Two of Thoreau’s guides were Penobscot Indians—Joseph Attean and Joe Polis.
Two of Thoreau’s guides were Penobscot Indians—Joseph Attean and Joe Polis. The group traveled by canoe, in French bateaux, and on foot. They slept in blankets by a campfire. The 3.5-million-acre boreal spruce-fir forest between Moosehead Lake and the Canadian border was unmapped at the time. (Much of it still is.) Thoreau drank cedar beer and hemlock tea with homesteaders, ate moose lips, and learned to speak Abenaki. He documented the hard, spartan life of the frontiersman (“We breakfasted on tea, hard bread, and ducks”) and the beauty of backwoods rivers and lakes (“a suitably wild-looking sheet of water”).
