Father Rasle’s dictionary of the Abenaki language

March 4. 

Thermometer 14° this morning, and this makes decent sleighing of the otherwise soft snow. 

March 4, 2018

Father Rasle’s dictionary of the Abenaki language amounts to a very concentrated and trustworthy natural history of that people, though it was not completed. What they have a word for, they have a thing for. A traveller may tell us that he thinks they used a parevent, or built their cabins in a certain form, or soaked their seed corn in water, or had no beard, etc., etc.; but when one gives us the word for these things, the question is settled, — that is a clincher. Let us know what words they had and how they used them, and we can infer almost all the rest.

The lexicographer not only says that a certain people have or do a certain thing, but, being evidently a disinterested party, it may be allowed that he brings suflicient evidence to prove it. He does not so much assert as exhibit. He has no transient or private purpose to serve. 

The snow balls particularly when, as now, colder weather comes after a damp snow has fallen on muddy ground, and it is soft beneath while just freezing above. I grow so fast and am so weighed down and hindered, that I have to stop continually and look for a rock where I may kick off these newly acquired heels and soles.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1858

Father Rasle’s dictionary of the Abenaki language. See Robert F. Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians 188