Maine trips provide a chance to delve into Indian culture

Sitting on the shore of Moosehead Lake one September morning in 1857, Henry David Thoreau made a deal with his American Indian guide, Joe Polis: Tell me all you know, and I'll tell you all I know.

Butch Phillips, a Penobscot Indian who has read ''The Maine Woods'' and traveled much of the author's route, thinks Thoreau should have written more about his Indian guide and how Penobscots of the time lived. Staff photo by John Ewing.

Thoreau, who saw in American Indians the beginning of American history, would be with Polis for the next 11 days, and he wanted to learn all he could of the Penobscot's language and traditions, customs and culture.

Thoreau had come to Maine to immerse himself in nature, and that meant not only observing the pointed firs and purple-fringed orchis but also interacting with the people who had lived among them for so long.

''There was so much of the Indian accent resounding through his English,'' Thoreau wrote of Polis. ''It was a wild and refreshing sound, like that of the wind among the pines or the booming of the surf on the shore.''

Thoreau had been accompanied on his 1853 visit to Maine by Joe Aitteon, a Penobscot Indian who was the son of a tribal governor. But Aitteon's habit of swearing - learned from white loggers - and saying ''Yes, Sir-ee'' and whistling ''O, Susanna'' did not impress Thoreau.

Aitteon also was unfamiliar with canoe construction and was a reckless hunter who relied upon store-bought goods when camping.

It is likely that Thoreau knew more about American Indian history than did many American Indians of the time. He had filled whole notebooks with extracts and quotations from his reading about North American tribes - from the ''Relations'' of the 17th-century Jesuits who came to Canada to the latest U.S. government statistics.

''If wild men, so much more like ourselves than they are unlike, have inhabited these shores before us,'' Thoreau wrote in his journal, ''we wish to know particularly what manner of men they were, how they lived here, their relation to nature, their arts and their customs, their fancies and superstitions.''

Thoreau's so-called ''Indian Notebooks,'' totaling 11 volumes and almost 3,000 pages, today are housed in a special collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.

On his final trip to Maine in 1857, Thoreau was fortunate to meet Joe Polis. Polis was well-educated, represented the Penobscot Indian tribe in Augusta and Washington, D.C. - where his portrait was painted by Charles Bird King - owned a home and had considerable savings, estimated at $6,000.

Still, he possessed a dignity and skills - hunting, canoeing and woodcraft, among them - that Aitteon did not. He and Thoreau were well-matched and quickly took a liking to each other.

''They were like a couple of woodchucks squaring off,'' says Thomas Blanding, a Thoreau scholar who was among the first to transcribe portions of the ''Indian Notebooks.'' ''Thoreau is seeking to get at the Indian psyche in Maine, and he's able to with Joe.''

Thoreau watched as Polis called a muskrat; made every sort of herb tea; identified the medicinal use of many plants; and seemingly was able to orient himself anywhere in the woods - in the dark.

As much as he admired Polis, though, Thoreau was wary of his reaction to ''The Allegash and East Branch'' - the essay in which their trip together is detailed. In an 1858 letter to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Thoreau requested that the publication of the essay be delayed until after Polis' death.

''The more fatal objection to printing my last Maine woods experience is that my Indian guide, whose words and deeds I report very faithfully - and they are the most interesting part of the story - knows how to read and takes a newspaper, so that I could not face him again,'' Thoreau wrote.

Some scholars attribute the author's reticence to a literary convention of the day not to name one's traveling companions. Others, however, suspect Thoreau was worried that Polis would feel betrayed, that a confidence had been broken.

In the end, publication of the essay was delayed - but Polis probably read it. ''The Allegash and East Branch'' appeared in 1864 - two years after Thoreau's death but 20 years before Polis'.

Butch Phillips, a Penobscot Indian who has read ''The Maine Woods'' and traveled much of the author's route, thinks Thoreau should have written more about Polis and how Penobscots of the time lived. Phillips calls Thoreau ''somewhat of a city slicker'' who missed an opportunity to teach people about American Indians in the 1800s.

''He's so wrapped up in the botany, in giving us the Latin names for all of the flowers, that he misses the important changes my people were going through then,'' Phillips said. ''I think me and Thoreau would clash today. He's not my type of outdoorsman.''

On May 6, 1862, Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis. The two audible words of his last, poorly articulated sentence were ''moose'' and ''Indians,'' an apparent reference to ''The Maine Woods.''