8 - Thoreau and Manifest Destiny

Summary

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE WEST emerges very early in Thoreau's career as a symbol for both his personal aspirations and for America's aspirations. As early as May 1841 Thoreau writes in his journal a poem about Mt. Wachusett in which he hails the mountain as “Thou western pioneer” that he identifies with because the mountain “like me / Standest alone without society” (PJ 1: 307). Earlier that same month he describes his personal destiny as a westward movement: “I shall not mistake the direction of my life; if I but know the high land and the main,—on this side the Cordilleras, on that the Pacific,—I shall know how to run. If a ridge intervene, I have but to seek, or make, a gap to the sea” (PJ 1: 308). Here the West represents Thoreau's own personal future, his own destiny.

Even earlier in a journal entry on 27 March 1840 the West represents America's national destiny: “How many are now standing on the European coast—whom another spring will find located on the Red River—or Wisconsin” (PJ 1: 120). In August of that same year, Thoreau suggests in his journal that the West is the destiny not only of America but of humanity: “Man looks eastward upon his steps till they are lost in obscurity, and westward still takes his way to the completion of his destiny. Whence he came or whither he is going nor history nor prophecy can tell—He sprang where the day springs and his course is parallel with the sun” (PJ 1: 177). The next year, four days after his poem about Mt. Wachusett, he writes a couplet that he titles “Westward, Ho!”: “The needles of the pine / All to the west incline,” suggesting that even nature favors a westward movement (PJ 1: 309).

Another early indication of the importance of the West to Thoreau can be found in his early essay on Sir Walter Raleigh (Early Essays 178– 218). Walter Harding dismisses “Sir Walter Raleigh” as inconsequential, but Sherman Paul finds it to be an important early indicator of Thoreau's strong interest in discovery and in the West. “It was Raleigh's relation to the West,” Paul says, “that Thoreau, looking beyond the Alleghenies himself, found most attractive” (132–33).