JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John “Grizzly” Adams

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October 22, Thursday: John Adams was born in Medway 25 miles south of Concord as the crow flies — and would grow up there. On the same day a 1st child, Helen Louisa Thoreau, was born to John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who had married one another on the eleventh of May in that year.

We may note that when this child would belatedly be recorded in the Concord town records, she would be recorded as having been born as of the year 1813. (The town’s records are not all that accurate or complete, but might this error have been purposefully registered in order to remove any doubt as to Helen’s legitimacy as the eldest child of this very new marriage?)

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

5th day 22 of 10 M / Our friend Christo Hely was in town & attended Meeting & the funeral of Sam Wilcox - but being previously engaged I went to Conanicut with our friend D Buffum to attend the funeral of Job Watson where David was largely & very acceptably engaged in declaring the truth to the People. -

1812

Births

Name Sex Birth Date Birth Place Father’s Name Mother’s Name

THOREAU, John 1754 Concord

THOREAU, Mary F 1786 Concord John

THOREAU, Sarah 1791 Concord

THOREAU, Helen L. F 1813 Concord John Cynthia

THOREAU, John M 1815 Concord John Cynthia

THOREAU, Sophia Elizabeth F Sept. 27, 1819 Chelmsford John Cynthia

John in later years Cynthia in later years

DUNBARFAMILY

THOREAUGENEALOGY

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We dined at John Weedens & got home before sunset. —

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

John “Grizzly” Adams “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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At the age of 14, John Adams of Medway was apprenticed in the footwear manufacturing industry.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1826

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John “Grizzly” Adams

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April 5, Monday: Theodore Henry Hittell was born in Marietta, Pennsylvania. He would grow up outside of Cincinnati.

A convict ship, the Marquis of Huntley, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 228 convicts undergoing transportation, 68 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 10 years.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1830

John “Grizzly” Adams “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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At the age of 21, John Adams completed his apprenticeship in the footwear manufacturing industry and signed on with a company of showmen as a zoological collector. He would be capturing live wild animals in the backwoods mountains of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. However, he would be mauled by a Bengal tiger he was attempting to train for his employers and after such a mauling this would become physically impossible.

There would be a period of recuperation after which to support himself in his physical condition he would need to apply himself at his cobbler’s bench.

1833

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Disregarding the domestic drama of the following cartoon, in the lower right quadrant one may glimpse the tools of the cordwainer’s craft which John would need to be following, near Boston, for the following fifteen years or so:

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Disregarding the domestic drama of the following cartoon, in the lower right quadrant one may glimpse the tools of the cordwainer’s craft which John would need to be following, near Boston, for the following decade and a half:

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John “Grizzly” Adams

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April 12, Tuesday: Despite his serious injuries from being mauled by a Bengal tiger, John Adams got married with Cylena (“Selma” or “Cylie” or “Selena”) Drury (January 1, 1816-February 19, 1866) in Spencer, Massachusetts.1 For a period of about 15 years he would be working in the shoemaking business in the vicinity of Boston. The marriage would produce a daughter Arathusea Elizabeth Adams (1843-November 8, 1875) and a son Seymour Adams (December 25, 1845-July 23, 1865). Eventually there would be financial difficulty, occasioned by the loss by fire in St. Louis of a consignment of Adams’s shoes and boots.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

3rd day 12th of 4th M / This Morning I recd a letter from my fr Joshua Lynch of Ohio - It mentioned his prospect of attending our approaching Y Meeting & that of NYork —In the evening Stephen A Chase called & set the evening with us — he has been to his Father James Robinsons & is on his way home to Salem in the Morning Steam Boat - Thos P Nichols also called in a little while in the evening. —

1836

1. I bet you didn’t know Henry Thoreau lived within a few miles of Grizzly Adams!

I bet you didn’t know that Grizzly was exactly the same age, to the day, as Helen Thoreau!

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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June 14, Sunday: A large meeting of liberals created the Liberal Party of Belgium.

Le chant des chemins de fer for tenor, chorus and orchestra by Hector Berlioz to words of Janin was performed for the initial time, for the opening of the Northern Railroad at the Hôtel de Ville of Lille, France.

A group of Anglo settlers revolting against the rule of Mexico, under John C. Fremont, took Mexican General Mariano Vallejo prisoner in the Sonoma Valley. They forced him to sign a surrender document and then went on to declare an independent California (Bear Flag) Republic. Vallejo and his brother were taken to Sutter’s Fort and imprisoned. A “California Republic” flag featuring a five-pointed star and a crude depiction of a four-legged animal, that had been painted by William L. Todd onto a piece of brown cotton cloth with reddish or brownish paint, was raised at Sonoma. Some said the animal was a pig, some a griz (we cannot now inspect the original item, for it has perished in the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906).

1846

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Fall: John Adams, a ’49er, reached Los Angeles, California.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1849

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John “Grizzly” Adams

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Fall: As he had done with his brother John Thoreau at the beginning of fall in 1839, at the beginning of this fall season Henry Thoreau went river-sailing. This time he went with Ellery Channing to Peterboro and Mount Monadnock and returned from Troy, New Hampshire by train (when Ellery would return to Concord he would find his wife preparing to take their children and separate from him).

John Adams went up into the mountains of California in an old wagon pulled by two oxen, armed with a pistol and two rifles, plus bowie knives. Despite his maimed condition after having been mauled by a Bengal tiger, he would be able to catch bears in log traps and construct cages in which to transport them for sale. He would venture eventually as far as eastern Washington. He would contribute mightily to the extinction of the grizzly, so that the only bear that now remains in this mountain range is the smaller brown bear.

Kate Fox left for school and Maggie Fox, in the company of her mother, traveled to Philadelphia and set up shop in the bridal suite of Webb’s Union Hotel. It was there that the young and handsome Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, still grieving from the recent death of his youngest brother Willie, would come one November morning to investigate the “Spiritual Manifestations” that enthralled the nation (whether this is properly to be described as “love at first sight” as Margaret would later assert is a matter for speculation).

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

1852

SPIRITUALISM

John “Grizzly” Adams “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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In California, a milestone of sorts was occurring: the first white tourists were arriving at Yosemite valley.

John Adams had been contributing to the extinction of the grizzly bear, by capturing them for zoos, displays, and bear-baiting events reminiscent of 17th-Century London. At this point a grizzly managed to rip up his scalp and leave a permanent depression about the size of a silver dollar in his skull. The scalp it was possible to reattach, but the bone injury would be permanent. Then while wrestling with General Fremont, a grizzly he had retained for his own display, the injury would be re-opened and this time brain tissue would be exposed.

1855

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You’re going to need to keep your hat on, guy:

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

John “Grizzly” Adams “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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Late in the year: Theodore Henry Hittell had become a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin. When he interviewed “Grizzly” Adams in his California Menagerie at 142 Clay Street near its intersection with Leidesdorff Street (very near where the Transamerica Pyramid is now, and according to the signage, pictured below, there remains some sort of zoo there even now), where Adams was exhibiting two chained grizzlies and a caged

grizzly in a basement, that showman initially represented himself as William Adams, then “confessed” that he was James Capen Adams (actually, James was his younger brother). Hittell immediately noticed that hair had been worn off the backs of the three bears by their being used as beasts of burden. Although he had been born in a Boston suburb on October 22, 1812, Adams informed Hittell that he had been born in Maine on October 20, 1807.

December 8, Monday: After a couple of months at the 142 Clay Street location in San Francisco, “Grizzly” Adams relocated his animals to the California Exchange at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets and reopened as the “Pacific Museum.”

Dec. 8. Thermometer at 8 A.M. 8°above zero. Probably the coldest day yet.Bradford, in his “History of the Plymouth Plantation,” remembering the condition of the Pilgrims on theirarrival in Cape Cod Bay the 11th of November, 1620, O. S. (page 79): “Which way soever they turned theireyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. Forsummer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face; and the whole country, full of woodsand thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.” Such was a New England November in 1620 to Bradford'seyes, and such, no doubt, it would be to his eyes in the country still. However, it required no little courage to

1856

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found a colony here at that season of the year.The earliest mention of anything like a glaze in New England that I remember is in Bradford's “History of thePlymouth Plantation,” page 83, where he describes the second expedition with the shallop from Cape CodHarbor in search of a settlement, the 6th of December, O.S. “The weather was very cold, and it froze so hard asthe spray of the sea lighting on their coats, they were as if they had been glazed.” Bradford was one of the tenprincipal ones. That same night they reached the bottom of the bay and saw the Indians cutting up a blackfish.Nature has not changed one iota.

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January 16, Friday: A visitor to “Grizzly” Adams’s “Pacific Museum” at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets in San Francisco, California would at this point have been able to be entertained not only by the sight of massive grizzlies, but also by a road-runner (Geococcyx californianus), a collection of snakes, some monkeys, and “a fine brass band” that played every evening. For a year and a half, Theodore Henry Hittell would visit this stinky place each afternoon after the Bulletin had gone to press, to absorb the endless tales of the picturesque proprietor (surely he was not paying the 50¢ admission each time?). The “museum” would remain open in San Francisco for a total of about three and a half years, and in addition to the three bears, exhibited elks, cougars, a tiger, a panther, some eagles, deer, a baboon, a vulture, etc.

Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote in his journal about Katie Loring, the 17-year-old charmer he had met at a party in Concord on January 7th:

Katie is in my head the whole while,and I cannot bear to think of never seeing her again.

Jan. 16. P.M. — Up Assabet.This morning was one of the coldest. It improves the walking on the river, freezing the overflow beneath thesnow. As I pass the Island (Egg Rock), I notice the ice-foot adhering to the rock about two feet above the surfaceof the ice generally. The ice therefor a few feet in width slants up to it, and, owing to this, the snow is blown offit. This edging of ice revealed is peculiarly green by contrast with the snow, methinks. So, too, where the ice,settling, has rested on a rock which has burst it and now holds it high above the surrounding level. The samephenomena, no doubt, on a much larger scale occur at the north.I observe that the holes which I bored in the white maples last spring were nearly grown over last summer,commonly to within a quarter or an eighth of an inch, but in one or two instances, in very thriftily growing trees,they were entirely closed.When I was surveying Shattuck's [and] Merrick's pasture fields the other day, McManus, who was helping me,said that they would be worth a hundred or two hundred dollars more if it were not for the willow-rows which

1857

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bound and separate them, for you could not plow parallel with them within five rods on account of the roots,you must plow at right angles with them. Yet it is not many years since they were set out, as I remember.However, there should be a great amount of root to account for their wonderful vivaciousness, making seven oreight feet in a year when trimmed.

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August: Louis Lauriat died in Sacramento, California.

By this point a 2d floor had been added to “Grizzly” Adams’s “Pacific Museum” at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets in San Francisco, that exhibited wax works. The rent for this location was $250 per month.

1858

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May 11, Wednesday: The 2d floor of “Grizzly” Adams’s “Pacific Museum” at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets in San Francisco, California had been converted into an amphitheater and circus ring. Evidently, however, the proceeds were not enough to cover the rent for this location, $250 per month. The animals were attached for the proprietor’s debt, and the operation ceased to advertise.

May 11. Wednesday. Golden robin yesterday. Fir-balsam well out in the rain; so say 9th.P. M.–To Flint’s Pond.Arum triphyllum out. Almost every one has a little fly or two concealed within. One of the handsomest-formedplants when in flower. Sorrel out in rain, apparently a day or two, – say 9th. A blue heron flies away from theshore of the pond.Scirpus planifolius in bloom on Smith’s wooded hill, side of Saw Mill Brook.A partridge-nest, with eleven fresh eggs, at foot of a chestnut, one upon another. It is quite a deep cavity amidthe leaves, with some feathers of the bird in it.Young, or fresh-expanding, oak leaves are very handsome now, showing their colors. It is a leafy mistthroughout the forest.Ulvularia perfoliata out in rain; say, then, the 9th. Just after plucking it I perceived what I call the meadowfragrance, though in the woods; but I afterward found that this flower was peculiarly fragrant, and its fragrancelike that, so it was probably this which I had perceived. S. was reminded of the lily-of-the-valley by it.The witch-hazel has one of the broadest leaves now.In the path in Stow’s wood-lot, I find apparently Thaspium aureum (Zizia aurea), which will open the first fairday. [13th in house and probably abroad.] Shows quite yellow now.Found in the path in the woods by the Mill Brook ditch, Flint’s Pond, dead, the Coluber punctatus, 13 1/4 incheslong, but no row of spots in middle of abdomen. The head above blackish with a blackish ring behind the yellow.Tail 3 inches long; breadth of body 5/16; plates 162; scales 55. Above, uniform glossy slate-color, with ayellowish-white band across the occiput; the head above blackish, and a blackish band close behind theyellowish one. Beneath, yellow or buff (whitish under head), with a row of small slanting black spots, one oneach side of each abdominal plate except the first 3/4 inch behind the head. In the midst of the path in the woods.I admired the iridescence from its glossy belly. It differs from Storer’s C. punctatus, for it is not brown above,nor “reddish yellow” beneath, and has no row of spots in middle of the abdomen.In that first thunder-shower, the evening of the 9th, the grass evidently erected itself and grew darker, as it wereinstantaneously. Was it the effect of electricity in the air? It looked very differently from what it had ten minutesbefore.

1859

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January 7, night of the full moon in January/April 6, night after the night of the full moon: Harvard Observatory produced a stereoscopic2 collodion3 photograph of the surface of the moon. For the first time one could get some direct sense of curvature and of depth, and mountains and valleys. The trick is, stare at this and let your eyes cross until the four images merge to produce a row of three images, and then transfer your attention to the middle image and inspect it as if you were inspecting someone’s face:4

In San Francisco, California, “Grizzly” Adams took passage aboard the Golden Fleece, with his menagerie, to sail around Cape Horn and back to New-York, where he would provide one of the exhibits in Phineas Taylor Barnum’s American Museum. By this point Adams could offer not only bears, cougars and other large land animals, but also a sea-lion. Barnum would be an equal partner in the ownership of the collection. Adams’s skull wound was being dressed every day by a Dr. Johns, plus, his wife came down from Massachusetts to

1860

2. Sir Charles Wheatstone had experimented with simple stereoscopic drawings in 1832 and obtained a patent for a stereoscope device in 1838. Since the more popular Victorian device designed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Holmes Stereo Viewer, would not be patented until 1861, we may infer that this stereoscopic collodion of the moon was being prepared for the Wheatstone viewer rather than for the Holmes viewer. In all probability it was being created in order to provide the public with visual proof that the moon is indeed a sphere rather than a flat disk.3. Collodion, meaning “gluelike,” is a highly flammable, colorless or yellowish syrupy solution of pryoxylin, ether, and alcohol which has been found useful as an adhesive to close small wounds and hold surgical dressings, and for the creation of photographic plates.4. OK, it takes practice, but once you know how it will be as easy as reciting the first 27 digits of .

ASTRONOMY

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nurse him.

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September 29, Saturday: Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Daniel Shattuck, on a portion of the estate which would eventuate in the Colonial Inn on Concord Common near Monument Street. His sketch shows as neighbors Joseph Reynolds, Aunt Maria Thoreau, John Shepard Keyes, and Mrs. Charles W. Goodnow.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library:

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

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View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail:

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/113.htm

Also, Thoreau was working on his natural history materials. He posted to editor Horace Greeley his “SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES” for publication in the New-York Weekly Tribune.

Concord Sep 29th 1860Friend Greeley,Knowing your interest in whatever relates to Agriculture, I send you with this a short Address delivered by me before “The Middlesex Ag-ricultural Society”, in this town, Sep. 20th; on The Succession of Forest Trees. It is part of a chapter on the Dispersion of Seeds. If you would like to print it, please accept it. If you do not wish to print it entire, return it to me at once, for it is due to the Societys “Report” a month or 6 weeks henceYrs trulyHenry D. Thoreau

September 29, Saturday: Another hard frost and a very cold day.

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In the hard frost of September 29th and 30th and October 1st the thermometer would go all the way down to 20° and all Ephraim Wales Bull’s Concord grapes, some fifty bushels of them, would be frozen.

Theodore Henry Hittell’s THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES CAPEN ADAMS,5 MOUNTAINEER AND GRIZZLY BEAR HUNTER, OF CALIFORNIA (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Company. 117 Washington Street. San Francisco: Towne and Bacon). The book contained a dozen woodcuts by Charles Nahl.

October 20, Saturday: From 1856 John “Grizzly” Adams had been using the name “James Capen Adams,” which was the name of a younger brother. While “Grizzly” was on tour with the circus in New England, a monkey bit him on his open skull wound. After more than four months performing with his animals in New-York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, Adams was unable to continue. Phineas Taylor Barnum handed him his final paycheck ($500, don’t spend it all in one place) and purchased the other half of the menagerie, while Adams retired to his wife’s and daughter’s home in Neponset, 25 miles southeast of Concord. Barnum paid $150 to have a new costume made of beaver skins, and hired a Herr Driesbach as his replacement — however, Adams did persuade Barnum to allow him to wear this new fur costume, until he would die.

5. Hittell had completely bought into Grizzly Adams’s story that his real name was James Capen Adams rather than John Adams.

JAMES CAPEN ADAMS

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October 20: E. Hosmer tells me to-day that while digging mud at the Pokelogan the other day he foundseveral fresh acorns planted an inch or two deep under the grass just outside the oaks and bushes there. Almostevery observant farmer finds one such deposit each year.If that Merriam lot is fifteen rods square, then, instead of there being no oaks in it, there are some twenty-fivehundred oaks in it, or far more oaks than pines, – say five times as many, for there are probably not nearly fivehundred pines in the lot. This is only one of the thousand cases in which the proprietor and woodchopper tellyou that there is not a single oak in the lot. So the tables were turned, and, so far as numbers were concerned, itwould have been truer to say that this was an exclusively oak wood and that there were no pines in it. Trulyappearances are deceptive.P.M. – To Walden Woods to examine old stumps.In Trillium Wood the trees are chiefly pine, and I judge them to be forty to fifty years old, though there are nota fe v oaks, etc. Beneath them I find some old pitch pine stumps and one white pine. They would not be seenby a careless observer; they are indistinct mounds and preserve no form nor marks of the axe. This is lowground. Part of the cores, etc., of the stumps are, nevertheless, preserved by fat.I then look at Farrar’s [?] hill lot east of the Deep Cut. This is oak, cut, as I remember, some twenty-five yearsago, the trees say five to eight inches [IN] diameter. I find beneath the oaks innumerable pitch pine stumps, wellpreserved, or rather, distinct, some of them two feet and more in diameter, with bark nearly three inches thickat the ground, but generally fifteen inches in diameter. Though apparently thoroughly rotten and of a rough(crumbly) conical form and more or less covered with fine moss (hypnum), they were firm within on accountof the fat in flakes on the whole core, and frequently showed the trace of the axe in the middle. I could getcartloads of fat pine there now, often lifting out with my hands the whole core, a clear mass of yellow fat. Whenthe stump was almost a mere mound mossed over, breaking off an inch or two deep of the crust, with the moss,I could still trace on one side the straight edge made by the axe. There were also, especially on the lower, ornorthern, side, some large oak stumps, no doubt of the same age. These were much better preserved than thepines, – at least the part above ground. The whole shape and almost every stroke of the axe apparent sometimes,as in a fresh stump. I counted from seventy to seventy-five rings on one. The present wood appears to be chieflyfrom the seed, with some sprouts. The latter two or more close together, with the old stump more or lessovergrown. The sprouts, I think, were from small trees. (Methinks you do not see trees which have sproutedfrom old or large stumps two or three feet in diameter. I doubt if a very old wood, like E. Hubbard’s, would sendup sprouts from the stump.) I saw one large oak stump so much decayed that it may have belonged to ageneration further back.I next examined Ebby Hubbard’s old oak and pine wood. The trees may be a hundred years old. The older ordecaying trees have been cut out from time to time, neglecting these more recent stumps. The very oldestevidences of a tree were a hollow three or four feet across, in which you often slumped, – a hollow place inwhich squirrels have their holes covered with many layers of leaves, and perhaps with young oaks springing upin it, for the acorns rolled into it. But if you dug there, from under the moss (there was commonly a little greenmoss around it) and leaves and soil. in the midst of the virgin mould which the tree had turned to, you pulledup flakes and shoulder-blades of wood that might still be recognized for oak, portions preserved by some qualitywhich they concentrated, like the fat leaves or veins of the pine, – the oak of oak. But for the most part it wasbut the mould and mildew of the grave, – the grave of a tree which was cut or died eighty or a hundred yearsago there. It is with the graves of trees as with those of men, – at first an upright stump (for a monument), incourse of time a mere mound, and finally, when the corpse has decayed and shrunk, a depression in the soil. Insuch a hollow it is better to plant a pine than an oak. The only other ancient traces of trees were perhaps thesemiconical mounds which had been heaved up by trees which fell in some hurricane.I saw where Ebby had tried a pitch pine with his axe, though there was not a green twig on it, and thewoodpeckers had bored it from top to bottom, – effectually proved it, if he had not been blind.Looked at that pitch and white pine wood just east of Close at Brister Spring, which I remember as pasture somethirty years ago. The pasture is still betrayed under the pines by the firmer, sward-like surface, there being fewerleaves and less of leafy mould formed, –less virgin soil, –and by the patches of green (pine) moss and whitecladonia peeping out here and there.Young chestnuts (I dig up three or four) have not the large roots that oaks have.I see the acorn after the tree is five or six years old.Brassica Napus, or rape, a second crop, is blooming now, especially where grain has been cut and the field laiddown to grass and clover. It has there little slender plants; rough, or bristly, lower leaves.1st. There is the primitive wood, woodland which was woodland when the township was settled, and which hasnot been cut at all. Of this I know of none in Concord. Where is the nearest? There is, perhaps, a large tract inWinchendon.

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2d. Second growth, the woodland which has been cut but once, – true second growth. This country has been sorecently settled that a large part of the older States is covered now with this second growth, and the same nameis-occasionally still applied, though falsely, to those wood-lots which have been cut twice or many more times.Of this second growth I think that we have considerable left, and I remember much more. These are our forestswhich contain the largest and oldest trees, – shingle pines (very few indeed left) and oak timber.3d. Primitive woodland, i. e., which has always been woodland, never cultivated or converted into pasture orgrain-field, nor burned over intentionally. Of two kinds, first, that which has only been thinned from time totime, and secondly, that which has been cut clean many times over. A larger copsewood.4th. Woodland which has been cleared one or more times, enough to raise a crop of grain on it, burned over andperhaps harrowed or even plowed, and suffered to grow up again in a year or two. Call this “interruptedwoodland” or “tamed.”5th. New woods, or which have sprung up de novo on land which has been cultivated or cleared long enoughto kill all the roots in it. (The 3d, 4th, and 5th are a kind of copsewood.)6th. Artificial woods, or those which have been set out or raised from the seed, artificially.It happens that we have not begun to set out and plant till all the primitive wood is gone. All the new woods (or5th kind) whose beginning I can (now) remember are pine or birch (maple, etc., I have not noticed enough). Isuspect that the greater part (?) of our woodland is the 3d kind, or primitive woodland, never burned overintentionally nor plowed, though much of it is the 4th kind. Probably almost all the large wood cut ten or fifteenyears ago (and since) here was second growth, and most that we had left was cut then.Of the new woods I remember the beginning of E. Hubbard’s east of Brister Spring; Bear Garden, pitch pine;Wheeler’s pigeon-place, pitch pine; also his blackberry-field, pitch pine and a few white; West Fair HavenSpring woods, pitch pine and white; E. Hubbard’s Close Mound, pitch pine; Conantum-top, pitch pine; Mason’spasture (?), white pine; behind Baker’s (?), pitch pine; my field at Walden, pitch pine; Kettle Hill, pitch pine;Moore’s corn-hill, pitch pine, cut say ’59; behind Moore’s house (??), pitch pine (was it new?); front of SleepyHollow, poplars, pitch pine; E. Wood’s, front of Colburn place (??), pitch pine, not new wood; John Hosmer’s,beyond house (?), pitch pine; Fair Haven Hill-side, white pine, just begun; Merriam’s pasture, beyond BeckStow’s, just begun, pitch pine; old coast behind Heywood’s, pitch pine; Conant’s white pine crescent in front ofW. Wheeler’s; J.P. Brown pasture, white pine; at Hemlocks, pitch pine; northwest of Assabet stone bridge, pitchpine; Tarbell’s pitch pines; Baker’s, above beech, pitch pine; Henry Shattuck’s, pitch pine; northwest ofFarmer’s, pitch pine; William Brown’s, pitch pine; north of H. Shattuck’s, pitch pine; white and pitch pine southof Rice’s lot; pitch pine northwest of old Corner schoolhouse, pitch pine southeast of new Corner schoolhouse;large pitch pine hill behind Hagar’s in Lincoln.In several of these new woods –pitch pine and birches– can see the old corn-hills still.The woods within my recollection have gradually withdrawn further from the village, and woody capes whichjutted from the forest toward the town are now cut off and separated by cleared land behind. The Irish have alsomade irruptions into our woods in several places, and cleared land.Edmund Hosmer tells me of a gray squirrel which he kept in his old (Everett) house; that he would go off to thewoods every summer, and in the winter come back and into his cage, where he whirled the wire cylinder. Hewould be surprised to see it take a whole and large ear of corn and run out a broken window and up over theroof of the corn-barn with it, and also up the elms.We have a kitten a third grown which often carries its tail almost flat on its back like a squirrel.

HENRY L. SHATTUCK

CAT

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October 25, Thursday: Benevento was annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia.

John “Grizzly” Adams died (meningitis?) at the age of 48. The body would be placed in the family plot at Bay Path Cemetery in Charlton, Massachusetts, beneath a gravestone that exhibits a man and a bear walking side by side through the woods.

As the dying man’s last request, the body was buried in the new beaver-skin mountaineering costume that Phineas Taylor Barnum had intended to be worn by Adams’s replacement at the American Museum in New-York, Herr Driesbach. The verse on the tombstone, since eroded, ran as follows:

And silent now the hunter laysSleep on, brave tenant of the wildGreat Nature owns her simple childAnd Nature’s God to whome aloneThe secret of the heart is knownIn silence whispers that his work is done

October 25. P.M.–To Eb. Hubbard’s wood and Sleepy Hollow.See a little reddish-brown snake (bright-red beneath) in the path; probably Coluber amoenus.Cut one of the largest of the lilacs at the Nutting wall, eighteen inches from the ground. It there measures oneand five sixteenths inches and has twenty distinct rings from centre, then about twelve very fine, not thickerthan previous three; equals thirty-two in all. It evidently dies down many times, and yet lives and sends up freshshoots from the root.Jarvis’s hill lot is oak, pitch pine, and some white, and quite old. There are a great many little white pinesspringing up under it, but I see no pitch. Yet the large pitch are much more common than the large white.Nevertheless the small white have come on much faster and more densely in the hollows just outside the largewood on the south.E. Hubbard’s mound of pitch pines contains not one seed-bearing white pine, yet there are under these pinesmany little white pines (whose seed must have blown some distance), but scarcely one pitch pine. The latter,however, are seen along its edge and in the larger openings. So at Moore’s pitch pine promontory south of theFoley house, cut off lately by Walcott. Where the large pines had stood are no little ones, but in the open pasturenorthward quite a little grove, which had spread from them. Yet from a hasty look at the south end of the SleepyHollow Cut pitch pines, it appeared that small pitch pines were abundant under them. Vide again.I have seen an abundance of white oak acorns this year, and, as far as I looked, swamp white oak acorns werepretty numerous. Red oak acorns are also pretty common. Black and scarlet oak I find also, but not veryabundant. I have seen but few shrub oak, comparatively. Of the above, only the white oak have decayed soremarkably. The others are generally sound, or a few wormy. The red oak, as far as I notice, are remarkablysound. The scarlet oak I cut this afternoon are some of them decaying, but not like the white oak Only the whitehave sprouted at all, as far as I perceive.I find some scarlet oak acorns on the back side northeast end of Sleepy Hollow which are rounder than usual,considerably like a filbert out of the shell. They are indistinctly marked with meridional lines and thus betray a

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relation to the black and black shrub oak. [Vide swamp white oak, (PAGE 180).]I see an immense quantity of asparagus seed in the mist of its dead branches, on Moore’s great field of it, nearHawthorne’s. There must be a great many bushels of the seed, and the sight suggested how extensively the birdsmust spread it. I saw, accordingly, on Hawthorne’s hillside, a dozen rods north of it, many plants (with their ownseed) two or three feet high. It is planted in the remotest swamps in the town.Saw in E. Hubbard’s clintonia swamp a large spider with a great golden-colored abdomen as big as a hazel-nut,on the wet leaves. There was a figure in brown lines on the back, in the form of a pagoda with its storiessuccessively smaller. The legs were pale or whitish, with dark or brown bars.Find many of those pale-brown roughish fungi (it looks like Loudon’s plate of Scleroderma, perhapsverrucosum), two to three inches in diameter. Those which are ripe are so softened at the top as to admit the rainthrough the skin (as well as after it opens), and the interior is shaking like a jelly, and if you open it you see whatlooks like a yellowish gum or jelly amid the dark fuscous dust, but it is this water colored by the dust; yet whenthey are half full of water they emit dust nevertheless. They are in various states, from a firm, hard and dryunopen[ED] to a half-empty and flabby moist cup.See the yellow butterfly still and great devil’s-needles.Dug up and brought home last night three English cherry trees from Heywood’s Peak by Walden. There are adozen or more there, and several are as handsome as any that you will find in a nursery. They remind me ofsome much larger which used to stand above the cliffs. This species too comes up in sprout-lands like the wildrum cherry. The amount of it is that such a tree, whose fruit is a favorite with birds, will spring up far and wideand wherever the earth is bared of trees, but since the forest overpowers and destroys them, and also cultivation,they are only found young in sprout-lands or grown up along fences. It looks as if this species preferred a hilltop.Whether the birds are more inclined to convey the seeds there or they find the light and exposure and the soilthere which they prefer. These have each one great root, somewhat like a long straight horn, making a rightangle with the stem and running far off one side close to the surface.The thistles which I now see have their heads recurved, which at least saves their down from so great a soaking.But when I pull out the down, the seed is for the most part left in the receptacle (?), in regular order there, likethe pricks in a thimble. A slightly convex surface. The seeds set like cartridges in a circular cartridge-box, inhollow cylinders which look like circles crowded into more or less of a diamond, pentagonal, or hexagonalform. The perfectly dry and bristly involucre which hedges them round, so repulsive externally, is very neat andattractive within,–as smooth and tender toward its charge as it is rough and prickly externally toward the foesthat might do it injury. It is a hedge of imbricated thin and narrow leafets of a light-brown color, beautifullyglossy like silk, a most fit receptacle for the delicate downy parachutes of the seed, a cradle lined with silk orsatin. The latter are kept dry under this unsuspected silky or satiny ceiling, whose old and weather-worn andrough outside alone we see, like a mossy roof, little suspecting the delicate and glossy lining. I know of no objectmore unsightly to a careless glance than an empty thistle-head, yet, if you examine it closely, it may remind youof the silk-lined cradle in which a prince was rocked. Thus that which seemed a mere brown and worn-out relicof the summer, sinking into the earth by the roadside, turns out to be a precious casket.I notice in the pitch pine wood behind Moore’s the common pinweed (Lechea major or the next) growing onthe top of a pitch pine stump which is yet quite in shape and firm, one foot from the ground, with its roots firmlyset in it, reaching an inch or two deep. Probably the seed was blown there, perhaps over the snow when it wason a level with the stump.

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Second edition of Theodore Henry Hittell’s THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES CAPEN ADAMS, MOUNTAINEER AND GRIZZLY BEAR HUNTER, OF CALIFORNIA (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Company. 117 Washington Street. San Francisco: Towne and Bacon), with a new introduction and postscript. The book contained a dozen woodcuts by Charles Nahl. Henry Thoreau would copy from this new publication into his Indian Notebook #12.

1861

JAMES CAPEN ADAMS

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John Ervin Kirkpatrick’s TIMOTHY FLINT, PIONEER, MISSIONARY, AUTHOR, EDITOR, 1780-1840; THE STORY OF HIS LIFE AMONG THE PIONEERS AND FRONTIERSMEN IN THE OHIO AND MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AND IN NEW ENGLAND AND THE SOUTH (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Company).

A New Jersey newspaperman writing under the pen name Victor Appleton (actual name Howard Garis) created the boy’s book TOM SWIFT AND HIS ELECTRIC RIFLE, an updating of Jules Verne’s 1875 underwater weapon of TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (in 1969, when the TASER would be developed by Jack Cover, what would this initialism stand for? —Thomas A. Swift’s Electronic Rifle).

Republication, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, of Theodore Henry Hittell’s THE ADVENTURES OF JAMES CAPEN ADAMS, MOUNTAINEER AND GRIZZLY BEAR HUNTER, OF CALIFORNIA, issued originally in 1860, with its original woodcuts by Charles Nahl.

1911

TIMOTHY FLINT, PIONEER

JAMES CAPEN ADAMS

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February 23, Friday: Theodore Henry Hittell died.

1917

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The final “collection” of Eskimo curlews Numenius borealis was made in this year, though from time to time a stray individual still is being spotted by one or another birdwatcher.

The last wild Korean tiger was captured in South Korea.

The last California grizzly was shot in Fresno County, though a few Ursus arctos horribilis (a subspecies of the brown bear Ursus arctos) yet survive in a small range in Yellowstone Park up through Glacier Park.

The last Barbary lion Panthera leo leo, the sort of lion that appears for instance in the Biblical story of Daniel and the Lion’s Den, was shot in the Atlas Mountains.

According to Gerald Fleming’s HITLER AND THE FINAL SOLUTION, during this year Adolf Hitler told an interviewer:

Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will bethe annihilation of the Jews.6

1922

6. Marvelously, other scholars have situated his decision to kill the Jews at 1941 — which would be all of eighteen or perhaps nineteen years into the future!

ANTISEMITISM

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Warner Brothers, by creating the movie RETURN OF THE DRAGON and the television series KUNG FU, brought kung fu movies to Hollywood. Bruce Lee, star of the movie, had been offered the TV series as well, but while auditioning it became clear to the producer, Jerry Thorpe, that the Hong Kong star couldn’t manage the English dialog. The dancer David Carradine was given the role instead (Chuck Norris would comment, with sympathy, that Carradine was about as adept in the martial arts as he himself was at the craft of acting).

1972

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Charles Edward Sellier, Jr.’s novel THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS. In this year the role of Grizzly Adams was filled by director John Huston in the Hollywood movie The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

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James McIntosh’s THOREAU AS ROMANTIC NATURALIST: HIS SHIFTING STANCE TOWARD NATURE (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP) offered material on Henry Thoreau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

1974

“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

McIntosh writes in his preface that: “This book is an attempt to read certain ofHenry Thoreau’s writings by calling attention to his divided attitudes towardnature. Instead of smoothing over inconsistencies, conflicts, and uncertainties,it makes the most of them. Yet it also underscores the steadiness of his commitmentto the romantic idea of nature.” McIntosh believes that Thoreau’s greatestinfluences on his reverence for nature, besides Waldo Emerson, are Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe and Wordsworth. About twenty pages of the “Introduction” show Emerson’sinfluences.

In the second chapter, “Thoreau and Romanticism” (the “Introduction” is the firstchapter), McIntosh shows how Thoreau’s romanticism differs from the Europeans’,specifically that of Goethe and Wordsworth. He says, “For nineteenth-century NewEnglanders, Wordsworth was the poet of nature,” and “Goethe provided a model ofpoet-scientist and writer who would have the patience to see the particulars ofnature accurately and lovingly.”

Concerning the question of Thoreau’s shifting stance, McIntosh says, “A preliminaryanswer might run thus: The nature which Thoreau found around him was chaotic,various, and ever changing, but was nevertheless also a single organic world, everthe same. In order to love it accurately, he learned to perceive its changes byadopting continually different stances toward it: he worked in his writing toexpress his shifting responses to a single, yet mutable reality.” His book expandsthis preliminary answer.

McIntosh focuses primarily on Thoreau’s early work — WALDEN and before. The titlesof his chapters are: “Early Reflections and Excursions,” “The WEEK: A Journeythrough New England and Beyond,” “Ktaadn: The Wanderer in Phusis,”“‘The Shipwreck’: A Shaped Happening,” “ WALDEN: Activity in Balance,” and“Thoreau’s Last Nature Essays.”

The first two chapters place Thoreau in the context of international romanticism.I found the analysis of the connection to European romantics especially helpful.In the third chapter, “Early Reflections and Excursions,” McIntosh discussesThoreau’s three different modes of dealing with nature.

He calls them, “the mode of involvement; the mode of detachment; and the mode ofcomprehensive understanding. He shows how Thoreau moves back and forth betweenthese different modes. McIntosh says, “[Thoreau] tires to give nature a formalstructure, a personality, and spirit, so that he may imagine a meaningful relationwith it. Yet despite the intensity of his with for a relation, an intermittentskepticism tends to erode his faith in a combining imagination and prompts him tolook for truth in utter factuality.”

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Laura Dassow Walls reports that although Thoreau’s brand of natural history has usually been linked with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the German Naturphilosophen, perhaps by way of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s THEORY OF LIFE, in fact neither Goethe nor Coleridge offer any link between “the Whole” that they endeavored to grasp and the “gritty specifics” which Thoreau found alone to be of value:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for all his loyalty to the actual,concentrated on reducing forms to ideal “types.” His idealismencouraged him to neglect or ignore details which provedinconvenient, and Goethe’s science has come down to us primarilyas an interesting curiosity. The same is even more true ofColeridge, whose ideas, derived from Naturphilosophie, expressvitalistic theories dating to the 1600s, and whose fascinatingessay is purified of any reference to specific living organisms.Whereas Goethe and Coleridge invented ideal systems in theirstudies, Henry Thoreau was in the fields of Concord observingand speculating about individual plants, animals, and phenomena,with a specificity unknown to any of the great Romantics.Wordsworth is teased for his pond “three feet long, and two feetwide” ( “The Thorn”). Thoreau might have measured it to theinch, and its depth too; in fact, he did so measure Walden Pond.

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“Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Dan Haggerty in the Hollywood film The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.

This movie offers that Adams went into the mountains because he had been unjustly accused of a crime.

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At the Bay Path Cemetery in Charlton, Massachusetts, a marker was added to the burial plot of John Adams pointing out to tourists that this was the famous bear tamer.

The former investment banker turned survivalist, Mel Tappan, published SURVIVAL GUNS to help his fellow survivalists select appropriate home-defense weapons (Mel would succumb to congestive heart failure in 1980 at the age of 47 without any hordes of crazed San Franciscans ever having stormed his compound on the Rogue River of Oregon).

For the 150th anniversary of the gunning down of Betty, The Learned Elephant, the state General Assembly proclaimed May 25th as “Elephant Day.” The citizens of Chepachet placed a commemorative plaque at the Chepachet River, marking the spot at which a gang of their local citizens concealed in a grist mill had cut down Little Bett with a broadside of anonymous gunfire.

Little Bett would also be celebrated, eventually, in this shameless Rhode Island town, by means of a specially

1976

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painted and decorated “Mr. Potato Head” in front of their courthouse:

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The movie “Star Wars” was released. Dan Haggerty played “Grizzly” Adams in a 29-episode TV series.

1977

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When pro boxer Earnie Shavers auditioned for a role in ROCKY II, he was pulling his punches and Sylvester Stallone told him they should make it look real. Pretty soon Sly needed to go to the bathroom and “When he came back he tol’ me he was sorry, but they couldn’t use me.... Only thing, people come up to me now, they know who I am, and they say, ‘Hey Earnie, think you could beat Rocky?’”

“Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Dan Haggerty in the TV movie The Capture of Grizzly Adams.

Iran got the upper hand in its war with Iraq. We needed to leap to the assistance of our friend Saddam Hussein. President Ronald Reagan removed Iraq from our list of known terrorist countries so we would be able to do “whatever was necessary and legal” to assist him in his nation’s struggle for survival (soon we would be sending him air shipments of our anthrax and weapons-grade botulin toxin).

During this year or the following one, Bill Walker unearthed a dinosaur claw at a Surrey clay pit. A previously unknown theropod, the animal would be formally named Baryonix walkeri and nicknamed “Claws.” Claws’s fishy fossilized gut contents raise suspicions that it might have been semi-aquatic, a hypothesis supported by oxygen isotopes later found in its tooth enamel.

1982

PALEONTOLOGY

THE SCIENCE OF 1982

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The Kevin Costner movie “Dances with Wolves” was released. “Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Gene Edwards in The Legend of Grizzly Adams.

1990

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The film “Breakfast of Champions” was distributed in limited release. Previously uncollected fiction from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1950s efforts, BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX, was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Cobbled together from Vonnegut’s afterlife reflective quips on WNYC, GOD BLESS YOU, DR. KEVORKIAN was published by Seven Stories Press.

Liu Haiyan’s “Life in the Open air: Thoreau and his WALDEN” appeared in Journalism Lover.

“Grizzly” Adams was played by the actor Tom Tayback in Grizzly Adams and the Legend of Dark Mountain.

In the Hollywood movie P.T. Barnum, meanwhile, he was being played by Jeff Watson.

1999

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“Grizzly” Adams was again played by the actor Dan Haggerty, in the Hollywood movie Escape to Grizzly Mountain.

Did we understand that Henry Thoreau was a wimp who disliked wilderness but loved the “working forest”? Here is a review by Philip Cafaro <cafaro@lamar.colostate.edu> (Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO 80523) of Daniel Botkin’s NO MAN’S GARDEN: THOREAU AND A NEW VISION FOR CIVILIZATION AND NATURE (Washington DC: Island Press, 2000):

Daniel Botkin believes that many environmentalists take toonegative a view of the human presence in nature. In his new book,he asks readers to consider the positive possibilities of citiesrather than writing them off as cancers on the biosphere, toappreciate semi-wild areas close to home, and to recognize theways conscientious foresters and ecological restorationists canmanage nature to enhance biodiversity. His discussion of theseissues ranges widely, from Mono Lake to the Maine Woods. Botkinseeks to place these reflections within an overall environmentalphilosophy, writing in his preface that his “purpose is to helpadjust our approach to living within nature and to integratingcivilization and nature, in the hope that both can prosper andpersist.” And he enlists environmentalism’s patron saint in thisproject, weaving quotes and anecdotes about Henry David Thoreauthroughout the book. At first glance, the hermit of Walden mightseem an unlikely ally for Botkin’s project. Yet as he pointsout, Thoreau valued both nature and culture. At Walden Pond, hehad Homer by his bedside — in the original Greek — and frequentvisits from leading writers and thinkers. Furthermore, Thoreauwas able learn a tremendous amount about nature and form a strongpersonal and spiritual attachment to it in the relativelypopulous and tamed environment of a Boston suburb. So, Botkin’spositive message is plausible and his vehicle for conveying itclever and potentially insightful. Still, despite making

2000

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scattered interesting points, the book fails in its larger aims,for three main reasons. First, Botkin tends to set up straw mento attack, so as to make his own positions seem more reasonable.Second, his discussions of practical conservation issues oftenset up false dichotomies, misrepresent opposing views, and failto clearly specify his own solutions to hard conservationproblems. Third, he simplifies and distorts Thoreau’s views,thus avoiding the searching discussion of fundamental issues hisbook promises and Thoreau’s books delivered. An example of thefirst kind of failure is his caricature of the philosophy ofdeep ecology. Deep ecologists, we are told, “rejectcivilization” (36) and believe “that people must be placed atthe bottom of the moral order” (241). Deep ecologists support“the suppression of individualism and democracy” (40) and think“that it is wrong for people to modify and adjust theenvironment” anywhere, anytime (227). But who believes any ofthis? Certainly not Arne Naess, whom Botkin invokes as some sortof bogey man, rather than a careful and rigorous philosopherworking toward what Botkin claims should be our main goal:developing a philosophy which combines the best of culture andnature. Botkin might have given us an honest interpretation ofNaess’ philosophy and specified his differences with him pointby point. But deep ecologists are more valuable to him as strawmen, appearing at various points with foolish, indefensibleviews so that whatever view Botkin is presenting will seem moreplausible. A similar failure to directly engage opposing viewsis shown in Botkin’s discussion of practical conservationissues. A good example is his treatment of the environmentalgroup RESTORE’s proposal for a 3.2 million acre Maine WoodsNational Park (161-173). Botkin clearly dislikes the idea ofsuch a park, but he doesn’t say why. He neglects to discuss thepoor forestry practices and development pressures that arefragmenting and harming Maine’s forests, despite the fact thatthe park proposal only makes sense as a response to thesepressures. He fails to propose his own alternative to the statusquo — a condition that should be unacceptable to anyconservation biologist. When it comes to discussing thejustification for the proposed park, Botkin rejects the viewthat we should preserve species and ecosystems simply for theirown sakes or “intrinsic value,” but he provides no cleardiscussion of this central issue. He seems to believe that wecan advocate nature preservation either for anthropocentric orbiocentric reasons, but not both. This is a clearly a falsedichotomy: from Yosemite and Yellowstone onwards, national parksupporters have given both. Botkin claims that RESTORE shouldadvocate protection of wild lands for their aesthetic,spiritual, or other benefits to humans, rather than for theirintrinsic value. Yet even a cursory glance at the group’sliterature and website (www.restore.org) shows that such appealsare central to their arguments for the park. Here again, Botkincould have learned something, or at least clarified his ownposition, by paying attention to what the people he criticized

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actually said. Perhaps the book’s greatest failure, however, isits treatment of Thoreau. “Rather than seeing species orecosystems as important in themselves, Thoreau saw nature asimportant to human creativity, civilization, and culture” (44),Botkin writes, perpetuating his implausible, exclusivedichotomy. He follows this with the astonishing assertion: “Ifound little if any discussion in his writings of an intrinsicvalue of nature independent of the ability of human beings tobenefit from it” (54). But the better part of two chapters ofWalden are given over to arguing for such intrinsic value andto exploring the resulting ethical demands on us. In the chapter“Higher Laws,” Thoreau argues for vegetarianism and againsthunting, based on the moral considerability of individualsentient animals. And in the chapter “The Bean-Field,” heconsiders what part of an intrinsically valuable wild landscapehe has a right to appropriate for his own use. Every one ofThoreau’s books, and most of his natural history essays, assertthe intrinsic value of nature and the need for human restraintin its use. It is true that Thoreau also talks about theknowledge, sense of history, spiritual connection and enrichedaesthetic experience that contact with wild nature provides topeople. But these are additional reasons to preserve wildnature, explore it responsibly and use it sparingly. Thoreau’srecognition of these anthropocentric values does not mean thatour interests should always trump the interests of otherspecies, or that we should manage all parts of the landscapeaccording to our own needs and desires. He explicitly andrepeatedly rejects these positions. They are Botkin’s positions,not Thoreau’s. Botkin also denies that Thoreau valuedwilderness, mostly on the basis of his famous description of adifficult excursion climbing Mount Katahdin in 1846. This leavesus wondering why Thoreau returned twice more for extendedwilderness trips to Maine or made dozens of mountain climbs inthe following years throughout New England and New York. Botkinasserts that Thoreau admired the timber cruisers working theforest near Katahdin and felt “a strong desire to participatein its logging and use” (117). This is contradicted by numerouspassages like the following, from Thoreau’s book THE MAINE WOODS:

Is it the lumberman then who is the friend and lover ofthe pine — stands nearest to it and understands itsnature best? ... No, it is the poet who loves them ashis own shadow in the air, and lets them stand ... Thepine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made intoboards and houses is no more its true and highest usethan the truest use of a man is to be cut down and madeinto manure. There is a higher law affecting ourrelation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, adead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcassis a man ... Every creature is better alive than dead,men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands itaright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

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This love for wild nature and willingness to rein in humaneconomic activities in order to preserve it is the cornerstoneof Thoreau’s environmental ethics. I believe it should be thecornerstone of ours, as well. It is his love for wilderness andhis appreciation of the threats facing it which prompt Thoreau,a few pages later in THE MAINE WOODS, to propose a system of“national preserves ... in which the bear and panther, and someeven of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be civilizedoff the face of the earth.” In Maine, Thoreau says, such apreserve would protect the full complement of native species andkeep the land wild. For “these are not the artificial forestsof an English king — a royal preserve merely. Here prevail noforest laws, but those of nature.” Botkin is right: we need anenvironmental ethics which celebrates human culture and wildnature, and makes a legitimate place for both. We needsustainable forestry and healthy cities and ecologicalrestoration of degraded lands. But we also need to rein in theexcessive human appropriation of the biosphere and our desireto control the entire landscape, and set aside more wilderness.We need an ethics which insists that we consume less, in orderto make this possible. The real Henry Thoreau has a lot to sayabout what such an ethics demands of us, and what it offers inreturn.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John “Grizzly” Adams

JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: December 18, 2014

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS JOHN “GRIZZLY” ADAMS

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.