Henry Thoreau writes:

> In this Billerica [Massachusetts] solid men must have lived, select from
year to year; a series of town clerks, at least; and there are old records
that you may search.  Some spring the white man came, built him a house, and
made a clearing here, letting in the sun, dried up a farm, piled up the old
gray stones in fences, cut down the pines around his dwelling, planted
orchard seeds brought from the old country, and persuaded the civil
apple-tree to blossom next to the wild pine and the juniper, shedding its
perfume in the wilderness.  Their old stocks still remain.  He culled the
graceful elm from out the woods and from the river-side, and so refined and
smoothed his village plot.  He rudely bridged the stream, and drove his team
afield into the river meadows, cut the wild grass, and laid bare the homes
of beaver, otter, muskrat, and with the whetting of his scythe scared off
the deer and bear.  He set up a mill, and fields of English grain sprang in
the virgin soil.  And with his grain he scattered the seeds of the dandelion
and the wild trefoil over the meadows, mingling his English flowers with the
wild native ones.  The bristling burdock, the sweet-scented catnip, and the
humble yarrow planted themselves along his woodland road, they too seeking
"freedom to worship God" in their way.  And thus he plants a town.  The
white man’s mullein soon reigned in Indian cornfields, and sweet-scented
English grasses clothed the new soil.  Where, then, could the Red Man set
his foot?  The honey-bee hummed through the Massachusetts woods, and sipped
the wild-flowers round the Indian’s wigwam, perchance unnoticed, when, with
prophetic warning, it stung the Red child’s hand, forerunner of that
industrious tribe that was to come and pluck the wild-flower of his race up
by the root. <

from "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", "Sunday" section, 1849

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