"These French Canadian of the Woods are Half-Wild Folk": Wilderness, Whiteness, and Work in North America, 1840-1955

In Thoreau's early life, the racial sciences were in a nascent state. The superiority of the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic people was commonly understood, but hierarchies of racial characteristics that extended beyond a dichotomy of white and black were, according to historian Reginald Horsman, "confused" and "jumbled." There was also no "sharp separation between a precise scientific racialism and literary racial nationalism," Horsman found.31 Understanding Thoreau's influences will explain the type of sources that perpetuated immigrant images for American audiences before 1893. Thoreau read [John S. Springer]'s Forest Life and Forest Trees (1851), a popular account of logging labour in which French Canadians were represented as "demi-savages" with a propensity for woodwork.32 Like other Americans, Thoreau likely read Alexis [Alexis de Tocqueville]'s works, including "Two Weeks in the Wilderness," in which the French settlers are "carefree," "cheerful," men of "instinct" who submit to "life in the wild." "He clings to the land," De Tocqueville wrote, "and rips from the life in the wild everything he can snatch from it."33 One text that had a strong influence on how Americans thought of French speaking Canadians was Henry W. Longfellow's epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), a work that historian Naomi Griffiths found "was the most powerful cultural tool available to those constructing an Acadian identity." Although French Canadians and Acadians were distinct people, many Americans conflated the two groups. In Evangeline, the idyllic "forest primeval" of Acadia was the birthplace and a safe haven for the French who were forcefully expelled by the British. The French people were viewed as part of the landscape, their lives gliding on "like rivers that water the woodlands." Like the landscape, these people's society yielded slowly to time. The pine trees sang the tale of Evangeline.34 The history of North America as it was written by the "conservative evolutionist" and "progressive" historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries supported these racial taxonomies. Proponents of the "germ theory" of historical progression argued that, in the civilizing of the North American wilderness land, "the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon ... Germanic ... Teutonic or the Aryan race was a common intellectual assumption of the day." The "free land" of America was "an Anglo-Saxon theatre, an empire which only the 'old stock' Americans could have developed and in