con¤dent that it will have helped to usher in a nobler race of Americans.
Amid the tumult of woodmen felling the virgin redwood forests in Cali-
fornia’s Mendocino County, the persona imagines that he hears the dry-
adic voice of the tree, “its mighty death-chant chanting,” and he under-
takes to translate it. (Whitman, who had never traveled west of the
Mississippi when he wrote the poem, apparently drew descriptive details
from published sources.) The tree’s “murmuring out of its myriad leaves”
thinly disguises the voice of the persona speaking through Leaves of Grass.
In featuring as its speaker a redwood tree in the process of being cut
down, the poet calls attention to his own condition at the time—“cut
down” by weakness and grief but apparently strengthened by the belief
that he has helped to create a vision of a nobler future for mankind. Like
the dying “Indian” who was a staple of popular culture, the redwood tree
voices its gratitude for the privilege (painful though it might be) of dis-
appearing from the land to make way for the “higher stage” of (white)
society that is destined to take its place. Whitman, like his contemporar-
ies, tended to picture the aboriginal Americans as vanishing from the
American scene. “It is consequently not surprising,” observes Ed Folsom,
“that the most extended poems he wrote about Indians were of them
dying.”^22 Most contemporary readers would have assumed that the dying
redwood tree was a metaphor for the supposedly vanishing “Red Man.”
And most of them did in fact view America’s westward movement as
a harbinger of personal and national progress, perhaps unaware of its
tragic implications for Native Americans or its environmental havoc.^23
The seemingly cheerful disappearance from the land of the indigenous
population to make way for the “white race” was the subject of count-
less literary productions, including Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,”
Fenimore Cooper’s “Indian” novels, Whitman’s “Yonondio” (1887), and
the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. Basic to this assumption
was the theory of the “stages of society,” according to which the darker,
and presumably inferior, races and their cruder social formations would
inevitably be superseded by a more sophisticated and technologically
adept Europeanized society.^24 Like the “good Indian” in a nineteenth-
century melodrama, Whitman’s tree seems happily resigned to die and
to see its fellow trees cut down in order to hasten the arrival of what it
calls “the new society proportionate to nature.” Having “grandly ¤ll ’d our
time,” sings the tree in its ¤rst aria, we “leave the ¤eld for them... predicted
long, / For a superior race, they too grandly ¤ll their time.” And in its sec-
“Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death” / 217