IN HIS EARLIEST “NATURE” ESSAY, “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” Thoreau critiques a series of government reports on the plants and animals of Massachusetts and gives the authors of the reports faint praise. But despite the dryness of their prose, he credits them with at least beginning the study of Massachusetts's flora and fauna: “We will not complain of the pioneer, if he raises no flowers with his first crop” (Exc 27). However, the goal of the pioneer scientist, he says, should be more “direct intercourse and sympathy” with nature in order to “possess a more perfect Indian wisdom” (28). Thoreau thus early sees the study of nature as an ongoing process, as is the study of human culture: “The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written” (27).

Prologue: Natural and Human History in “A Walk to Wachusett”

This progressive theory of both natural and human history appears in one of Thoreau's other early nature excursion essays. In “A Walk to Wachusett” his walk westward takes him and his companion through small villages that remind him of pioneer settlements. A small, unnamed village near the town of Sterling has “already a certain western look”; it has “a smell of pines and roar of water, recently confined by dams” (Exc 36). The village, however, seems not to have tamed the wilderness but rather to have made it seem wilder:

This passage reflects Thoreau's youthful (and sometimes annoying) love of paradox, but it also suggests that the essay is about human history as well as about nature. As Linck Johnson points out, in one of the manuscripts of the essay, Thoreau wrote “though a ‘Journey of a Day,’ we meant that it should be a ‘Picture of Human Life’” (Historical Introduction 445).