Like another famous New Englander a century after him, it was in Henry David Thoreau's blood to take the road not taken.
In the Spring of 1845, U.S. President James Polk was preaching expansion and "manifest destiny" to the nation; wagon trains were backing up on the Sante Fe and Oregon Trails; the cotton gin and a slave economy were fueling a southern boom; the cities of the North were hitching the steam engine and the railway and the telegraph to the industrial plow; and Thoreau, on land borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson, with an axe borrowed from Bronson Alcott, was building a one-room cabin on a sunny, south-facing slope of Walden Pond ... FULL STORY »
