Thoreau's Autumnal Indian

Thoreau's great interest in the North American Indian is a commonplace. The Indian had many meanings for Thoreau, embodying many, perhaps all, of his most central concerns. Some of these meanings Thoreau made clear in published writings; others remained half-expressed or implicit in the notebooks and jour- nals he had gathered against the day - which never came - when he would write his book on the Indian. For Jonathan Bishop, "the meditations on Indian facts are a convincing part of Thoreau's total experience of the sacred."1 Edwin Fussell singles out five "uses" of the Indian for Thoreau: as the Past, as Fundamental Man, as Nature, as Language, and as the Frontier.2 In an analysis of The Maine Woods I have suggested that the Indian "summed up in his person the various dimensions of Thoreau's response to the Maine Woods: ... natural, topographi- cal, historical, social, comic, and moral."3 But the Indian also had meaning for Thoreau as part of what I choose to call Thoreau's autumnal vision

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• The Experience of the Sacred in Thoreau's Week

  Jonathan Bishop•ELH•1966

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• The Return of the Vanishing American

  Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fiedler•American Literature•1969

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