Cronching with Thoreau

Despite his knowledge of several languages, Thoreau’s spelling could be erratic. Torrey and Allen cleaned up most of it for the 1906 edition of the Journal, but I noticed that they retained the verb “to cronch.”

Dec. 8, 1850: “The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible! carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than woolen feet to all walkers, cronching the snow only.”

Jan. 2, 1853: “… we pick our way over a bed of pine boughs and twigs a foot or two deep, covering the ground, each twig and needle thickly incrusted with ice into one vast gelid mass, which our feet cronch as if we were walking through the cellar of some confectioner to the gods.”

March 21, 1853: “What shall I name those run-out pastures, those arid downs, where the reindeer lichen fairly covers the whole surface, and your feet cronch it at every step?”

July 11, 1854: “I heard Conant’s cradle cronching the rye behind the fringe of bushes in the Indian field.”

Sept. 1, 1859: “The ox requires the meadows to be shorn for him, and cronches both blade and stalk, even of the coarsest grass, as corn...”

There’s some cronching in Walden, too.

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer ...

He [a barred owl] could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me.

Perhaps it was a standard spelling in those days?