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Rustling Thoreau’s Cattle Wildness and Domesticity in ‘‘Walking’’ b a r b a r a “ b a r n e y ” n e l s o n  A cultural parallax, then, might be considered to be the difference in views between those who are actively participating in the dynamics of the habitats within their home range and those who view those habitats as ‘‘landscapes’’ from the outside. — Gary Paul Nabhan, ‘‘Cultural Parallax in Viewing North American Habitats’’ While teaching a new class called ‘‘Environmental Literature’’ at small, rural Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, I was about to assign Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 classic essay ‘‘Walking.’’ One of the textbooks I had chosen for the class, American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History edited by Roderick Frazier Nash, contained a shortened version of Thoreau’s essay which Nash had renamed ‘‘The Value of Wildness.’’1 At first glance, Nash’s version seemed to adequately summarize what he claimed was the heart of Thoreau’s essay: wilderness preservation. But there were many innocent-looking little ellipsis dots where passages had been removed. Curious about what was missing and uncomfortable with his interpretation of Thoreau’s meaning, I carefully compared Nash’s edited version with Thoreau’s original. Perhaps because of my rural background and affiliation, I noticed that Nash, a highly respected history scholar at the University of California, was carefully omitting almost all of Thoreau’s references to horses, cows, farming, and pastures. Missing are Thoreau’s statements that he loves to see ‘‘domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that t their original wild habits and vigor,’’ that watching cows swimming the river is like watching the buffalo crossing the Mississippi, and that the 254 ‘‘seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.’’2 Nash’s deletions and his decision to delete one key paragraph and replace it with another change the essay’s focus from wildness as a saving grace lurking beneath the surface of all things domestic to wilderness preservation propaganda . But the problem isn’t new. The wild/domestic dichotomy in American literature begins as early as Mayflower Pilgrim William Bradford (1589/90–1657). His published journal, Of Plimoth Plantation, written between 1630 and 1647, is an account of early Plymouth history. Modern anthologies, biographies, or journal articles dutifully quote Bradford’s description of the Pilgrims’ fearful first sight of the New England coast as ‘‘a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.’’3 With no friends to greet them and the wide Atlantic behind them, the Pilgrim Separatists had indeed finally separated themselves from the corruptive influences of society . Although granting that ‘‘Bradford was no romantic,’’ critic David Laurence finds in Bradford’s words ‘‘the queer music and peculiar visionary irony of the American sublime.’’4 Laurence observes that Bradford accomplishes here ‘‘in a sudden and singular leap what American writing in general must wait to achieve after a long period of provincialism.’’ Laurence argues further that if we ‘‘search the record of American writing between Bradford and Emerson for the like of Bradford’s ‘Americanness ,’ we search in vain’’ (56). The sublime emotion contained in Bradford’s famous passage comes not from his literal description of the Pilgrims’ vulnerable position, but from our twenty-first-century perspective of knowing, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. We know how the story ended. We know that half of the Pilgrims died and half survived that first winter. What many scholars have failed to note seriously enough is that Bradford also knew how the story ended when he wrote those lines. The passage was written not at the moment the Pilgrims sighted land, but ten years later. Contrast the Plimoth quotation with the following lines, written on the Mayflower during the actual sighting: ‘‘After many difficulties in boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence . . . we espied land. . . . And the appearance of it much comforted us, especially seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea.’’5 This Mourt’s Relation quotation has a hopeful, almost childlike faith in the new land and God’s benevolence. At the time, trees represented life-saving firewood and material for homes, not wilderness. But after only ten years on Massachusetts soil, Bradford already adopts the strangely American phenomenon Wildness and Domesticity in ‘‘Walking...

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