Cattle

Cattle occupy a revealing place in Walden: they are working animals essential to farming, but also the standard by which human prosperity is measured and a sign of how property can command the lives of its owners. Thoreau’s recurring comparisons make the relationship run in both directions: people work with cattle, yet the scale of the farm and barn suggests that the herd, in turn, keeps people.

Work and Dependence

Thoreau observes that young men in his town inherit farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools, and argues that such possessions are easier to acquire than to get rid of. Inheritance therefore appears less like uncomplicated wealth than an obligation to enter a predetermined field of labor. His fanciful alternative is to have been born in open pasture and suckled by a wolf, so that one might see more clearly what kind of work one had been called to do. The cattle belong to this inventory of inherited property: living animals, land, buildings, and equipment arrive together as a system that can shape a life before its owner has deliberately chosen how to live.

The system is social as well as economic. Thoreau notes that the annual Middlesex Cattle Show goes off with ceremony, as though all the joints of the agricultural machine were running smoothly. The public celebration offers a polished image of agricultural success, while his comparison elsewhere unsettles the assumption that the farmer is simply master of the farm. The show presents livestock as objects of display and improvement; the broader argument asks what kind of human life is organized around maintaining them.

Who Keeps Whom

Thoreau makes the reversal explicit: people may seem to be keepers of herds, but herds can be understood as the keepers of people, with animals freer in the exchange. People and oxen exchange work; measured by necessary labor alone, he says, the oxen have the advantage, since their farm is so much larger. The comparison shifts the measure of advantage away from human ownership and toward the amount of work each party must perform in relation to the land that sustains it.

The same argument appears in the architecture of farm life. Although the town has substantial houses of brick or stone, Thoreau says the farmer’s prosperity is still measured by how far the barn overshadows the house. The town is said to have the largest buildings for oxen, cows, and horses in the surrounding area, and impressive public buildings as well; by contrast, the county has few halls for free worship or free speech. The contrast is not merely between one kind of building and another. It makes visible a hierarchy of care and investment: structures for livestock can proclaim local wealth while spaces for independent human assembly remain scarce.

Households and the Cost of Living

Cattle belong to a wider economy of domestic labor that Thoreau scrutinizes when describing clothes, food, shelter, and furniture. He observes that the introduction of clothes brought sewing, work that could seem endless, since a woman’s dress is never finished. His account of self-reliance also depends on practical arrangements: he imagines avoiding trade and barter for food, but says clothing and fuel would still have to be obtained. The ideal of independence thus does not erase the work needed to keep a household going; it makes that work, and the limits of withdrawal from exchange, more visible.

His own household inventory includes furniture, some made by himself and the rest acquired without cost for which he had not rendered an account: a bed, table, desk, three chairs, and a small looking-glass. Elsewhere, he describes a home where the fire, oven, furniture, and utensils are its chief ornaments, and where washing, cooking, and other tasks remain inside the household rather than being sent out. These details place the grander image of the barn beside the repetitive labor of domestic life. Cattle and the buildings that house them are conspicuous measures of the farm, while the human work of making food, clothing, and shelter endures in less celebrated forms.

Landscape, Labor, and Memory

Thoreau’s references to cattle also connect farming to historical change in the landscape. In recalling the woods near his house, he says the road once resounded with the laughter and gossip of inhabitants within the memory of his townsmen. The recollected human presence gives the woods a history of settlement rather than making them an untouched backdrop. In another retrospective passage, he laments that woodchoppers have further laid waste the shores since his departure: the trees on the bottom, an old log canoe, and the dark surrounding woods are gone. The destruction changes what the pond can offer as a place of woodland wandering and water views.

In winter 1846–47, a hundred men of northern extraction descended on Walden Pond with carloads of farming implements, including sleds, plows, and drill-barrows. For sixteen days, Thoreau watched a hundred men working from his window, with teams, horses, and what looked like the equipment of farming. The scene shows agricultural labor transposed onto the frozen pond, where organized human work and its machinery occupy a landscape usually encountered through seasonal observation. Cattle are not the focus of this episode, but the teams and implements belong to the same material world of animal power, farming, and labor that his comparisons of herds and people examine.

The resulting portrait is not a simple condemnation of animals or farmers. Cattle sustain real work and stand at the center of a lived agricultural economy, but their scale, their barns, and the labor exchanged with them also expose what that economy asks of human beings. By asking who keeps whom, Thoreau turns livestock from a background feature of rural life into a measure of dependence: prosperity may be counted in herds and buildings, even as the people who possess them surrender time and freedom to the work of keeping them.