“THE PAST,” THOREAU SAYS IN A Week, “cannot be presented” (emphases Thoreau’s); “it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is” (Exc 155). In The Maine Woods Thoreau makes it his goal not to correct the record of the past, as he attempted to do in A Week and would do again in his Cape Cod essays, but to find out what of America's past is still present in the forest and Native American culture of Maine. In the process he encountered an example of succession in progress in America.

Thoreau made three excursions into the Maine woods. In his first excursion in 1846, while he was still living at Walden Pond, his goal was to climb Mt. Katahdin to experience a sublime view of unspoiled nature unavailable closer to home. The second excursion occurred in 1853 when he was invited on a moose-hunting trip with his cousin George Thatcher and hoped to see not only the majestic moose in its habitat but also to study the ways of the party's Indian guide, Joe Aitteon. Not satisfied with what he had learned of Indian culture from the laconic Aitteon, in 1857 he engaged another Indian guide, Joe Polis, for a third trip into the wilderness. By then he was conducting an extensive study of the plants in Walden Woods and had read widely in books about Indian history and culture, so he was interested in botanizing to compare wilderness plants to those at home and to get further first-hand experience with Indian language and customs. Throughout all three excursions he encountered a landscape and a culture in transition.

Wilderness and the Dilemma of Sublimity in “Ktaadn”

On his first trip Thoreau experienced what he felt was the true wilderness of America as it had always been and, in some places, still was. In “Ktaadn,” he describes waking up in camp on the shore of a lake one night to gather firewood and sensing that he was truly seeing the unspoiled American wilderness: