Free The Last Empty Places by Peter Stark

themselves on the Micmac women would result in death.
    “…[V]igorous and tough,” 36 wrote a later French colonial administrator of this little culture of transplanted Frenchmen in the New World, “well built and firmly planted on their legs, accustomed to live on little, robust and vigorous, very self-willed and inclined to dissoluteness; but they are witty and vivacious…they imitate the Indians, whom, with reason, they hold in high regard…strive to hold their regard and please them.”
    So this small band of Frenchmen living isolated from Europelearned the Micmac way—learned, as Thoreau would say, “Indian wisdom.” What a profound difference in attitude toward the native peoples and the North American wilds when one compares these fur-hunting young Frenchmen in Acadia to the crop-raising British down in Jamestown and the Puritans at Plymouth. From the outset—that first winter of celebration in 1606–07 and l’Ordre de Bon Temps—the French forged a bond with the Micmac. Down in Jamestown and Plymouth, the soon-to-arrive British colonists, in contrast, kept themselves separate from the native populations. While the French in Acadia
embraced
the wilds of North America, the British framed their lot in the New World as an epic
struggle
against a wilderness of vast, biblical proportions, and one infested with deviltry. Both the wilderness and the satanic heathens who lived there had to be eradicated to bring forth the light of Christianity and civilization.
    F ROM THE MOMENT he set foot on Cape Cod in autumn of 1620, William Bradford, the leader of the religiously inspired “Pilgrims” aboard the
Mayflower
anchored offshore, cast the colony’s fate in opposition to the American wilds:
    “[W]hat could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men…”
    The early New England preacher and poet Michael Wigglesworth wrote of the same evil desolation:
    [A] waste and howling wilderness,
37
Where none inhabited
But hellish fiends, and brutish men
That Devils worshiped
.
    To the Puritans it was a simple fact that Satan had long ago seized the New World wilderness and its Indian inhabitants for his own purposes, and it was their God-given role to counter him. While to the French Acadians, the Indian chiefs, or sagamores, like Membertou were held in high respect for their wisdom, generosity, and knowledge of the woods, to the New England Puritans the greater the sagamore, the greater his evil. The “chief Sagamores” of the Indians, wrote thepreacher Cotton Mather, are “horrid Sorcerers, and hellish Conjurers and such as Conversed with Daemons.”
    By the time of Thoreau’s birth, in 1817, that old Puritan New England fear of wilderness and its deviltry still resonated. The wilderness and its Indian inhabitants were still something to be eradicated, although both now lay far from his placid Concord, where the Indians long ago had been run off or killed and the forests mostly cultivated into farms. When Thoreau went to live on Walden Pond and then headed to the Maine Woods in search of “Indian wisdom,” he attempted a radical leap from the New England past—away from two centuries of that old Puritan fear of the evil and desolate wilderness, and toward the embrace of it as once absorbed by young Charles Biencourt and Charles de La Tour and the other French who had lived with the Micmac in Acadia.
    I WONDERED HOW OFTEN Charles Biencourt or Charles de La Tour encountered other humans while paddling the Upper St. John—Micmac or Maliseet Indians in birch-bark canoes, most likely, or perhaps their own French colleagues. We saw no one, until the fourth night. Again it had poured all day, causing the river to rise noticeably. During the day’s paddling, it had broadened to one hundred yards, swishing fast between dark, forested banks—undulating walls of green. The forest looked impenetrable. I sensed why it might have repelled the Puritans, and why Biencourt and La Tour,