Radio Script #1043

Little Talks on Common Things
March 16, 1975

It is often supposed that the Maine wilderness did not attract people from outside the state, as hunters, fishermen, and tourists until comparatively recent times. We do know that after the Rangeley narrow gauge was built, sportsmen came into that region regularly as early as the1880’s. Fashionable sporting camps, like the Wild Goose Club in Harmony became common. We know also that soon after the Civil War summer visitors from Boston, New York and elsewhere began coming to Bar Harbor, Blue Hill, and Squirrel Island, and that Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, knew many such visitors at Orrs Island.

Not so well known are the visits made to the wilderness in the Katahdin area in the first half of the 19th century by persons who became prominent nationally as writers or journalists and therefore left a record of their trip. One such visitor was the celebrated author and nature-lover, Henry David Thoreau, well known for his secluded life on Concord’s Walden Pond.

In 1846, Thoreau made the journey into our state that resulted in his book “The Maine Woods”. Now let us see what Thoreau had to say in that volume.

“On August 31, 1846, I left Concord for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine by way of railroad and steamboat, to accompany a relative of mine engaged in the lumber trade in Bangor. We went to a dam on the west branch of the Penobscot, 100 miles from Bangor. It was thirty miles from the military road to Houlton and five miles from the last log hut. From there I proposed to make an excursion to Mount Katahdin, the second highest peak in New England.

“In a buggy we left Bangor on September 1, expecting to be met at Mattawamkeag Point, 60 miles off, by two more men from Bangor. We passed through Stillwater to Old Town, a village at the falls of the Penobscot. That river furnishes the principal power by which the Maine woods are converted into lumber.

“In 1837 there were 250 sawmills on that river above Bangor, turning out 200 million feet a year. No wonder we hear of vessels off our coast being surrounded a week at a time by floating lumber from the Maine woods.”

Thoreau did not neglect the Penobscot Indian reservation. He wrote: “Indian Island seemed deserted, but I observed a few new houses among the weather beaten huts. In 1837 there were 362 of their tribe on the island. Generally the houses present a forlorn, cheerless appearance, mostly bare and unpainted. The only neat building is the church, but that is not Abnaki. Rather it is Rome’s doings. It may be good Canadian, but it is poor Indian.”

Thoreau continued his journey. “From Milford we rode along the east bank of the Penobscot on the Houlton road, over which troops once marched to Mars Hill.”

Thoreau was thus referring to the bloodless Aroostook War, which had occurred only a few years earlier in the century.

“We crossed over the Passadumkeag and other streams. We turned off the road to spend the night at Enfield. Like most places in the region, that is just the name for a little settlement in the midst of uninhabited wilderness. The next morning we took the Houlton road again on to Lincoln, where there is quite a village, the largest since we left Old Town. Leaving our team there, we walked half a mile through the forest to the river to get an Indian to guide us to the mountain. In a canoe we paddled out to the island where he lived. He soon appeared with a long pole in his hand and drove off the vicious dogs that had stopped us. He took us a bit up the river to Louis Neptune, who had guided Jackson to Katahdin in 1837. Louis said he and other Indians would start at noon, with two canoes, since they planned a month’s hunting for moose.”

Thoreau says his own party planned to join those Indians at Five Islands Point, just below Mattawamkeag. He says: “When we reached Mattawamkeag we put up at a house on the Houlton road where the stage stops. We found a rude, covered bridge built over the Mattawamkeag Stream. Here, as at every public house on that road, we had sweetcakes set up on a continuous line from one end of the table to the other – a row of them on a dozen plates. They tell us that, when lumbermen come out of the woods, they have a craving for cakes and pies, which are almost unknown in the lumber camps.

“After dinner we strolled down to the point where the Mattawamkeag enters the Penobscot. This is the site of a great battle between the Abnakis and the Mohawks. Before our Indians arrived, we rode up the Houlton road seven miles to Molunkus, where the Aroostook road joins it and where we found another public house. There is no other evidence of man in this part of the world.”

At that isolated inn at Molunkus, Thoreau was surprised to find attached to the wall the latest edition of Greenleaf’s map of Maine. He wrote: “Since we had no pocket map, we traced from this Greenleaf map a chart of the lake country.”

The next day the party started on the long tramp up the west branch of the Penobscot. There was no road, but a path that apparently followed an old Indian trail. They saw no people for 30 miles, only a few abandoned log huts. Thoreau said, “Ahead of us was only uninhabited wilderness stretching to Canada. Neither horse nor cow, nor vehicle of any kind had ever passed over this ground.”

After a walk of three miles they came to Matteseunk Stream, where there was a sawmill and a rude, wood railroad down to the Penobscot. At the mouth of the Salmon River seven miles on, they came to a place called Crocker, consisting of a single log cabin. A few miles further on was Howards, where they found three cabins and a few graves. ” At the mouth of the East Branch opposite an island, the last of the so-called Five Islands, was a habitation known as Fisk’s. Thoreau’s account continues: “We found the East Branch a large and rapid stream at its mouth. We did not follow it, but kept on the south side of the West Branch, which is considered the main river, and found several empty logger’s camps. These structures are about 20 by 15 feet, made of logs with the bark left on to a height of about four feet, then of smaller logs to form a pitched roof. The chimney is a square hole in the middle, three feet in diameter. The fireplace is the shape and size of the chimney and directly under it. In winter these huts are kept comfortable by huge fires day and night.”

Three miles beyond Fisk’s they came to Waite’s farm, an extensive, elevated clearing with growing crops. Thoreau says: “Here we could overlook an immense country of uninterrupted forest, stretching away toward Canada, and off to the northeast the Aroostook Valley.”

Five miles above the Waite farm they found a place called McCauslin’s or Uncle George’s. His house stood on an open intervale near the junction of the Little Schoodic River with the Penobscot. Thoreau tells us: “McCauslin was a Kennebec man of Scotch descent who had been a log driver on the lakes and headwaters of the river for five or six years. He had now decided to settle in this clearing and raise supplies for the lumbermen. Before our eyes, supper was prepared in an ample kitchen by an open fire that would have roasted a whole ox. The fireplace took at one time half a dozen four-foot logs. We had piping hot wheat cakes. The grain had been brought up the river in bateaux from the central Maine wheat country.”

That statement should not surprise us, for right here in Waterville an old record tells us that the principal export from the Waterville river landings in 1840, next to lumber, in both volume and dollar value was wheat.

Following his statement about the wheat cakes, Thoreau says the meal included ham, eggs, potatoes, milk and cheese, all products of McCauslin’s farm. We learn that far up there on the Penobscot there were cows. As if the meal had not already been big enough, the host brought on salted shad and salmon, tea sweetened with molasses, and a mountain of cranberries for dessert. Thoreau comments: “Everything was in profusion and of the best kind. Here butter is so plentiful that it is commonly used to grease boots. We saw McCauslin’s barns where he kept horses, cows, sheep and hens. Oats, hay and potatoes are his chief crops. I asked McCauslin why more settlers did not join him. He said it was because they could not buy land. It was owned by families or companies who did not want to see their timber lands turned into towns, or have any towns near them lest it raise their taxes. As for neighbors, McCauslin said they would only cause him trouble and expense. McCauslin let us have a strip of cotton cloth, a couple of blankets, 15 pounds of hardtack, and ten of pork and a little tea – enough food to last six men for a week. A teakettle, frying pan and axe completed our outfit.”

Leaving McCauslin’s, Thoreau had his first sight of ravage made by a Maine forest fire. Trees had been burned for ten miles, all the way to Millinocket Lake. The guides said the lake afforded a direct route to Katahdin, but the Thoreau party preferred to follow the river. At Millinocket River a man named Fowler was just finishing a new log cabin and was sawing out a window through two-foot logs when Thoreau arrived. He was sheathing, or rather as Thoreau put it, “papering” the inside of the cabin with spruce bark turned inside out.

In company with Fowler, they poled up the river two miles where Fowler’s father had built a mill not far from the Grand Falls
of the Penobscot. “Old Fowler’s”, said Thoreau, “is the last house, and he is the oldest inhabitant of these woods. A bit north of here he had built a house in 1830, but decided his new location was better. We portaged around Grand Falls, using a horse sled made of saplings, but we had to wait for Fowler to catch the horses, pastured at some distance.”

On this broadcast our time in now up, but next week we will tell you how Thoreau went on to Katahdin.

NOTE: The quotations attributed to Thoreau in this script and in the following script, taken from his long article entitled “Katadin” in the book named “The Maine Woods” are really not exact quotations, but are paraphrases, using many of Thoreau’s words, and conveying his meaning, but condensing and summarizing the original narrative.