Who was Thoreau?

I've finished the magnificent Walls biography of Henry David thoreau.

Thoreau was a naturalist, surveyor, philosopher, poet, lecturer, graphite producer, pencil maker, writer, educator, friend and lifelong bachelor, transcendentalist, Harvard graduate, river sailor, and fire starter—literally and figuratively, politically and personally. 

He was daft and judgmental towards native Americans, and curious and perceptive about them, appreciating them, seemed to easily alternate between the two stances of judgement and curiosity. 

Some gays claim him, detect a sense of a secret self in his writings. He was wary of Whitman but was disappointed when the women put the kibosh on inviting him to stay in Concord. He asked a woman to marry him, but she declined. An older woman asked him to marry and he declined. We don’t know if his attention to young boys was purely motivated by his desire to share knowledge and educate. He seems to have been a real character of Concord. His proposal of marriage to a woman makes him nominally hetrosexual. Looking at no known sexual activity makes him asexual. Like many people in history, we just don't know, and have to tolerate not knowing. I'm not sure what the obsession is beyond Foucault's pointing out that at some point in history sexuality became a part of who and what you are. Not really anyone's business in a way.

He was a decided homebody who traveled down to Philadelphia and up to Quebec, and wrote books about Massachusetts, Maine and Cape Cod. He wrote about his trip to Canada. He worked hard to become a writer. He could also dance and sing. He loved walking, and could tell you what week it was based on the wildflowers. He lived in Staten Island for a year but could get his literary career off in New York. At the end of his life he went out west to Minnesota.  

His first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers took him 3 years to pay off because it was essentially self published if it didn't sell enough copies, and it didn't sell enough copies. It was a book about a trip he took with his brother who died soon after the trip, and it never mentioned his brother. Many of his books were posthumously published. "The Succession of Forest Trees" is supposedly his most read essay and work in his life, reprinted in newspapers across the country.

He was disgusted by meat and killing but ate and enjoyed it anyway. He wrote about his disgust of the fur trade. 

He was disappointed in slavery and was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He wrote about it once in his journal, but it's suspected that he did more than what he wrote.

He organized to support Irish laborers families with knitting coats for children. He gave a worker $50 to get his wife and family to America. He bought wood from Irish laborers to build his hut on Walden Pond. His trip to Cape Cod took a somber note when an Irish hunger ship crashed and he was presented with the recent wreckage and pillagers. 

He utterly rejected Puritanism. He disliked government, the Mexican war, supporting slavery even in the north, but worked well with people, except stupid editors who altered the meaning of his texts. He inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King with his civil disobedience. He could also imagine city planners who made sure the environment wasn't destroyed by greedy single minded people who ignored other's concerns. Did he think up the idea of public parks in towns and cities as Walls suggests? I have a hard time believing it, European cities had parks already. Boston Commons was established in 1634. There's a park in Budapest called Varosliget that was established in the 13th century that lays claim to the oldest park in Europe. Walls was suggesting the seed of the idea in America may have been influenced by Thoreau, not that he thought up the idea of municipal parks. 

"In Queens, the oldest parks are Daniel Carter Beard Memorial Square (known as Flushing Park until 1942), which was acquired by the town of Flushing in 1875" (NYC). I go walking every week in Flushing Meadows Park, by Willow Lake. 

He was friends with all the fascinating transcendentalists, and other naturalists, businessmen and scholars. He cared for Emerson’s family when Emerson went to England, traveled and hiked with poet Ellery Channing. He went to Fire Island to see if he could recover Margaret Full’s body. Caroline Healey Dall stayed a few extra days with the Thoreau's after her lecture in Concord. He met Whitman once, and loved his Leaves of Grass. He wanted to invite Whitman to stay in Concord but the women dislike him and vetoed an invitation. He met John Brown and introduced him to Emerson. He met Frederick Douglass, and possibly Harriet Tubman. 

He read Indian ancient texts but probably didn’t know the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism.

He accidentally started a wildfire that destroyed hundreds of acres but tried to get the town to fight it, some were indifferent. When Wentworth started a fire he warned against it and a bit of a wildfire started on Mount Washington, Tuckerman’s Ravine, in New Hampshire killing ancient forest.

His mother was pregnant with him in 1816 when there was no summer, and many moved west. He was against the Mexican War, slavery and the fugitive slave laws. He lived through the 1857 panic, in part triggered by the Dred Scott decision. He saw the beginning of the Civil War but not the end of it.

He got to read Darwin's Origin of the Species, with his friends aloud. In the context of the times, the book supported the ideas of abolition of slavery. He saw the arguments verified in his experience as a hiking naturalist. It gave him new ideas about how to study nature, and he both stayed on a mountain for a long time, and culled his journals for patters across the seasons. He thought about seeds and tree succession. 

Thoreau defended John Brown and saw his actions as noble. His way of seeing perhaps influenced Boston and the north regarding his actions, created a noble narrative. He wrote 3 essays about John Brown. John Brown's daughter Annie through Thoreau was a little like John Brown. His two daughters were adopted by Concord Transcendentalists and they went to school in Concord. Thoreau helps smuggle a co-conspirator, a Mr. X, out of the USA to safety in Canada. People ignored the summons regarding John Brown's conspiracy. The schoolmaster Sanborn was seized by marshals, and the town rescued him before they could get out of town. He showed up on court the next day and the warrant was canceled. It was reissued, but he wasn't caught before the secession of South Carolina and the start of the Civil War.

He seems to have had tuberculosis since age 18, and yet lived to age 44, only living 3 years longer than his father who had a longer life. His one expressed regret that comes down to us is that he wished he wasn't so offish. “ When his orthodox Aunt Louisa asked, "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" he answered pleasantly, "I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt."”(p.495 Walls)