Henry David Thoreau

As everyone knows, Henry David Thoreau retired to Walden Pond in 1846 to meditate on nature and the immortality of the soul. Thoreau emerged from the experience with a memoir about his visit to Mount Katahdin in Maine a few years earlier and a slim treatise called "Proof of the Immortality of the Soul." When the latter volume was published, it was harshly criticized by Thoreau's friend and sometimes mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Wounded by Emerson's crticism of the book as lacking in rigor, Thoreau left New England where he was then living and traveled by steam-boat up the Mississippi River reaching Red Wing and, later, St. Paul. From St. Paul, Thoreau prevailed upon a fur trader, Charles Belvedere, to take him north into the wilderness. Belvedere seems to have shown Thoreau the "veritas caput" -- that is, Lake Itasca, the true head of the Father of Waters. The two men parted on the shores of another lake, thirty miles closer to Canada, a place now called Black Duck Lake on the Ojibway reservation. (The details of Thoreau and Belvedere's journey to the headwaters of the Mississippi are unclear; Belvedere was stabbed to death in a brothel in Duluth in 1880 and his oral accounts of the two men's travels were inconsistent.) Alone in the great forest, Thoreau built a small cabin on Black Duck Lake and began working anew on his philosophical account of the soul's immortality. When he failed to return to his family home near Charleston, South Carolina a year later, his brothers were concerned. The Civil War then raging made it impossible for Thoreau's brothers to seek after the missing man and, indeed, two of his three male siblings were to died in combat. In order to find Thoreau, his grief-stricken mother conceived an ingenious scheme. Thoreau's closest friend during his childhood was a slave boy named Pompey. Thoreau's family freed Pompey, but only on the condition that he would travel north to Minnesota and search for the missing philosopher. Pompey discharged his duty faithfully. In 1864, following rumors then circulating in St. Paul about the missing philosopher, Pompey traveled by freight boat and, then, canoe north to Itasca. The Indians were much impressed by Pompey's black skin and treated him with courtesy and kindness, ultimately leading him to Thoreau's hermitage. In May of 1865, Pompey canoed across Black Duck Lake to the moldering cabin that Thoreau had erected on the steep and heavily wooded shore of the lake. In the cabin, Pompey discovered the remains of Thoreau, mostly reduced to skeleton, and the manuscript from which later editors have published the text that we now know as "The Nonexistence of Death". Pompey wrapped Thoreau's skeleton in canvas. In order to canoe smoothly across the waterways to St. Paul, he had to balance the light birchbark vessel in which he traveled, carefully placing both the skeleton and the manuscript at the prow and stern of the canoe. Reaching St. Paul, Pompey remarked that Thoreau's corpse, or what remained of it, was precisely the same weight as the handwritten manuscript neatly wrapped in twine proving that death did not exist.