Admiration for the primitive or simple man — a common theme in Romantic literature — is corollary to the significance of the natural world in Thoreau's work. Thoreau was fascinated by the American Indian, whom he described as "[a]nother species of mortal men, but little less wild to me than the musquash they hunted" (journal entry, March 19, 1842). His attraction was founded on the Native's closer relationship to nature than that of civilized man. He saw in the relics of Indian culture, which he found wherever he walked, evidence of the "eternity behind me as well as the eternity before." Although he could not fail to notice that the remaining local Indians of his time had been degraded, Thoreau was able to visualize through the Native an earlier connection between man and nature that had been lost in the evolution of civilization. He wrote in The Maine Woods:
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, . . . amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. . . . Why read history then if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep in time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay! — for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. . . . He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man.
Thoreau wrote about the skillful Indian guide Joe Polis in The Maine Woods. He found characteristics of primitive man as a whole in the representative individual.
Thoreau also saw in other simple men who lived close to the woods and the earth a tacit understanding of the universal order that civilization obscured. In Walden ("Higher Laws"), he wrote of the following:
Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, [who] are often in a more favorable mood for observing her . . . than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation.
