THOREAU AND THE PIONEERS.

THOREAU AND THE PIONEERS. In the article by Jill Lepore that I posted on here, she describes how Thoreau rejected the economic growth of the nineteenth century to return to a subsistence way of life. He made the decision, as he said, “‘not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.’” Thoreau’s building his cabin in 1845 was a radical rejection of New England civilization. Yet in the next fifty years thousands of Americans would do roughly the same thing. They would abandon most of their material possessions and the social life of the settled parts of the United States to move to unsettled areas, build their own cabins, and live lives somewhat like the one Thoreau chose. They were drawn not by principled asceticism, but by the free market in land.