SOURCE: “‘The Red Face of Man,’ the Penobscot Indian, and a Conflict of Interest in Thoreau's Maine Woods,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1993, pp. 20-46.

In the following essay, Frost examines Thoreau's romantic notion of Native Americans and the inevitable disappointment he felt when confronted with actual Indians who could not live up to his expectations.

In his introduction to The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks, Richard Fleck interprets Thoreau's fascination with the American Indian:¹

If [Thoreau] could only gain insight during his life into a people whose origins and very existence stemmed from the mystical depths of nature, then, perhaps, he as well as his literary audience could renew themselves during an age when civilization had become stagnantly materialistic. This mystical “arrow-headed” character of Indian culture had to be deciphered, not destroyed, so that our civilization would not obliterate...