Compass and Chain

In the seventeenth century, the first settlers arrived at Massachusetts Bay. Their ideal was a self-sufficient bit of land to work for their families. Instead of remaining in one settlement or village, the land-hungry immigrants pushed back the Native Americans, who they considered their "enemies." The Indian mind only vaguely grasped the European notion of land title. The Native Americans were driven off their lands and hunting fields by the institutionalized "usurpations" of the whites, at a terrible cost to the Indian tribes. On the American continent, the Indian populations were rooted out from buffalo hunting on the Plains and salmon hunting along the West Coast, meeting their fate of starving as migrants, turning to nomadic hunting, or returning to farming, or else making pottery and other handiworks in reservations.

Henry David Thoreau's incurable nostalgia for Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) boosted no field or territory for practical use but represented the moral code to preserve the American wilderness. Thoreau wrote about his irresistible urge to leave the areas of technical and industrial revolution. As a woodsman, he objected to the deforestation, the disappearance of wild animals (wolf, lynx, deer, beaver, turkey, salmon, and other animals), and resisted the devilish entrée of the telegraph and the railroad passing his favorite lake, Walden Pond. Thoreau, longing for home, found his green Eden in the natural beauty of Walden Pond outside his native Concord, Massachusetts. This active botanist and naturalist felt alien to the industries of American mankind. He found a way back into the wildness of the American continent, enjoying the freedom and the white and starry skies as a squatter.

Thoreau identified with his Indian predecessors in his area, Massachusetts. The centuries of native peoples had made the natural scenery of Concord a liveable and visible habitat, but the footsteps of their old culture had in Thoreau's mid-nineteenth century turned into invisible traces. Though his heart lay with archaeology and environmentalism, he needed to make a living. Following his stay in Walden Pond, Thoreau served for about thirteen years as a land surveyor, called in the Indian terminology a "land stealer." Being a public surveyor in the American continent included the duty of double-checking old maps of the countryside, making boundary lines of new land, and checking or making maps of developed land. Could Thoreau's technical and metric ritualization of land and property be reckoned to be partly responsible for the conquest of land as an economic commodity, implying the wreckage of the economical and social poverty in the unfreedom of the American indigenous peoples? Is this old conflict true or only a fable?

This explosive question is one of the main themes in Thoreau the Land Surveyor, written by Patrick Chura (inspired by his father, who worked as a land surveyor). Thoreau had to face up to "the national narrative" of the "story of almost unbroken triumph by white men over indigenous cultures, with surveyors and measuring technology playing a significant abetting role." Thoreau was an official trustee, who as a government surveyor helped the land-poor Algonquins, Ottawas, and Penotscots. Having professional honesty, Thoreau used in his manual trade the surveyor's compass and chain, but thanks to his interpreter Joe Aitteon—a Penotscot Indian with "anglicized manners"—he supported the anthropological and social justice of the antislavery militants. Thoreau's greatness as an advocate of the "Indian question" would have grown if he had been able to finish his intended book about Native Americans, aimed at advancing recognition of their rights and cultural contributions.

Other related questions in Thoreau the Land Surveyor link the debate about slavery and property rights. Chura makes Thoreau's ideological position clear, writing that:

Slavery polarized the nation and eventually put Thoreau firmly on the side of "radicals" who viewed the U.S. Constitution as a transparent sanctification of owning-class interests, morally flawed proslavery document, "an agreement to serve the devil." Surveying work, on the other hand, forced Thoreau to compromise...