moonlight, and struck at them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skir...ts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »