His mark [a bow and arrow].
This singular letter was addressed to John Thoreau at Taunton, and was
so carefully preserved in the family that it must have had value in
their eyes, as recalling traits of the two Thoreau brothers, and also
events in the village life of Concord, more interesting to the young
people of 1837 than to the present generation. Some of its parables
are easy to read, others quite obscure. The annual State election was
an important event to Henry Thoreau then,--more so than it afterwards
appeared; and he was certainly on the Whig side in politics, like most
of the educated youths of Concord. His "young chief of the Karlisles"
was Albert Nelson, son of a Carlisle physician, who began to practice
law in Concord in 1836, and was afterwards chief justice of the
Superior Court of the County of Suffolk. He was defeated at the
election of 1837, as a Whig candidate for the legislature, by a
Democrat. Henry Vose, above named, writing from "Butternuts," in New
York, three hundred miles west of Concord, October 22, 1837, said to
Thoreau: "You envy my happy situation, and mourn over your fate, which
condemns you to loiter about Concord and grub among clamshells [for
Indian relics]. If this were your only source of enjoyment while in
Concord,--but I know that it is not. I well remember that 'antique and
fish-like' office of _Major_ Nelson (to whom, and to Mr. Dennis, and
Bemis, and John Thoreau, I wish to be remembered); and still more
vividly do I remember the fairer portion of the community in C." This
indicates a social habit in Henry and John Thoreau, which the Indian
"talk" also implies. Tahatawan, whom Henry here impersonated, was the
mythical Sachem of Musketaquid (the Algonquin name for Concord River
and region), whose fishing and hunting lodge was on the hill
Naushawtuck, between the two rivers so much navigated by the Thoreaus.
In 1837 the two brothers were sportsmen, and went shooting over the
Concord meadows and moors, but of course the "buffalo" was a figure of
speech; they never shot anything larger than a raccoon. A few years
later they gave up killing the game.