The Maine Woods
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 502 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenry David Thoreau. (n.d.). The Maine Woods. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/the-maine-woods
- MLAHenry David Thoreau. The Maine Woods. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/the-maine-woods.
- ChicagoHenry David Thoreau. The Maine Woods. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/thoreau/the-maine-woods.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The account of three journeys into the northern woods of Maine, between 1846 and 1857, and the book in which Thoreau meets a nature that resembles Walden's not at all.
Context and history
Walden was a pond two miles from town; this is real forest, and the difference shows. The best-known passage is the climb of Mount Katahdin, where Thoreau meets a landscape that rejects him and writes some bewildered pages about pure, inhuman matter that waits for nobody: 'Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?'. The rest is canoe travel with Penobscot guides — Joe Polis above all, who appears as a person and not as a type — and exact observations of trees, rivers and the timber business that was already eating them. It was published posthumously in 1864. This is the least domesticated Thoreau, and the one most read today in ecology.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
whistler duck on the river, of the jay and chickadee around us, and of the pigeon woodpecker in the openings, were the sounds that we heard. This was what you might call a bran-new country; the only roads were of Nature’s making, and the few houses were camps. Here, then, one could no longer accuse institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil. There are three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season. At the end of three miles we came to the Mattaseunk stream and mill, where there was even a rude wooden railroad running down to the Penobscot, the last railroad we were to see. We crossed one tract, on the bank of the river, of more than a hundred acres of heavy timber, which had just been felled and burnt over, and was still smoking. Our trail lay through the midst of it, and was well-nigh blotted out. The trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each other in all directions, all black as charcoal, but perfectly sound within, still good for fuel or for timber; soon they would be cut into lengths and burnt again. Here were thousands of cords, enough to keep the poor of Boston and New York amply warm for a winter, which only cumbered the ground and were in the settler’s way. And the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire, like shavings, and no man be warmed by it.…