1. Forest
The Adirondacks
Map 1. Adirondack Park 1892
1. The Recreation of Nature
When the New York City minister Joel Headley collapsed in 1849 from a nervous breakdown, he was ordered by his doctor to try what was, for a mid-nineteenth-century American, a most unusual undertaking: a vacation. As a destination for this peculiar endeavor, Headley selected the little-known Adirondack Mountains, a series of heavily forested peaks that crowned New York's northernmost counties. The Adirondacks' clean air, tranquil scenery, and remoteness from urban centers, Headley reasoned, would provide a tonic for his shattered nerves. Although at the time upstate New York was better known for its hardscrabble farms and lumber camps than for its recreational opportunities, the frazzled minister had made a wise decision. A few weeks in the “vast wilderness” of the Adirondacks rejuvenated Headley's constitution, leading him to pronounce the region's “glorious woods” the perfect antidote to the stresses of urban life. “I could hardly believe,” he exulted, “I was in the same State of which New York was the emporium, whose myriad spires pierced the heavens.”[1]
These cries of amazement were echoed by several other nineteenth-century observers, all of whom, like Headley, puzzled over the existence of extensive forestlands only two hundred miles from New York City. As one anonymous author put it in 1865, “One might expect to find it [the Adirondacks], or its fellow, somewhere in the faroff West, that mythical land which is every day drawing nearer to us,—but not on the Eastern side of the continent,—not in
Headley, Northrup, and Sylvester were just a few of the many voices joining in a debate that had by the midnineteenth century assumed an increasingly prominent place in American culture. The discussion's core questions were deceptively simple: What is nature? And how does it shape human affairs? But at perhaps no time in United States history were the answers the source of so much intellectual ferment. The Anglo-American world of the nineteenth century witnessed an efflorescence of works seeking to plumb nature's inner workings: the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; the American school of landscape painting, developed by artists such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Thomas Moran; the rise of natural history, heralded by the founding of journals such as Nature and the American Naturalist in the 1860s; the eugenics movement led by Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton; even the popular books of Henry William Herbert, who in the 1830s immigrated to the United States, renamed himself Frank Forester, and introduced the American elite to the upper-class European tradition of sports hunting. Nature, as the historian David Arnold has aptly observed, was “one of the principal metaphors of the age, the prism through which all manner of ideas and ideals were brilliantly refracted.”[3]
Yet in spite of this shared subject matter, the era's nature studies did not always cohere in any clear or consistent manner. At the same time that A. Judd Northrup might reason that the law of nature protected the Adirondacks from development, a far more pessimistic—and influential—series of natural laws was being promulgated by a onetime schoolteacher, newspaper editor, and diplomat from Vermont named
Marsh's grim scenario both explained the past (making Marsh arguably the first environmental historian) and predicted the future. The same environmental catastrophe that had devastated the Old World, Marsh asserted, now threatened to spread to the United States and the rest of the globe, with potentially apocalyptic consequences: “The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.”[5]
One spot that Marsh singled out as being in urgent need of protection was Headley's beloved Adirondack Mountains, which contained the headwaters of several of New York's most important rivers, including the Hudson. While the region's remoteness had so far prevented its development, Marsh feared that with each passing year settlers and lumber companies were whittling away more of the Adirondacks woodlands. Left unchecked, Marsh maintained, such actions would place New York in grave danger: “Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the
To prevent such disaster, Marsh proposed a novel solution: New York should “declare the remaining forest [of the Adirondacks] the inalienable property of the commonwealth” and become the forest's administrator and protector. The current land policy in the United States—converting the public domain into private property—was, in Marsh's opinion, a grave mistake. “It is a great misfortune to the American Union that the State Governments have so generally disposed of their original domain to private citizens,” he wrote. “It is vain to expect that legislation can do anything effectual to arrest the progress of the evil [of the destruction of woodlands] … except so far as the state is still the proprietor of extensive forests.”[7]
Marsh advocated this radical shift in policy for two reasons. The first was a distrust of the inhabitants of the countryside, particularly the small-scale farmers who made up the bulk of the residents in places like the Adirondacks. In keeping with his Whig political beliefs, Marsh viewed these members of the lower classes as lacking the foresight and expertise necessary to be wise stewards of the natural world. Man and Nature thus included pointed critiques of “the improvident habits of the backwoodsman” and “the slovenly husbandry of the border settler.” Second, Marsh believed that in a world dominated by the search for short-term private gain, only the state had the longterm public interest at heart. Marsh pointed approvingly to Europe, where coalescing national bureaucracies had established state forest academies, carefully regulated forests, and the new science of silviculture. “The literature of the forest, which in England and America has not yet become sufficiently extensive to be known as a special branch of authorship, counts its thousands of volumes in Germany, Italy, and France,” he noted. If the Old World's ecological disasters had something to teach the United States, then so did its recent successes in uniting science and the state.[8]
Undergirding Man and Nature's critique of backwoodsmen and its appeals to the lessons of European forestry lay a powerful new vision of nature. In Marsh's view, the natural world existed in a state of balance and stability. “Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline, and proportion,” he wrote in a passage anticipating twentieth-century ecology's
Man and Nature's unique perspective on the natural world not only made the book a bestseller, it established the text as, in Lewis Mumford's words, the “fountainhead of the conservation movement.” Indeed, Marsh's work originated the degradation discourse that would dominate conservationist narratives about landscape change for the next century. The discourse's essential ingredients were a natural world that was stable, predictable, and manageable; a rural populace engaged in “unwise” environmental practices that would have potentially catastrophic ecological consequences if left unchecked; and an interventionist state armed with technical and administrative expertise. Combined with one another, these narrative elements formed the central story of conservation—a tale that prophesied imminent ecological doom, unless natural resources were removed from local control and placed in the hands of scientifically trained governmental managers.[10]
With its dire predictions of what deforestation in the Adirondacks would mean for the state's waterways, Man and Nature attracted immediate attention in New York. As early as 1872, the state legislature, prodded by an unlikely alliance of sports hunters who wanted to preserve New York's northern counties as a permanent hunting and camping ground, and industrialists concerned about maintaining an adequate flow of water for the region's mills and canals, formed a committee to look into the feasibility of adopting Marsh's recommendation to establish a park in the Adirondacks. The following year, the committee issued a report concluding “that the protection of a great portion of that forest from wanton destruction is absolutely and immediately required” and calling for the creation of a “timber reserve and preserve” in the Adirondacks. While the committee members drew much of their discussion directly from Marsh, they appended to his argument an additional point of their own: “[Besides] these weighty considerations of political economy, there are social and moral reasons which render the preservation of the forest advisable. … The boating, tramping, hunting and fishing expedition afford that physical training which modern Americans—of the Eastern
This linkage of an environmental crisis (deforestation and water loss) and a social crisis (urbanism and the undermining of traditional models of masculinity) captures the modern and antimodern impulses that, in uneasy combination, lay at the core of the nascent conservation movement. On the one hand, conservation, with its emphasis on using the power of science and the state to rationally manage natural resources, represented a quintessentially modern approach toward the environment. On the other, conservation frequently invoked the Romantic search for authentic experience, in which nature was offered as the antidote to an increasingly industrial, “overcivilized” existence. These two positions did not necessarily contradict one another; it was possible to be an industrialist during the week and a sports hunter on the weekend (as many of the leading proponents of conservation in fact were). But tensions between the two perspectives would, at times, prove difficult to reconcile. As a result, conservation never traveled a simple trajectory. Although its central beliefs remained remarkably consistent—an emphasis on professionalization, on governmental ownership and management of the environment, and on the inherently stable and predictable character of the natural world—conservation charted an irregular orbit around these positions, as first one force than another exerted its gravitational pull on the movement.[12]
In the case of the Adirondacks, recommendations for state action languished until 1883, when a severe drought gripped New York and the water level in its principal rivers, the Hudson, the Mohawk, and the Black, dipped to alarmingly low levels. Concerned with the effect this decline could have on the Erie Canal and downstream mills, the New York Chamber of Commerce and the New York Board of Trade added their weight to calls for state management of the Adirondacks. In response, the New York legislature passed a measure in 1883 forbidding any further sales of state lands in the Adirondacks. Over the next few years, state control over the region ratcheted steadily upward. In 1885, the legislature reorganized its holdings in the Adirondacks into a forest preserve, overseen by a forest commission. In 1892, lawmakers consolidated these efforts into the three-million-acre Adirondack Park, made
The ultimate result of these actions was to turn the Adirondacks of the mid-1880s into the most advanced experiment in conservation in the United States. Many of the people who would later lead the national conservation movement—Franklin Hough, Bernhard Fernow, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot among them—gained their first insights into the challenges of American forestry in the woods of northern New York.[14] Moreover, for conservationists, New York's Forest Preserve established a viable new role for the state: active supervisor of the environment. Inspired by the example of the Adirondacks, several prominent conservationist organizations, including both the American Forestry Congress and the federal Division of Forestry (which at the time possessed only an educational function, since there were no national forests to administer), held up New York's Forest Preserve—“this first attempt at making a reality of forest preservation”—as a model to be emulated nationwide.[15] Congress eventually accepted such suggestions in 1891 when it passed the Forest Reserve Act. But during conservation's early years, it was New York's unprecedented undertaking in the Adirondacks that set the pace for the rest of the nation.[16]“Here [in the Adirondacks], then, for the first time on the American continent, had the idea of State forestry, management of State lands on forestry principles, taken shape,” observed Fernow in his 1911 textbook, A Brief History of Forestry. “A new doctrine of State functions had gained the day.”[17]
One point, however, was frequently obscured amid such celebrations: the consequences that the coming of conservation would have for the approximately 16,000 people already living in the Adirondacks.[18] On those rare occasions when New York authorities pondered the impact
Given such conditions, officials assumed that the region's residents would readily embrace conservation. “The little settlements already existing in the region are not incompatible with the project [of a park],” concluded the 1873 report of the Commissioners of State Parks. Recognizing the money to be made from the increased tourism that an Adirondacks park would attract, the inhabitants of the region would, the commissioners predicted, “take a direct interest in the welfare of the park” and “would voluntarily protect the game and timber from unlawful destruction.”[21]
There was a grain of truth to this hypothesis. When the Forest Commission dispatched agents in 1885 to interview local inhabitants about their reactions to the newly created Forest Preserve, it found many residents ignorant of the specifics of the reserve but in agreement with the larger project of protecting the Adirondacks' forests. “I have lived here forty-five years, being a hunter and passing a large portion of my time in the woods,” declared one local. “The woods must be taken care of if they want any left worth calling a forest. I am in favor of the best plan.” Offered another: “We depend on the woods and the attractions of the place for our living, and don't want to see either destroyed or marred.” “People through this valley are very much in favor of the work of the Forest Commission,” added a resident of Keene Valley in Essex County. “We need the protection, as the woods are our one source of income.”[22]
Despite this promising start, however, relations between conservationists and Adirondackers quickly soured. Following their first patrols, the Forest Commission's newly appointed foresters reported “gross infractions” of the state's new game, timber, and fire laws. Noting the frequent hostility the foresters encountered whenever they tried to arrest those responsible for such crimes, the New York Fisheries Commission concluded that “in the whole Adirondack region … the utmost lawlessness prevail[s].” Contemporary newspaper accounts added to the sense of crisis. In 1889, for example, the New York Times published a string of articles bearing such lurid headlines as “Pirates of the Forest,” “Stealing Is Their Trade,” and “Useless Forestry Laws” that depicted violations of the state's conservation code as common throughout the Adirondacks. As such accounts multiplied, many conservationists began to fear that their celebrated new plans for the region were on the verge of being swept away by a wave of inexplicable popular disorder.[23]
Perhaps in no nation are agrarian fantasies as complex and contradictory as in the United States. Nineteenth-century discussions of the Adirondacks, for instance, pivoted on two countervailing agrarian tropes. The first, which might be called the pastoral, stressed the simplicity and abundance of rural life. “An easy life is theirs,” remarked Headley upon encountering some settlers at Raquette Lake: “No taxes to pay—no purchases to make—and during most of the year, fish and deer and moose ready to come almost at their call.” William Murray—whose popular 1869 book, Adventures in the Wilderness: or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, brought a stream of tourists to the region—offered a similar vision: “A more honest, cheerful, and patient class of men cannot be found the world over. Born and bred, as many of them were, in this wilderness, skilled in all the lore of woodcraft, handy with the [fishing] rod, superb at the paddle, modest in demeanor and speech, honest to a proverb, they deserve and receive the admiration of all who make their acquaintance. … Uncontaminated with the vicious habits of civilized life, they are not unworthy of the magnificent surroundings amid which they dwell.”
A second trope, which might be called the primitive, focused on the backwardness and privations of rural life. J. P. Lundy, who visited the Adirondacks in the 1870s, saw only the region's “hard and grinding poverty.” The typical Adirondacker, Lundy reported, “looked upon all physical and mental superiority with aversion or disdain. … He trapped
Of course, neither pole—the pastoral nor the primitive—offered more than a crude approximation of a place like the Adirondacks. Both interpretations, by seeking to capture the unchanging essence of rural life, missed the dynamism that had long marked the region and its shifting human populations. For much of the 1600s and 1700s, the Adirondacks had been a lightly inhabited border zone fought over by the Iroquois to the south and Huron and Algonquin to the north. Bands from these nations sometimes hunted for moose and beaver in the Adirondacks, but because of the risk of attack and the short growing season, they rarely established permanent villages. Warfare under these circumstances functioned as a sort of crude conservation policy, limiting the ability of native peoples to exploit the region's resources for any extended period of time.[25]
Once the power of the Iroquois was broken in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a variety of newcomers drifted into the area: Yankees from Vermont and the more southerly parts of New York, and French Canadians from the north. Preceding these pioneers were Indian settlers, many of them refugees from tribes such as the Penobscot (an eastern Abenaki people originally from Maine) and the St. Francis (a western Abenaki group originally from Vermont and southern Canada) displaced from homelands farther east. As the settler Harvey Moody recalled in 1860, a number of Native American families were already well established in the Adirondacks when he arrived in the region as a young boy: “When I fust come to the S'nac [Lake Saranac] with father, there was nobody else about there but Injins. I used to meet 'm on the lakes fishin' in their bark canoes, and trappin' about the streams, and huntin' everywheres.”[26]
| SOURCE: 1880 Population Census, Manuscript Schedules, Hamilton County, New York, Roll 837, T9, Records of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives. | ||
|---|---|---|
| male | ||
| Agriculture (farmer, hired hand) | 564 | (48.6%) |
| Timber industry (“worker in lumberwoods,” shingle maker) | 228 | (19.6%) |
| Crafts (mason, boatbuilder, blacksmith, carpenter | 56 | (4.8%) |
| Laborer (unspecified) | 180 | (15.5%) |
| Professions (minister, teacher, surveyor, clerk | 40 | (3.4%) |
| Services (hotel keeper, guide, gamekeeper) | 86 | (7.4%) |
| Miscellaneous (pauper, hermit) | 8 | (.7%) |
| TOTAL | 1,162 | (100%) |
| Female | ||
| Homemaker (“keeping house,” keeping shanty”) | 731 | (94.7%) |
| Professions (teacher, nurse) | 14 | (1.8%) |
| Domestic service (servant, hotel maid) | 19 | (2.5%) |
| Trades (glove maker, dressmaker) | 8 | (1.0%) |
| TOTAL | 772 | 100%) |
Encroaching white settlers both feuded and intermarried with the Indian peoples they encountered in the Adirondacks.[27] By the time federal census takers arrived in the region in the midnineteenth century, New York—born whites had become the predominant group in the region, but there remained Indian families, wives, and husbands scattered throughout the communities of the central Adirondacks. The 1880 census, for example, records that Hamilton County—the only one of New York's northern counties located completely within the Adirondack Park—was home to eleven Indians, eight living at Indian Lake and three at Long Lake.[28] For whites and Indians alike, the most common occupation for men listed in the federal censuses of the 1800s was “farmer,” while the activities of women were typically classified as “keeping house.” (See Tables 1 and 2.) Neither category illuminated the diversity of economic life in the Adirondacks with much precision. The region's women undertook countless domestic chores, from gardening to gathering medicinal herbs to maintaining the networks of mutuality and
| SOURCE: 1880 Population Census, Manuscript Schedules, Hamilton County, New York, Roll 837, T9, Records of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, National Archives | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 3,449 | (87.8%) | |
| Northeastern United States | 129 | (3.3%) | |
| Connecticut | 11 | ||
| Maine | 4 | ||
| Massachusetts | 16 | ||
| New Hampshire | 9 | ||
| New Jersey | 4 | ||
| Pennsylvania | 12 | ||
| Rhode Island | 3 | ||
| Vermont | 70 | ||
| Southern/Western United States | 5 | (.1%) | |
| llinois | 3 | ||
| South Carolina | 1 | ||
| Virginia | 1 | ||
| Canada | 144 | (3.7%) | |
| Europe | 200 | (5.1%) | |
| England | 36 | ||
| France | 12 | ||
| German States | 44 | ||
| Holland | 3 | ||
| Ireland | 87 | ||
| Scotland | 16 | ||
| Switzerland | 2 | ||
| TOTAL | 3,927 | (100.0%) | |
These same forests provided Adirondackers with much of their annual support. In spring and summer, men collected wild ginseng (Panax trifolius) for resale to outside traders, while their wives and children gathered medicinal herbs such as sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) and the wild leeks (Allium tricoccum), cowslips (Caltha palustris), adder tongues (Botrychium virginianum), and berries that Adirondacks families used to supplement their diets. “When the berries came it was nothing but pick berries with mother and the children that were old enough to go,” recalled Henry Conklin, an early resident of Herkimer County. In the fall, men—and, upon rare occasion, women—went into the woods in pursuit of deer, bear, or partridges. Younger boys occupied themselves closer to home by setting snares for smaller game like rabbits or woodchucks. All caught fish for their families' tables in the multitude of streams and ponds throughout the Adirondacks. In the winter months, local males ventured into the woods yet again, lacing on their snowshoes to collect valuable forest products such as spruce gum or wild furs. It was not unusual for Adirondacks men to be gone for a week or more on such expeditions, during which they usually camped in bark shanties that they erected wherever they happened to be at the time.[30]
The far-flung character of these undertakings reflected themselves in turn in local property rights. Although state officials in the 1880s charged Adirondackers with looking upon the forests as “a piece of ‘commons,’ or as a public crib where all may feed who choose,” matters were more complex than this assessment implied. In keeping with the common-rights ideologies prevailing elsewhere in the rural United States at this time, locals did regard undeveloped lands, whether state or private, as open to hunting and foraging. Engaging in such activities on another's property “we would not call a trespass,” admitted the Adirondacks resident Freeman Tyrrell in 1895. “I know I don't when they go on my lands.”[31] These “rights in the woods,” however, were hedged by numerous constraints. Inhabitants often considered certain features of the woods, such as game blinds, fish weirs, or traplines, to be—like homesteads or other “improved” areas—exclusive property. Interference with these could prompt violent confrontations, as happened in the late 1800s, when H. Dwight Grant and his
This common-rights ideology persisted in the Adirondacks despite the changes that, in the years following the Civil War, pulled the region with increasing force into the expanding national economy. Unlike much of the rest of the American countryside, the economic modernization of the Adirondacks did not center on agriculture—the region remained too remote and its soil too thin to support intensive farming—but rather on the forests themselves. By the 1860s, northern New York had become home to an extensive forest industry composed of tanneries (which used bark from the area's abundant hemlocks to cure hides) and lumber operations (which regularly hired crews of local men to cut and skid logs during the winter months). Although these companies purchased vast portions of the Adirondacks landscape after the Civil War, they seldom tried to close their property to local hunting and foraging, as such activities posed little threat to the spruce, pine, and hemlock that the lumber companies sought. Moreover, these corporations seldom sought to exercise their property rights for very long. Typically, they would cut the marketable timber; then, rather than holding the
Technological limitations posed an additional barrier to the Adirondacks timber industry in the immediate post—Civil War years. Today, the term “lumbering” may conjure up images of vast clearcuts, but up until the late 1880s most timber operations in the Adirondacks logged on a selective basis. Because companies transported logs to saw mills via streams, only those trees located within a few miles of a waterway could be cut—and then only those species that floated well. Softwoods such as black spruce (Abies nigra) and white pine (Pinus strobus) were the lumberman's favorites, while hardwoods such as the sugar maple (Acer sacharinum), red oak (Quercus rubra), red beech (Fagus ferruginea), and white birch (Betula populifolia), all of which floated poorly, were rarely cut, except for local consumption. These circumstances ensured that only a limited number of the region's trees were felled. “The lumberman did not take more than eight trees to the acre, on an average,” explained the Forest Commission in 1891.[36]“The phrase ‘lumbered land’ is a somewhat misleading one. It does not imply that such land is cleared, devastated, or even stripped of timber. The term is used, locally, to describe lands from which the ‘soft wood’ (spruce, hemlock, pine and tamarack—one or all) has been taken, leaving the hard wood (birch, cherry, maple, beech, etc.) standing. Generally there is so much of this hard wood left on a ‘lumbered’ tract that an inexperienced eye glancing over it would scarcely detect the work of an axe. The woodsmen expect to see such land covered with spruce again, large enough to be marketable, in about fifteen years.”[37] In fact, Forest Commission records from 1897 indicate that for all the dire accounts of deforestation circulating at the time of the Forest Reserve's creation, most lands in the Adirondacks retained their tree cover, and many never felt the woodsman's ax.[38] (See Table 3.)
Lumbering nonetheless set in motion profound ecological changes in the Adirondacks. The opening up of the forest canopy that accompanied timber operations promoted what ecologists have come to term the edge effect: a transition zone between open land and woodland,
| SOURCE: New York Fisheries, Game, and Forest Commission, Third Annual Report, 1897, 269. | ||
|---|---|---|
| Cleared for agriculture | 75,819 | (2.5%) |
| Wild meadow | 724 | (>.1%) |
| Water | 59,111 | (2.0%) |
| “Wastelands” | 22,424 | (.7%) |
| Burned areas | 18,220 | (.6%) |
| “Denuded lands” | 61,009 | (2.0%) |
| Forested, soft timber removed | 1,627,955 | (54.2%) |
| Untouched forestlands | 1,139,593 | (37.9%) |
| TOTAL | 3,004,855 | (100.0%) |
This growth in the whitetail population had a significant impact on another forest industry taking shape in the Adirondacks in the 1860s: the tourist trade. Headley had been an anomaly when he visited the region in the 1849, but following the Civil War, members of a growing urban elite began to flock to the Adirondacks. Many of these visitors were what local residents called “sports”—well-to-do professional men who hoped to indulge in the masculine pastimes of hunting and fishing in one of the largest extant forests in the Northeast. These sports rarely ventured into the Adirondacks' woods without hiring local guides, whose job it was to conduct hunters to likely hunting spots, set up camp, and track deer and other game. Much to their delight, Adirondacks men discovered that at a time when laboring in a lumber camp
For all its monetary benefits, however, tourism unleashed new pressures as well. The arrival of large numbers of sports placed increased demands on the Adirondacks' limited supply of fish and game, while the rise of the tourist industry created fresh class divisions in the region, with a few locals capitalizing on the trade to become large landowners and employers. Perhaps the most successful of these entrepreneurs was Apollos “Paul” Smith, a onetime trapper and guide. In 1852, at the suggestion of one of his clients, Smith built a small “hunter's retreat,” where he and his wife could take in eight or ten sports as boarders. Bit by bit, Smith added to his holdings, until by the time of his death in 1912 he owned some thirty-five thousand acres and a four-story hotel overlooking lower St. Regis Lake that could accommodate a hundred guests. Smith's clientele included such members of the eastern upper classes as Gifford Pinchot, who as a child summered in the Adirondacks with his family in 1879, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, who stayed at Smith's when he made his first visit to the Adirondacks in 1871. Besides running a hotel and employing many of his neighbors to wait on his guests, Smith sold lots to wealthy vacationers who wanted to construct summer homes nearby. Although these homes were euphemistically called “camps” after the rough cabins occupied by the region's inhabitants, many became luxurious and exclusive estates. “The guide told me that in some of these ‘camps’ there was hot and cold water, and in one electric lights,” remarked one visitor in 1898. “It all seemed to me like playing at roughing it.” Even Smith, in his more candid moments, admitted his bewilderment at the odd business in which he found himself: “I tell you if there's a spot on the face of the earth where millionaires go to play at housekeeping in log cabins and tents as they do here, I have it yet to hear about.”[41]
Such developments made the Adirondacks of the late nineteenth century a region that defied easy categorization. It was a place of abandoned farms and of grand new estates, where daily rhythms were set by commercial timber operations and by subsistence agriculture, by wage labor
2. Public Property
and Private Parks
“The people, as a rule, know nothing of the existence of a Forest Commission.” So reported one of the commission's agents following a special investigative tour of the Adirondacks in the summer of 1885, in a comment that portended the enormous challenges facing the region's newly appointed managers. It had been a relatively easy matter for officials in Albany to draw a “blue line” around some three million acres of state and private land in northern New York and to proclaim this space a park and forest preserve governed by a new series of environmental regulations. But landscapes do not magically reshape themselves in accordance with the desires expressed in legislation. Establishing a functioning conservation program would require not just new laws but new mechanisms of enforcement as well, for, as New York officials soon discovered, managing the ecology of the Adirondacks was possible only if one monitored the daily interactions of local residents with the natural world.[1]
To facilitate the expanded state supervision of the countryside that conservation required, the Forest Commission embarked upon a program of what the political scientist James Scott has termed “state simplification,” in which officials standardized and rationalized local practices to make them more comprehensible—and ultimately more controllable—by government agencies.[2] Creating a simplified Adirondacks, however, was far from a simple process. The new agencies charged with overseeing the region's ecology often lacked basic knowledge about local conditions. Even data that one imagines to have been
Differentiating between state and private lands was therefore essential if the Forest Commission was to apply the state's conservation laws in the appropriate manner. Yet instead of organizing its property documents in one central place, New York had long left this task to each county, which kept track of its records in whichever way seemed to best fit local practice. As a result, simply to compile an accurate list of the lands in its domain, the Forest Commission had to spend almost fifteen years sorting through the often confusing and contradictory land titles and tax records filed with the six counties that had lands located within the Adirondack Park. Not until 1901 did the commission complete this project, releasing what the superintendent of state forests considered to be “the most important and valuable publication issued by the Department”: a definitive, 367-page list of all “the 5,934 separate parcels of land which constitute the Forest Preserve.”[3]
In addition to clarifying the title to its lands in the Forest Preserve, the Forest Commission also needed to locate each of its holdings—a task complicated by the lack of a standardized grid of lot lines in the region. Most of the Adirondacks had been surveyed only roughly, sometimes not since the 1700s. Furthermore, many parcels were bound by idiosyncratic limits, which, while they made sense to those on the ground, often confused state officials and other outsiders. One plot in Herkimer County, for example, was delineated at one corner by “a large rock marked (+)”; another by “a soft maple tree at the end of Brown's Tract road marked 13 ¼ miles from Moose River.” A 737acre parcel of public land in Hamilton County began at the northwest corner of a farm owned by one Charles Fisher and then proceeded in a northwest direction until it reached the shore of “Mud or Gilmour's Lake.” From here it continued north along the shore of the lake until reaching “a hemlock tree marked for a corner.” It then went south along a roadway until touching upon Charles Fisher's farm again, at which point it traced an eccentric arc marked by a birch tree, a beech tree, and two township lines.[4]
Those not familiar with local geography often found it tedious and time consuming to chart the unusual boundaries of such plots. As Verplanck Colvin, the state official who headed the Adirondack Survey throughout the 1880s, observed, the “old reference points” mentioned in property documents frequently eluded his survey team. “While there are numerous references to ‘a stake’ or a ‘heap of stones,’ it has been found by experience in the field that the stakes have in most places entirely decayed and disappeared and the ‘heap’ of stones are generally quite indistinguishable from other stones, scattered throughout the woods.” Because of such conditions, it was, “extremely difficult in all, and impossible in many cases, to establish the exact boundaries of the various tracts and subdivisions [of the park].” In 1896, Forest Commission officials admitted that even after a decade they had yet to find and mark all the boundaries in the region: “It should be understood that the lot lines which are so distinctly shown on our Adirondack map are not always so apparent in the forest itself, where, at the best, they can be traced only by the occasional faint ‘blaze,’ made in most cases fifty, and perhaps ninety years ago,—marks discernible only by those experienced in this peculiar woodcraft. In fact, the boundaries of the 160 or 200-acre lots in some townships never existed except on the map of some early surveyor who, having surveyed the outer lines, contented himself with making a ‘paper allotment,’ and doing nothing further in the way of surveying and marking these interior lines on the ground itself.” While these conditions rarely interfered with local residents' uses of the forests, they often placed the Forest Commission in the awkward position of being unable to locate, let alone manage, its holdings.[5]
To counter such obstacles, the Forest Commission embarked on one of the essential practices of state simplification: the creation of a new, more detailed map of the region to be supervised. A cartographic representation of the Adirondack Park, the commission reasoned, would condense the information necessary for its conservation policies into a single page, thus providing a handy synoptic overview of the region and facilitating many of the chores associated with administration: “Ever since the organization of this Commission the necessity of a map which would show correctly the allotments of the various townships in the Great Forest of Northern New York has been felt, both in our office business and in our field work. … The Wardens, Inspectors and Foresters have been greatly impeded in their work by the lack of some accurate diagram which would show on one sheet the complete allotment of that territory. The Commission has accordingly directed that a map be
Besides making the Adirondacks more legible to outside agencies like the Forest Commission, such maps also played an important role in the region's reorganization. The Forest Commission's official maps documented the agency's idealized conception of the Adirondacks under conservation as a tidy grid of property units and forest types. At the same time, the agency neglected to record local uses of these same woodlands—the locations of traplines and hunting shanties, of areas frequently used for hunting, fishing, or gathering wild plants, of favorite spots for cutting firewood or building supplies, and so on—that might cloud the state control that the Forest Commission sought to achieve. For these reasons, many inhabitants viewed the agency's mapping efforts as a threatening first step toward erasing all local claims to the forest. When asked by surveyors for information on the location of local lands within the Forest Preserve, therefore, residents frequently responded by feigning ignorance or giving intentionally misleading responses. As investigators for the Forest Commission fumed in 1895, “Few persons of those examined have appeared to know of the exact locations or bounds of State lands in any township.” Other locals, as soon as the survey left their vicinity, burned, cut down, or otherwise destroyed the blazed trees and other monuments that surveyors had erected to indicate boundaries—so frequently, in fact, that the New York legislature in 1888 increased its penalties for anyone who “willfully or maliciously remove[s] any monuments of stone, wood or other durable material, erected for the purpose of designating the corner, or any other point, in the boundary of any lot or tract of land.”[7]
By destroying monuments, which in turn obscured the location of the state's landholdings, locals hoped to preserve their access to the resources on nearby public woodlands. Indeed, as one exasperated warden noted, those arrested for trespassing on state lands often defended their
Of all the issues associated with the state's efforts to delineate its territory in the Adirondacks, by far the most volatile concerned the location of local homesteads. Throughout the nineteenth century, Adirondackers had tended to establish homes and farms on any available plot of land, often neglecting, because of the costs and difficulties involved, to obtain any title to their holdings. In place of a system of property rights that flowed from the state downward, such folk substituted a property system based on usufruct rights—rights based on use and occupation, in which lands that were unused were unneeded and therefore open to settlement by others. This “homestead ethic,” which derived its authority from the republican belief that the ownership of land was crucial to one's political and economic independence, had been workable when the state was a remote presence. But after the arrival of conservation in 1885, many settlers suddenly found themselves at risk of occupying the wrong space on the Forest Commission's new map and being recategorized as squatters.[9]
By 1891, the Forest Commission's chief warden, Samuel Garmon, had identified squatting on state lands as one of his most pressing concerns.[10] Subsequent reports from the Forest Commission bewailed “the occupation of land in the Forest Preserve … [as] one of the most perplexing and complicated questions with which this Commission has to deal.” With the boundaries of so much of the Adirondacks in question, it was difficult even to determine the exact scope of the problem. Official tallies varied widely, with the total number of illegal dwellings ranging from ninety-eight to more than nine hundred. Squatters also came from a surprising variety of backgrounds. While many of those dwelling on state land were longtime inhabitants of the region (“farmers who have occupied the premises as homes for over thirty, and, in many instances, forty years”), other squatters were wealthy tourists who had built vacation homes on plots purchased from Adirondacks locals.[11] Consequently, in the words of the Forest Commission, “these occupancies range all the way from the most primitive shanty to costly and beautiful summer homes.” Since many of the wealthy summer
In the face of such dilemmas, the Forest Commission adopted a policy of benign neglect for much of the nineteenth century, limiting new settlements but doing little to oust longtime squatters. Not until the early 1900s did the commission begin to push more aggressively to reclaim control of its lands. In 1901, for example, the state issued ejection notices to a large number of residents of the Raquette Lake area. Many squatters, however, refused to leave their homes. After several delays, the commission finally dispatched foresters to tear down and burn the offending structures. In November of 1905, District Game Protector John B. Burnham and fifteen men went into Raquette Lake with orders to destroy some fifty houses on state lands, only to be met by angry locals: “threats of violence to the state officers if property was harmed by them were freely given out at the village, and it was expected that there would be trouble,” noted a reporter for the New York Times. Residents tried to counter the state's attempt to eject them by emphasizing the public nature of the park as well as their lengthy residence in the area. “[The squatters] offer as a defense that the Adirondack forest park was created at the expense of and for the use and enjoyment of the people of the State, and that they, as citizens, are entitled to such use as they now make and always have made of it.” While the Forest Commission did end up expelling a significant portion of the squatters after 1910, some settlers continued to resist their removal, with the result that property rights in certain portions of the Adirondack Park, including Raquette Lake, remain contested even today.[13]
To project its authority in these and other tense situations, the Forest Commission relied on its “forest police,” or foresters. Adopting a policy
In 1886, the Forest Commission hired an initial force of 25 foresters. Although this number dipped to 15 the following year because of budget shortages, the next several decades witnessed a steady upward progression in the force. In 1892, the number reached 20; in 1895, 38; in 1902, 50; in 1910, 90; and in 1912, 125. Despite such growth, there were never enough foresters to satisfy many conservationists. Outraged letters to the editor complaining of continued violations of the game and timber laws were standard features of such leading conservation journals as Forest and Stream and Garden and Forest throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Adirondack Park was so large and the lawbreaking by local people so incessant that some letter writers suggested that only by radically expanding the force to 400 or even 1,000 foresters could the state prevent violations of the conservation code.[15]
To be sure, the vast territories that foresters had to cover often hindered their abilities to enforce the forestry laws. Isaac Kenwell, the fish and game protector based in Indian Lake during the 1890s, for example, was assigned to a district that included not only much of Hamilton County but portions of neighboring Essex County as well. During the winter of 1893–94, Kenwell reported to his superiors that he had traveled an average of 481 miles per month (his high being 738 miles in January 1894). Because of the lack of trails, much of this patrolling was slow, laborious work. “There is a large part of my district so situated that it is impossible to get from one section to another very quickly,” explained Kenwell. “Large parts have to be travelled on foot.” Even in
But there were other factors beyond a simple calculus of square miles per forester that inhibited the enforcement of state forestry laws in the Adirondacks. While the hiring of local people as foresters provided the Forest Commission with individuals who possessed a detailed knowledge of the Adirondacks forest, it also meant that foresters possessed strong allegiances to the rest of Adirondacks society and, as a result, often felt the tug of local loyalties. Since it was impossible for the Forest Commission to monitor every facet of their daily behavior, foresters often had considerable latitude in deciding how to enforce—and not enforce—the forestry laws. As Forest and Stream charged in 1885: “The constables being appointed from the country round and knowing many of the guides, it is a generally understood thing that if no venison is in sight there will be no search for any. As soon, therefore, as a deer is killed the carcass is buried or hidden in the underbrush, and if a constable should pay a visit to the camp he and the campers have so many pleasant topics of conversation that it seems a pity to introduce unpleasant ones.”[17] Fourteen years later, the situation, according to the journal, remained much the same: “The game protectors realized the hardships which a thorough and effective execution of their powers would entail, and in most cases it was more than their positions were worth to buck up against public sentiment and antagonize the community in which they lived by a strict enforcement of the text [of the law].”[18]
Indeed, a standard feature of Adirondacks folklore was the “good” forester. This figure might overlook certain violations; or, rather than arresting an offending local immediately, he would first issue a warning, giving the lawbreaker an opportunity to mend his or her ways and thus avoid arrest. Ira Gray, born in the Adirondacks in 1886, recalled one such story about a protector who paid a visit to a local who was wellknown for hunting deer out of season. After the two had enjoyed a friendly dinner together, the forester asked the man to poach deer no longer, confessing, “I would be awfully sorry to catch you.” Similar
Such stories, however, formed only a small portion of the strategies that local people employed to regulate the behavior of foresters. One other common tactic was the social ostracization of an overzealous forester. Fletcher Beede, the district game and fish protector of Essex County, charged that after arresting several locals for hunting deer out of season and for using illegal fishing devices, his family's position in the local community had become quite difficult, for he was “getting to be the most cordially hated man in the county.” Locals relied on more direct forms of intimidation as well. One frequent strategy, according to Adirondacks folklore, was to warn the protector that he looked like a deer out in the woods and that he might therefore get shot “by accident.” “Mighty easy to think it's a deer if the game constable's around. … What can anybody do? The man shoots at a deer and the game constable happened to be there.” At times, such threats crossed the line to direct action. As the Forest Commission admitted in one of its annual reports, attempted shootings were a persistent feature of the foresters' profession: “It is not uncommon for protectors to be shot at while in pursuit of their duties. There are few protectors who have served any length of time on the force who have not had an experience of this kind.”[20]
Foresters also found themselves constrained by local surveillance. Bill Smith, recalling his childhood in the Adirondacks in the early 1900s, remembered that when a new game warden arrived in their township, the first reaction of those living nearby had been to learn as much about him as they could: his habits, his tracks, his schedule. “The poor man, of course, he probably didn't have any idea he was being watched anywhere near as close as he was. But we wanted to know
From time to time, a clever forester might find ways to avoid such surveillance. Seymour Armstrong, for instance, once pretended to be a traveling salesman for Quain's Dictionary of Medicine as he patrolled his district. More often, however, Adirondacks communities were so familiar with their local warden that it was necessary, as one forestry official put it, “to send the forester into an entirely new district where he wasn't known for the purpose of catching or getting on to the evidence of trespasses.” “They [the foresters] have to be transferred from their home counties, at much expense, to other and distant counties to work incognito where the local protector is known to every citizen, and word is sent of his coming in advance of his movements,” grumbled the Forest Commission in its 1901 report. “Habitual law violators soon become acquainted with the habits of the local protector, and devise clever schemes for keeping tabs on the protector's movements. It is, therefore, often necessary to bring in from other sections men who are not known locally, in order to secure convictions of this class of violator.”[22]
The peculiar pressures bearing upon foresters highlight the new social and political relationships that the rise of conservation generated in the Adirondacks. Foresters played a dual role in the region: not only were they the means by which state power was projected into the countryside, they were also the means by which local influence penetrated into the state. As a result, foresters had to navigate between several competing allegiances. On the one hand, the Forest Commission sought to make the forester an extension of its conservation program; on the other, the forester's friends and neighbors often tried to render him an accomplice in their efforts to evade the state's environmental regulations. While the forester who became too aggressive in pursuing his duties risked being ostracized or shot by local residents, the forester who was found to be too cozy with lawbreakers could lose his job or even be arrested for corruption, as happened on several occasions to foresters who were alleged to be taking bribes to ignore the illegal cutting of timber in their districts. The daily dilemmas that foresters faced
As central as state simplification was to New York's conservation program for the Adirondacks, not all of the region's conservation efforts at the turn of the century were, in fact, state directed. By the 1890s, one of the dominant features of the Adirondacks landscape was the private park. Even before the Forest Preserve's creation, wealthy sports hunters had upon occasion bought up large tracts of abandoned timber land and converted these still-wooded plots into hunting preserves. The size and number of private parks, however, surged during the 1890s, as the New York State Legislature, reluctant to authorize the funds necessary for the repurchase of all private lands in the Adirondack Park and seeing the interests of estate owners as “identical with those of the State,” revitalized a preexisting law allowing for the creation of preserves on private land. This statute permitted people or clubs who wanted to “encourage the propagation of fish and game” to set up private parks from which they could exclude trespassers at greatly increased penalties. (In 1892, the state even flirted briefly with a program which would have exempted estate owners from taxes if they agreed to restrict timber cutting on their holdings.)[24] By 1893, there were some sixty private parks in the Adirondacks, containing more than 940,000 acres of private lands, including many of the region's best hunting and fishing grounds, at a time when the stateowned Forest Preserve contained only 730,000 acres. As Forest and Stream observed the following year, “Private parks in the Adirondacks today occupy a considerably larger area than the State of Rhode Island. … a man might travel ninety miles in a comparatively straight line without being fifteen minutes out of sight of a trespassing notice.” Many of these parks were owned by wealthy individuals such as William Rockefeller. Others, such as the Adirondack League Club's (ALC), belonged to associations of well-to-do sports hunters. To increase their hunting opportunities, the new owners of these parks frequently stocked their ponds and streams with fish, engaged in largescale feeding programs for deer and other wildlife, or imported exotic game animals, such as boar, caribou, western elk, or English deer.[25]
Although they initially faced many of the same problems with setting boundaries and enforcing regulations as the state, most private parks surmounted these obstacles through expenditures of funding and manpower that far exceeded the state's efforts during this same time.
As Yell's reference to “the land being watched” implies, almost all private parks employed a number of guides who acted both as a private police force and as a supplement to the Forest Commission's foresters. By the late nineteenth century, the Adirondack League Club alone had a contingent of over twenty guides, all of whom were required as part of their employment to sign a pledge that they “shall consider themselves game protectors.” According to the ALC's handbook, the guides in the club's employ were to report all cases of trespassing and poaching and to “use every effort for the successful apprehension and punishment of every such offender.” To reinforce the guides' role as law enforcers, the ALC distributed to each of its employees a silver, star-shaped badge that bore the words Police Guide. Despite such regulations, the guides at many parks, much like their counterparts in the state's forester corps, seem to have demonstrated a certain ambivalence about their new role as law enforcers. Many guards were efficient enough to earn the enmity of local communities. But examples do exist of conflicts between guides and private park owners. At the ALC, for instance, there were sporadic attempts among the guides to unionize for better wages and, on at least
Among Adirondackers, private parks soon became the most hated facet of conservation. In little more than a decade, private park owners had sealed off many of the region's best hunting and fishing areas, defying the previous convention of leaving undeveloped forestland open to hunting, fishing, or foraging by local community members—a restriction that not even the Forest Commission, which still permitted public passage and the taking of game on Forest Preserve lands during the hunting season, had attempted. Private parks' stringent efforts against trespass, combined with their concentrated landholdings and extensive corps of guards, made them, for many rural folk, a powerful symbol of the class biases lurking at the heart of conservation. Observed an investigative committee of the New York State Assembly in 1899, “The poor [in the Adirondacks], as well as the men of moderate means, are complaining that our forest lands are rapidly being bought up by private clubs, and are closely watched by alert game keepers, and thus, as they claim, and not without some reason, our [woods] are all being monopolized by the rich; that we are apeing the English plan of barring the poor man from the hunt, etc.”[29]
In 1903, the resentment of private parks long bubbling beneath the surface of Adirondacks life finally boiled over. On September 20, Orrando Dexter, an estate owner in Franklin County who had launched numerous lawsuits against local trespassers, was shot dead as he drove his carriage down a once-public road that he had enclosed within his estate. Dexter's outraged father, the wealthy founder of the American News Company, offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for information and hired a team of Pinkerton detectives to search for his son's killer, but the murderer was never located. All evidence, however, indicated that the killer must have been a local resident. Not only was the bullet that killed Dexter of a type commonly used for deer hunting, but near the murder scene were several footprints made by a “coarse shoe or boot such as are worn a great deal by the workmen, woodsmen and hunters of the Adirondacks.” Seizing upon such clues, many newspapers trumpeted Dexter's death not as an isolated incident but as “only one demonstration of the hatred that exists in the woods.” Editorialized the New York World, “Dexter's murder illustrates and must intensify the bitterness felt by the small farmers and woodsmen in the Adirondacks, and by those who have been long accustomed to hunt and fish where they wished, against the rich men who have established great
Although few cases reached the extremes of Dexter's, the unpopularity of private parks did, as one local newspaper put it, have “the effect of breeding lawlessness.” Local people ripped down the “no trespassing” signs that ringed the parks' boundaries. They cut the elaborate wire fences that enclosed many estates, hoping that the deer and other game within might escape. They set fire to private parklands, sometimes with the intention of damaging fences, other times with the apparent desire to make the preserve an undesirable refuge for game animals.[31] And they shot at the guides hired to protect the private parks. “The position of guard on the vast forest preserves of William Rockefeller is not one to be much desired,” observed the New York Times dryly in 1904: “Several of these guards have been fired at recently while patrolling their lonely beats in the dense forest, and one who had a bullet pass through his coat sleeve, narrowly missing his shoulder, has resigned, declaring the job too strenuous for him. As smokeless powder has been used in every case, all efforts to locate and capture these ‘snipers’ have proved futile.” Even Rockefeller's house did not prove immune from such attacks. On several occasions, locals fired late-night shots at the buildings on Rockefeller's estate, leading the Standard Oil heir—who already took the precaution of never leaving his grounds without several bodyguards—to erect bright floodlights all around the perimeter of his Adirondacks “camp.”[32]
Although vandalism and shootings were by far the most common forms of resistance to private parks, a few locals challenged the estates by means of the court system. The ALC was the target of one such case in 1898. As the club's manager wrote in his annual report, “We reported last year seven convictions of trespassers on the preserve. Several of them threatened reprisal and in some cases bloody revenge. George Thomas, who had unwillingly paid us $ 58 after staying seventeen days in jail, brought suit for false imprisonment. George did not get anything.”[33]
Within a few years, some two to three hundred of Brandon's homes had disappeared, along with the village's hotel, church, and mill. The fourteen families remaining in the town relied mainly on hunting and fishing in the surrounding forest to survive—or, in the words of Oliver Lamora, one of the holdouts, “my occupation is, well, doing nothing.” A veteran of the Civil War, Lamora received what one observer termed “a pension enough for a plain subsistence, which he ekes out with trout from the streams, partridge and deer from the forest, and berries from the mountainside.” Such activities brought Lamora and the other residents of Brandon into inevitable conflict with Rockefeller, on whose lands any hunting, fishing, or foraging had to occur, since Rockefeller's park completely surrounded the village.[35]
In late April 1902, Lamora took one of the paths leading out of Brandon and crossed into Rockefeller's park, where he began to fish in the St. Regis River. He did so, Lamora later admitted, “with full knowledge that Mr. Rockefeller had … forbid me to go there.” One of Rockefeller's guards, Fred Knapp, spotted Lamora and ordered him to leave the park. Lamora replied that he would go when he was ready. He spent a little less than two hours at the river, catching nineteen fish, before he returned home. As this was not the first time that Lamora had engaged in such behavior, Rockefeller decided to have the bothersome French Canadian prosecuted under the Fisheries, Game and Forest Law for trespass.[36]
Lamora demanded a jury trial, and the result was a series of lawsuits that dragged on for the next four years. Lamora won many of the early
The case of Rockefeller v. Lamora commanded considerable attention throughout the Adirondacks, with many residents viewing the case as a pivotal challenge to the power of private park owners to restrict public passage and hunting on their lands. Seeing Lamora's cause as their own, a number of inhabitants began a popular subscription to raise money for the pensioner's mounting court costs. Lamora's initial victories also emboldened many locals to assert claims of their own against private parks. “Mr. Rockefeller's men have taken the names of upward of fifty different persons who were found fishing in the Rockefeller park,” reported the Times in 1903. “The success Lamora had in the lower courts prompted fishermen in other localities to enter private parks, and the gamekeepers of the preserves of William C. Whitney, Dr. W. Seward Webb, Edward Litchfield, and others were troubled as they had never been before by poachers.”[38]
Within the courtroom, the case hinged on two key issues. The first was whether Rockefeller had the right to make private the preexisting pathway that Lamora had taken to reach the St. Regis River, a route that some inhabitants of Brandon testified had been in use since 1886. Lamora maintained that he had always respected Rockefeller's property rights; he had always stayed on this pathway, which he considered public property, when on his way to the St. Regis River. (Although Lamora's argument concerned this one path, a friend of Lamora's, Fred McNeil, stated outside the courtroom that for the past several years he had been traversing all the trails on the Rockefeller estate to demonstrate that they were still in public use.) The second issue was what right Rockefeller had to the wild game found within his park. Lamora's lawyers argued that since the state had in past years stocked the waters of
The opposition to private parks manifested by locals such as Lamora in the early 1900s even struck a chord with a growing number of sports hunters. Originally, most visiting sports had celebrated estate owners as the saviors of the region's game. “[The deer] would long ago have been exterminated, if it were not for the large areas of private parks, where they do receive protection,” declared Forest and Stream in 1894. But as it became apparent that the expansion of private parks meant that those sports hunters who could not afford to buy large estates or to become members of clubs were being excluded from significant portions of the Adirondacks, the attitude of many outsiders began to shift. By the time of Dexter's murder in 1903, several New York newspapers had begun to argue against the private park law. In the words of the Albany Press-Knickerbocker, “William G. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Dr. Seward Webb, Alfred G. Vanderbilt, and other landed proprietors in the Adirondacks are only doing with our woods what they have already done with our industries. They are bringing forests and streams under the control of a few, for the benefit of a few, and at the expense of many.” Within a few years, even Forest and Stream was running angry articles with titles such as “Private Parks Do Not Protect Game” and protesting preserve owners' efforts to “restrict the common-law right of … citizens to take wild game.”[40]
As a result of their mutual opposition to private parks, sports hunters and local residents occasionally forged alliances with one another against their common foe. One such example occurred in 1896, when William West Durant enclosed the South Inlet entrance to Raquette Lake within his private park. The first to challenge Durant's efforts was a visiting sport from New York City named John Golding. Golding and his guide, Ed Martin, dragged their boat over the log barrier that Durant had erected across the South Inlet and proceeded to fish in Durant's
| Year | Acreage | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, Eighteenth Annual Report of the President, 7. | NOTE: The preserve's recorded size varied in the late 1880s and early 1890s because of inaccuracies in the property records of the time. | ||
| 1886 | 681,374 | ||
| 1888 | 803,164 | ||
| 1891 | 731,674 | ||
| 1894 | 731,459 | ||
| 1897 | 801,473 | ||
| 1898 | 852,392 | ||
| 1899 | 1,109,140 | ||
| 1900 | 1,290,987 | ||
| 1901 | 1,306,327 | ||
| 1902 | 1,325,851 | ||
| 1906 | 1,347,280 | ||
| 1907 | 1,415,775 | ||
| 1908 | 1,438,999 | ||
| 1910 | 1,530,559 | ||
As the resolution to this particular standoff suggests, the combined outrage of locals and sports hunters over private parks did eventually lead the state to alter some of its conservation policies in the Adirondacks. In 1897, the New York legislature established a new fund to buy additional land for the Forest Preserve. Within four years, this effort raised the number of stateowned acres in the park to more than a million, surpassing for the first time the acreage of private preserves, which dipped during this same time from 900,000 to 705,000. Many of these new holdings came from some of the largest of the private parks:
Despite such measures, the repurchase program was far from a total victory for the region's inhabitants. Adirondackers never eliminated the hated private preserves: even today, significant portions of the park remain in the hands of private owners, who continue to post their land against local trespass. Moreover, in certain respects, local opposition to private parks reinforced the state's control of the region—for, as the Lamora case evinces, in voicing their opposition to private parks, the region's residents frequently resorted to a vocabulary of public property and public rights that echoed the language used to legitimize state conservation. Although this congruence was often unintentional, at other moments locals consciously advocated state ownership as a more attractive alternative to private parks. As one inhabitant of Brandon put it in 1903, he hoped “Mr. Rockefeller will sell out to the State. … then we will be allowed to make our town again what it once was.”[43]
Such expressions of local support for New York's conservation program, however, often proved fleeting at the turn of the century. No doubt residents preferred state conservation to the vast and exclusionary estates of a Dexter or Rockefeller. But if New York's purchase program prevented a rash of Orrando Dexter—style murders from erupting across the Adirondacks in the early 1900s, it still left many of the central tensions of conservation unresolved. Adirondackers would soon find that the state control over the environment that the Forest Commission sought posed almost as great a challenge to their land use practices as had the region's hated private parks.
3. Working-Class Wilderness
In planning the Adirondack Park, conservationists had envisioned nature as stable and predictable, an entity that followed fixed laws easily comprehensible to trained experts. If park supporters had initially focused little attention on the people inhabiting their new conservation experiment, they soon concluded that the region's human populace possessed few of the qualities that characterized its natural systems. In place of nature's order and harmony, Adirondackers seemed to be governed by a “peculiar moral attitude” that manifested itself in unpredictable, lawless behavior. “I have not found a single instance in which the State forestry laws are obeyed or even respected,” reported an outraged correspondent to the New York Times in 1889. “Instead of the employees of the State guarding against violation of the statutes or trying to enforce their provisions they assist in breaking them. The statement that the Commonwealth owns certain portions of the territory upon which they live has no apparent meaning to the mountaineers. … Not alone are the laws forbidding the cutting of timber upon State lands violated, but the game restrictions are never thought of by the mountaineers.”
This “opposition from the inhabitants of the northern counties … to every serious attempt made for the care and protection … of the North Woods” seemed inexplicable to most conservationists, given the benefits they believed the movement was bringing to the region.[1] As a committee of the New York State Assembly stated following an investigative tour of the park in 1899, “[We encountered much] grumbling by the old hunters
There is, to be sure, much that is correct about such analyses. The settlement of the American countryside was accompanied by tremendous ecological devastation as settlers endeavored to find marketable goods and remake the “wild” nature they encountered into a more familiar world of fields and fences. Yet the current scholarship remains elusive on a number of critical issues. Above all, while many environmental historians place capitalistic economic relations at the center of their analyses, they frequently treat capitalism as little more than a marketplace for the buying and selling of natural resources. Rarely do their discussions touch upon capitalism's social or cultural dimensions: its division of labor, its contesting classes with their distinct ways of conceptualizing the world. Submerging these differences has lent environmental history tremendous rhetorical power, but at the cost of obscuring the diversity of relationships that Americans forged with the natural world. Moreover, by failing to engage the perspective of nonelites, environmental historians have inadvertently recapitulated much of the degradation discourse of early conservation, especially the movement's leaders' vision of themselves as saving nature from “the ignorant or unprincipled.”[4]
The timber stealing and game poaching in the Adirondacks that so troubled the New York Forest Commission provide useful vantage points from which to reexamine this scholarly consensus. After all, at
Because maintaining the region's tree cover was a central rationale for conservation in the Adirondacks, one of the Forest Commission's initial goals was simply to prevent the illegal cutting of timber on state lands in the park. As Theodore B. Basselin, the prominent lumberman appointed forest commissioner, recounted, “When we took office in 1885, we knew but very little of the State management of the forest.” Upon surveying their new holdings, however, Basselin and the other commissioners “found a large number of trespasses, some very large and some small—the number so large that we were very much surprised.” Equally alarming, many residents appeared to consider the theft of wood from state lands a perfectly acceptable practice: “We also found that the people around the borders of this wilderness had been educated from time immemorial, that is, from the first settlement of the country, that what belonged to the State was public property, and that they had a right to go in there and cut as they wanted to; their fathers and grandfathers had been doing that, and that they had a birthright there that no one could question.” Finding it impossible to prosecute so many trespassers all at once, the commission “endeavored to single out the more glaring ones and endeavored to strike terror, as it was, into the people who were trespassing in that way.”[6]
To their dismay, however, Basselin and his colleagues encountered frequent difficulties in persuading locals to testify against the “timber poachers” in their midst. The inhabitants of the Adirondacks, the Forest
The Forest Commission's enforcement problems arose, however, not only from the mixture of neighborliness and intimidation prevailing in many Adirondacks villages but also from an even more fundamental cause: a profound disagreement with local residents over the definition of timber stealing. While conservation officials, in keeping with their program of state simplification, insisted on classifying all cutting of trees on public lands as theft, local residents considered such “crimes” to be, under certain circumstances, perfectly legitimate. These differing perspectives emerged in sharp relief during the investigation into lumber trespasses that the Forest Commission conducted in 1895. Asked about the frequent timber theft in the region, Robert Shaw, a farmer in Long Lake, retorted, “This country has been wild, you know, until within a few years, and the owners of lands here used to let the people, for their own use, cut any timber they were a mind to, anywhere; that was the former practice, and it never has been fully abandoned.” Flabbergasted, state officials queried Shaw as to whether the felling of trees on another's property was not a crime. “No, sir; it is not considered by the majority of the people a heinous crime at all,” replied Shaw. “Half of the people haven't got any wood of their own that lives around the vicinity. … and so they never have considered it any crime.”[10]
Adirondackers typically justified such behavior by claiming a natural right to subsistence. Under this logic, many of the acts recorded in the Forest Commission's trespass files—the cutting of “17–18 cords of stove wood,” the theft of “hard wood for fire purposes,” the stealing of state timber “to build a house and barn”—were not crimes at all but legitimate appropriations of necessary household resources.[11]“Men we would call in this locality honest, straight, lawabiding citizens,” noted Burke, “would consider it no crime whatever to take a few logs from State land.” Indeed, to those Adirondackers who depended on state woodlands for firewood, building materials, and other supplies, New York's Forest Preserve appeared less an exercise in the wise stewardship of nature than the callous denial by the Forest Commission of local access to essential resources. In numerous Adirondacks communities, almost all the nearby woodlands belonged to the state, leaving residents with little option but to steal timber from the new Forest Preserve. “In many localities, e.g., Raquette Lake, Long Lake village, and Saranac Lake village, the State owns nearly all the forest land, thereby making firewood and lumber scarce and high priced,” acknowledged the Forest Commission at the turn of the century. “Consequently, the inhabitants, becoming somewhat desperate, felt justified in obtaining their wood and lumber where it was most convenient, without regard to ownership.”[12]
Although conservation officials realized that many such trespasses were committed “for the sole purpose of obtaining firewood,” they nonetheless insisted that “the people who did the cutting [be] arrested, convicted and fined. … These parties, all of whom were very poor, pled in their defense that the State owned all the land in their vicinity, except for some small private preserves whose owners would not sell to them any timber for fuel. They claimed that they had gathered all the dead or fallen timber for a long distance, and that to go farther for such fuel made it cost more than firewood of any kind was worth. They complained loudly of the worthless quality of the old, fallen trees, which they dislike to burn, accustomed as they have been all their lives to using good ‘body wood’ in their cook stoves.” Several Adirondackers even dispatched anguished letters to the Forest Commission, asking officials to rethink their policies. As William Dunham of Piseco, Hamilton County, wrote in 1899, “I have been informed by one of the officers of your Commission that the people of this vicinity are forbidden to cut any firewood on State lands. … As a good many of the people here have no woodland of their own and cannot buy any of their neighbors, it becomes
Many locals defended their thefts of trees not only by stressing their right to subsistence but by placing their activities outside of the market nexus. As the Adirondacks native Henry Bradley explained in 1895, residents considered it perfectly legal to take firewood or building supplies from state lands if the materials were used for one's immediate household subsistence. From the local perspective, such activities only achieved the status of crimes if, in Bradley's words, one cut trees “for the purposes of marketing and selling the logs again.” “Though the cutting of timber from State lands for the market has been recognized as done in violation of the law,” agreed an investigative committee of the Forest Commission, “it seems not to have been considered a crime or offense of any kind for trespassers to cut timber upon State lands for firewood or for building purposes, chiefly of hardwood.” In keeping with this division between subsistence and market activities, local people also distinguished between which species of trees might legitimately be cut. To fell spruce, pine, or any other marketable softwood remained questionable (the only notable exception to this trend being the special cuts of cedar and pine essential for the construction of guide boats). In contrast, to take nonmarketable hardwoods was considered perfectly acceptable, as William Dunham's letter to the Forest Commission on his need for firewood suggests: “All the woods used as firewoods are hardwoods, no evergreen timber being used.”[14]
If the persistence of this subsistence, nonmarket ideology illustrates the reluctance of many rural folk to embrace a completely capitalist orientation, it also reveals the uncertain ethical terrain Adirondackers had come to inhabit by the close of the nineteenth century. Residents might, in keeping with enduring agrarian notions of simplicity and self-sufficiency, give moral primacy to subsistence practices. But by the 1880s, none lived a completely subsistence lifestyle. Thus, as much as holding up subsistence as a moral ideal may have appealed to Adirondackers' image of themselves as independent pioneers, it curtailed their ability to address the true dilemmas that they faced—issues such as
As a result of this confusion, residents found it difficult to arrive at a consensus as to what constituted an appropriate middle ground between subsistence and capitalist engagement. In the case of timber theft, some Adirondackers reasoned that if the taking of firewood and building supplies for subsistence was a reasonable practice, it should also be justifiable to sell stolen timber if the resulting cash was used to buy household staples. Such logic held a particular appeal for residents with few other means of generating revenue, and throughout the 1880s and 1890s one could find a “mostly … poor class of citizens who own little or no land of any character” pilfering logs from the Forest Preserve. One of the most common targets for such thieves was trees stolen for shingles or “fiddle butts” (the bottom part of large spruce, used to manufacture sounding boards for fine pianos). Those who committed such crimes often claimed that since they possessed little property of their own, they had few alternatives but to sell resources from state lands. When Inspector Seymour C. Armstrong confronted a man he caught stealing logs from the Forest Preserve in 1895, for example, the thief responded that he was “a poor man and was obliged to take the timber to get something to live on.” Foresters reached a similar conclusion about the timber thief Charles Barney: “Barney has no means of support except cutting and selling wood and timber from state lands on which he resides.” Local juries, the Forest Commission soon learned, displayed frequent sympathy to such arguments. “If this man happens to be a poor man who is being prosecuted,” grumbled one inspector, “he has the sympathy of his friends and neighbors, and the very men who are on the jury are men possibly who have been engaged in some such operations themselves.”[15]
Residents may have also tolerated the theft of trees for shingles or fiddle butts because they recognized that neither activity posed an overwhelming threat to local forests. Only a few trees were suitable for either product, forcing trespassers to cut selectively. Furthermore, after felling their trees, the thieves still had to invest a considerable amount of time and labor to transform the raw timber into a marketable commodity. Shingles, for instance, were produced using a shaving horse, on which the shingle maker would sit and, using a drawing knife, shave shingles from a carefully trimmed log. Fiddle butts required less intensive reworking prior to sale, but, unlike other logs, they could not be floated to downstream mills, as water was believed to damage the
Although the Forest Commission devoted much of its resources to stopping such practices, the stealing of trees for fiddle butts or shingles did not constitute the Adirondacks' most common form of timber theft in the 1880s and 1890s. Measured in terms of quantity of trees stolen, by far the most common form of timber theft was in fact the largescale cutting of timber by crews working for lumber companies. Such trespasses were typically planned in advance and sifted through several layers of oral contracts. “A contract to cut timber usually passes through many hands before it comes to the man who actually does the work,” charged state investigators in 1895. “An effort to shift the responsibility for cutting over the lines is shown. … In general the jobbers have cut the timber wherever employed by contractors or lumbermen to do so, without investigation or concern as to whether the land belongs to the State or not; and the common workmen have been, if possible, even more indifferent to the ownership of the land, so long as they have made a living from their work.” These arrangements enabled timber concerns to shield their involvement while leaving the woodsmen who did the actual trespasses on state lands to face the risk of fine or arrest alone. Observed the New York Times in 1889, “The scheme of ‘letting jobs,’ as it is known here, is partly responsible for the difficulty of fastening the guilt of the illegal cutting upon the persons who authorize it. A boss lumberman will direct a lumberman to cut a specified tract. The lumberman employs his men and they henceforth go on with the work not in any sense subject to the direct control of his employer. … Should proceedings be taken by the State, [the subcontractor] is compelled to show his instructions very clearly or he is the man who is regarded as responsible.”[17]
The rise of this widespread theft occurred at much the same time as several other key shifts in the timber industry, which would in the 1880s transform lumbering in New York into an enterprise far different from the one Adirondackers had known just a few years before. While earlier timber operations had focused on cutting large softwoods located within a few miles of waterways, the rise of the railroad and the pulp mill in the closing decades of the nineteenth century altered this longstanding pattern. Liberated by the train from their dependence on rivers for transportation, lumbermen expanded their activities dramatically, cutting many previously untouched portions of the Adirondacks and taking many of the hardwoods that timber crews had previously left
Because of the pressure that these changes placed on wildlife habitats and their own wood supplies, a number of Adirondackers began to insist, in the words of resident D. F. Sperry, on the need “to protect the state lands from the vandalism of the lumberman.” “There is no prejudice existing in Franklin county in favor of lumbermen,” observed the county's chief fish and game protector, J. Warren Pond, in 1891. “On the contrary they are regarded with some suspicion on account of the desire of people to preserve the forests and [waters] and the game therein.” That same year, in a move that would have surprised those who believed that rural folk uniformly favored the rapid exploitation of natural resources, the Adirondack News called for stricter supervision of the region's lumber industry. “Let the state appoint wardens to supervise the cutting of timber and allow no trees of less than twelve inches in diameter to be cut; and let the most stringent enactment be made against charcoal manufacturers and the establishment of pulp mills,” editorialized the News, “and there will always be forests.”[19]
As a result of this local opposition to the timber industries' rapid expansion, those working for illicit timber crews did not always enjoy the same popular acceptance as the region's other timber thieves. To those Adirondackers worried about lumbering's growing impact on their region, such groups seemed too cozy with the timber industry that, in their eyes, constituted the real bandit in the region. Nathan Davis, a local surveyor, contended that it was such companies, not the poor resident taking some firewood or building supplies for his or her own use, that were the Adirondacks' true criminals: “Trespasses are done by men of some considerable means, lumbermen. … ordinary people, as a general thing, do not steal timber from State lands.” To contain such local unease, a few black marketeers took the precaution of organizing themselves into gangs—some sporting names such as the “State Troops” and the “Grenadiers” that offered ironic commentary on the Forest Commission's conservation efforts—and issuing threats designed to keep residents from interfering with their activities. A favorite territory of one
Despite such measures, the heyday of the Adirondacks timber gang lasted little more than a decade. The Forest Commission's ability with each passing year to map and patrol its holdings with greater precision soon made it difficult for organized groups to steal the large quantities of logs that the timber industry sought. By 1900, the Forest Commission could report that of the forty-six cases of trespassing it had prosecuted that year, only one had been connected to a lumber company. Instead of stealing timber outright, many lumber concerns began to exploit the weaknesses of conservation in other, more subtle ways. A number of companies seized upon the confused status of property titles in the region to strike sweetheart land deals with sympathetic members of the commission (several of whom, like Basselin, were drawn from the ranks of New York's prominent lumbermen). In 1894 and again in 1910, such scenarios led New York to investigate charges of fraud in the Forest Commission and to dismiss several leading conservation officials.[21]
Yet, even as theft by the lumber industry declined sharply at the turn of the century, subsistence pilfering continued unabated in the park. Exasperated commission members admitted in 1897 that “petty trespassing” remained widespread throughout the Adirondacks, especially “by residents who wanted some building material or fuel.” Well into the twentieth century, the bureau found itself plagued by “the poorer class of residents who t[ake] trees for firewood,” with thefts of fuel constituting the vast majority of the trespass cases the commission investigated. Because of their detailed knowledge of local conditions, these thieves proved nearly impossible for the commission to apprehend. Typically, local timber poachers slipped onto state holdings late at night, bringing along their dogs to warn them of the approach of any strangers. After tying a coat or blanket around the trunk of a tree to muffle the sound of the ax, they would cut a few logs, which they would then spirit out of the preserve as quickly as possible. “A man will go with his boy or his neighbor and cut two or three trees and take them away in the middle of the night,” declared Warden Samuel Gorman. “There is no way of getting hold of them.”[22]
Although this ongoing pilfering posed little threat to the survival of the Adirondacks forest, it stood as a potent symbol of the standoff that had developed between the Forest Commission and local residents. In spite of its foresters and its attempts at simplification and surveillance,
For all the controversies surrounding timber theft, no facet of conservation proved more contentious in northern New York than the game law. To the deer and other animals of the chase, it doubtless mattered little who was trying to kill them. But to the other participants in the process—sport hunters and local residents alike—who was hunting, how, and why mattered a great deal, turning the pursuit of game into a flash point over the questions of who should control the Adirondacks' natural resources, and to what ends.
Sports' approach to hunting was derived from a curious amalgam of British upperclass tradition, imported to the United States by English expatriates such as Frank Forester, and a homegrown desire to recreate the imagined world of the American frontier through “occasional relapses from the restraints of civilization into the primitive conditions of the backwoods.”[23] Out of this peculiar mixture of history, militarism, and upperclass pretense, there developed during the late nineteenth century a sportsman's code in which how one hunted was almost as important as what one hunted. This approach led, in turn, to impassioned debates among sports hunters over what constituted the best test of the manly skills that hunting was supposed to measure. Some sportsmen contended that “driving with dogs” represented “the fairest, manliest and most interesting” way of hunting, while others asserted that the still hunt (the unaided stalking of game) was “the only fair and manly way of hunting anything.”[24]
If there was one point that sports did agree upon, it was that their behavior was not the cause of game scarcities in popular hunting spots like the Adirondacks. “We believe that more deer are killed by the few score guides in [the Adirondacks] … than by all the sportsmen put together,” declared Forest and Stream in 1874. This indictment of local practices, echoed repeatedly in the pages of the leading sporting journals of the day, pointed toward an obvious conclusion: that protecting the wildlife in the Adirondacks depended on setting stricter limits for
As might be expected, most Adirondackers strongly disagreed with such interpretations. Residents pointed out that wealthy sports hunters did not need the game they killed—hunting, after all, was for tourists a leisure activity. By contrast, hunting was for locals an integral component of household subsistence. “We lived off the land, and the deer were there, and you ate them the year around,” noted resident Bill Smith.[26] To such folk, it seemed unfair that New York's game law failed to distinguish between rural need and elite leisure. Rather than passing laws for “the benefit of the cities alone,” argued Christopher J. Goodsell of Old Forge, the legislature should “make the game laws for the poor as well as the rich.”[27] Many inhabitants fondly recalled an earlier era when the state had not meddled in their hunting practices. “Times is different now,” grumbled Alvah Dunning in 1897: “In them days nobody said a word ef a poor man wanted a little meat an' killed it, but now they're savin' it until the dudes get time to come up here an' kill it an' some of 'em leave a deer to rot in the woods, an' on'y take the horns ef it's a buck, or the tail ef it's a doe, just so's they can brag about it when they go home, an' they'd put me in jail ef I killed a deer when I needed meat.” To Dunning and others like him, this contrast between the seriousness of local subsistence and the frivolity of outside sport highlighted the obvious inequities of the game law.[28]
By the close of the nineteenth century, the growth of tourism had propelled such issues to center stage in the Adirondacks. One glimpse of the resulting clash in perspectives can be found in the brief exchange that took place between Charles Hoffman, a visiting sport, and John Cheney, his guide. The two were out hunting and had already killed some birds and a deer when Hoffman spotted a covey of partridges. To Hoffman's suggestion that they increase their bag by shooting some of the partridge, Cheney replied, “It's wrong, it's wrong, sir, to use up life in that way; here's birds enough for them that wants to eat them; and the saddle of venison on the buckboard will only be wasted, if I kill more of these poor things.”[29] Adirondacks local David Merrill offered an even more caustic critique of sports hunting as a wasteful, even cruel, activity. On several occasions, foresters arrested Merrill, his father, and brother for netting fish in the lake near their home. Yet the Merrills maintained that a net, while illegal under the new game law,
A party of young gentlemen came north to kill some deer;They did not know Brave Golden was well known to hunters here;They struck his track with well-bred dogs and boasted of the same. Lo! soon the king through grove and glen proved both grit and game.
For three long days they chased him o'er hills and mountains high, Till hounds and men surrounded him, each moment pressing nigh;He seemed to plead for mercy. Alas! it was in vain;He was shot and shed his life's blood on the bosom of Champlain.
We miss Brave Golden from his herd, we miss him from his home, We miss him from each grove and glen through which the king did roam;Our hounds will never strike his track to make the valley ring;The stranger's cruel, deadly shot laid low our noble king.[31]
The regret running through Sheehy's poem was not only for the demise of Old Golden but also for the loss of the system of local controls over the environment that the Adirondackers had once exercised. Residents found their environmental practices under attack on several fronts during the 1880s, first by a loss of legitimacy to the state's conservation code and then by the scores of sports hunters, “strangers” unfettered by community ties, pouring into the region.
Initially, most Adirondackers viewed New York's new game laws as offering few solutions to these problems. Locals were quick to observe
Information reaches us that along the Moose river and in many parts of the Adirondack region, deer are being slaughtered in a great number by certain parties who hunt and shoot these beautiful creatures for mere sport. A week or more ago hunters from Utica and Holland patent killed twelve deer near Moose river and the carcasses of the animals were left in the woods to rot. Such “sportsmen” as these should not be permitted to pursue their cruel and destructive business, which will soon rid the forests of the game that is so prized and ought to be in some manner protected from the wholesale slaughterers. … Altho' the letter of the law does not prohibit such unnecessary slaughter, the spirit of it certainly does. The man who shoots more game or catches more fish than he can make use of, is not a sportsman in any sense of the word.
There was only one solution, according to the Herald: “persons who are interested in preserving the game in the Adirondacks should band together for the purpose of keeping out the deer slayers.”[32]
Apparently, others agreed. The closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a number of collective efforts by residents to control the hunters in their midst. During a return trip to the Adirondacks in 1875, for example, Headley learned of one sportsman who had recently visited the region, killing large numbers of deer. His overhunting so enraged “the scattered settlers and guides” that “at length [they] sent him word that if he ever came there again they would make an example of him, and he has since prudently stayed away.” Local outrage coalesced into more formal modes of action at this time as well. In early 1883, for instance, a number of the inhabitants of Boonville, upset by the “unscrupulous butchers in the guise of sportsmen [who] have unmercifully slaughtered hundreds of deer in this section of the country,” formed a club to watch over their local forestlands. The club members raised money among themselves to pay for “two able and efficient guides … to secure evidence against parties who engage in illegally killing deer.” Three years later, a similar movement took place in the Keene Valley area of the Adirondacks. Despite the opposition of
Such developments complicate the prevailing interpretation of game laws as an unwelcome sanction from above, imposed on a restive and resisting rural populace. To be sure, many Adirondackers manifested open hostility to the new laws that governed when and how they could hunt. But others came to find ways in which the state's conservation program could be used in place of the region's earlier, community-based regulatory regimes. The forester John Hunkins noted just such a shift in his territory in St. Lawrence County. “On my first trip,” Hunkins recalled, “I was unable to obtain a boat or any accommodations from these people for any consideration. Our lives were in constant jeopardy, either from those we had prosecuted or from those who feared being called to account for their many misdeeds.” With the passage of time, however, some residents began to see Hunkins as a useful ally against those who abused local resources. “Now,” declared the forester, “some who had been the most outspoken are my most valuable and able assistants; ever ready to carry me from point to point and give any information they possess.”[34]
Adirondackers were especially quick to direct foresters against unpopular outsiders such as sports hunters and preserve owners. In the 1890s, for example, people living near Lieutenant Governor Woodruff's private park in the Adirondacks tipped off local foresters that Woodruff was keeping a pack of dogs for deer hunting, in violation of the law against hounding. At much the same time, locals employed at J. Pierpont Morgan's private park confided to the Raquette Lake game protector that Morgan had been fishing out of season. The protector's search of Morgan's camp revealed thirteen lake trout, resulting in a $ 155 fine. In 1903, the Adirondack News celebrated the fact that “twenty-four violators of the game laws, who were hunting on state lands in the Adirondacks, the number including prominent business and professional men of New York, Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Saratoga, have been arrested as the result of good work done by Protectors Mattison and Hawn.” And, in 1906, in what was perhaps their crowning achievement, some friends of Oliver Lamora brought about the arrest of John Redwood, the superintendent of William Rockefeller's private park, and Harry Melville, one of Rockefeller's gamekeepers, on charges of deer hounding, causing them to be fined one hundred dollars apiece.[35]
By exposing elite lawbreakers, Adirondackers sought not simply to punish certain individuals but also to undermine a key assumption of conservation's degradation discourse. While conservationists might depict rural folk as ignorant and environmentally destructive, residents pointed out that many violators in the Adirondacks were in fact drawn from the ranks of ostensibly enlightened sports hunters. “Sportsmen come here and force their guides under penalty of dismissal to fish out of season,” charged C. H. Larkin, a guide from St. Regis Falls. “What is a guide to do under such circumstances? A guide has no influence to inforce [sic] the laws or prevent the infraction of them, particularly when opposed to sportsmen who are oftimes among the richest lawgivers of opulent cities.” In a similar vein, when the inhabitants of Tucker Lake formed a club to “fight Rockefeller's men” in 1903, they called themselves the Adirondack Game and Fish Protective Association—a name that appropriated the very language of conservation to articulate the residents' vision of themselves as the genuine protectors of the Adirondacks wildlife against rapacious private preserve owners.[36]
Yet if Adirondackers insisted on strict enforcement of game laws against outsiders, they rarely applied the same standards to fellow community members. As Forestry Quarterly noted in 1902, residents frequently overlooked violations when “bound by the ties of kin, of friendship, of neighborliness. … The game wardens are prompt against a stranger, but the local offenders who go unpunished are numberless.” Even when foresters did arrest locals for breaking the game law, sympathetic courts often refused to punish the wrongdoers. “It has been said that a Hamilton county jury would not indict a resident for violation of the game law,” griped Seymour Armstrong, the game and fish protector in Hamilton County, in 1887. The career of Isaac Kenwell, Armstrong's replacement, demonstrates the validity of Armstrong's observation. Of the seven people that Kenwell prosecuted in 1894 for violations of the game law, three were acquitted, one never showed up to trial, and one, having pled guilty to killing a deer out of season, received only a suspended sentence. Only two suffered any penalty: fined ten dollars apiece for “illegal fishing,” the defendants never paid, serving ten days of jail time instead. Concluded Kenwell, “It is very hard to get a conviction in the County Court of Hamilton for violation of the Game Law, as the jurors are most all old violators or are friends of the violator, and their sympathy is with the offender.”[37]
To justify their violations of the game law, Adirondackers called upon a complex of beliefs that linked hunting to the proper ordering of
In addition to asserting their right to this republican ideal, residents claimed—just as with the cutting of trees for firewood or building supplies—that they also had a natural right to subsistence. “If I'm hungry, I've a right to furnish myself with venison,” maintained one local when asked about his violations of the game law. “The law of [nature] and necessity permits it, and that I say, again, is higher than the statut' book.” “[The deer] were given to us for food, and it matters not how we kill them,” contended another. Adirondackers asserted that this right to subsistence predated and preempted any claims the state might have to the same resources. As one longtime resident quipped, “When they made the game laws down in Albany, somehow they skipped Spruce Mountain,” his favorite local hunting area.[39]
The ethical framework that residents applied to hunting paralleled their approach to timber cutting in other respects as well. In much the same manner that Adirondackers considered the felling of trees for nonmarket uses to be the most justifiable form of timber trespass, they viewed the taking of game to be most morally defensible when the hunter used the animals for family subsistence rather than selling them. Recalling his boyhood hunting in Herkimer County, Henry Conklin declared, “Everybody got them [white-tailed deer] and supposed they were free as water. There was never any wasted, for they were not killed expressly for their saddles to supply the market. No, they were killed because we were poor and had to have meat.” Questioned in 1885 about conditions in the region, Ernest H. Johnson of Tupper Lake ventured a similar preference for nonmarket hunting: “Stop the hunting and fishing (out of season) for market, and pass an act making it unlawful to buy or offer for sale any venison in the Adirondacks. I would
Much as occurred with lumbering, however, the moral certainties of this subsistence position began to erode in the late nineteenth century. As the market cast an increasingly long shadow over the region, a number of inhabitants fastened upon market hunting as a preferable alternative to other, seemingly more dependent and less profitable forms of capitalist engagement, such as wage labor. Both such factors exhibit themselves, for instance, in the thinking of Albert Page of Lake Pleasant, who enthused after killing a partridge in the early 1900s that “he had … made a good day's wage as he was going to sell [the bird] for $ 1.” At the same time, the activities of market hunters such as Page placed them at odds with residents who adopted other economic strategies during this period—especially guides, who sought to preserve their relatively well-paying jobs by maintaining a pool of wildlife that would attract employers to the region.[41]
As such divisions reveal, the conflicts that unfolded in the Adirondacks over the game law pitted residents against not only outside conservationists but also against members of their own communities. The peculiar mixture of subsistence, lumbering, and tourism that prevailed in the Adirondacks left the region's inhabitants with a number of tensions that were difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile. As a correspondent for the Hamilton County Record reported in 1895, “After a deliberate and diligent inquiry with the people, regarding the proposed changes in the game laws of the state that are now agitating people here … I am forced to the opinion that no law can be framed which will be satisfactory to all.” Some residents hoped to preserve their economic autonomy through market hunting. Others wanted to outlaw market hunting completely because of its potentially devastating effect on the region's game population. Some residents preferred to hunt by hounding and jacking because of the efficiency of such techniques. Others feared that these practices enabled sports hunters to decimate local wildlife. Some residents were willing to accept the larger quantities of deer that sports killed with hounding and jacking, because these successes attracted more
Much like the timber law, then, the game law became the terrain on which Adirondackers negotiated the new circumstances governing their lives. If they were never able to resolve all the competing agendas of their fellow community members, the considerable energy that Adirondackers devoted at the turn of the century to debating game legislation demonstrates that they were not, as conservationists often imagined, opposed to laws per se. Moreover, in many cases residents advocated not “wide open laws” but regulations, such as those against market hunting or the killing of does, that were far more restrictive than New York's existing statutes. Viewed from this context, Adirondackers' violations of the forest code emerge not as a manifestation of their inherent disregard for all law but as a sign of their frustration with a simplistic regulatory regime that failed to take into account their wants and needs. As one resident put it, “The laws were made by men who don't know what we need here. Give us some laws we can take care of and we'll put them through.”[43]
As a result of the coming of conservation, the residents of the Adirondacks inhabited a landscape that, by the mid-1890s, was far different from the one they had known only a decade or so earlier. Many of the forests where locals used to cut firewood and building supplies had become part of New York's Forest Preserve and were now patrolled against trespass by the state's new forester force. The wildlife in the region was now subject to an array of new state laws that limited the season and manner in which game could be hunted. The building of homesteads on unused state land had become criminalized as squatting.
Wage work assumed a variety of forms in the Adirondacks, from sawing logs in a lumber camp to cleaning dishes in a hotel. But the guiding of sports emerged as the most avidly sought position, for it offered comfortable working conditions and, by regional standards, relatively high pay. As the competition for employment increased in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, guides responded by establishing a number of local clubs designed to increase their control over hiring and wages. A correspondent to Forest and Stream explained in 1883 that the Adirondacks' guides had become “nearly all members of associations. … There are Blue Mountain guides, Saranac guides, Long Lake guides, Fulton Chain guides, St. Regis, Raquette, and I don't know how many others, and a migratory sportsman finds that he cannot depend upon a cordial reception being given to his guide if he takes him into the limits claimed by a body of which he is not a member.”[45] Over time, these clubs established a system of work rules that was closely followed throughout the Adirondacks. These practices subdivided the region into different districts, each served by a corps of guides drawn from the local community. “Adirondack guides do not roam aimlessly through the entire wilderness in search of employment,” noted the New York State superintendent of forests, William Fox. “Each one attaches himself to some particular locality. They strictly adhere to the rule that the guides in each locality are entitled to the patronage of all tourists, travelers, or sportsmen starting from within the precincts of certain guides' territory.” Under this system, a guide who lived in the vicinity of Blue Mountain Lake, for instance, would guide only visitors to that area. If his sport subsequently decided that he wanted to journey on to the lakes of the Fulton Chain, the guide would convey his client to a place where
Guides followed other rules as well. No guide, for example, accepted employment for less than a day. Nor did guides rent out untended boats. Visiting sports who wanted the use of a boat were required to hire a guide to accompany them. Should these controls be threatened, it was not unknown for guides to take violent measures to protect what they took to be their prerogatives. When a man named Theodore White brought a steampowered boat, the “Lake Lily,” to Lake Placid in the 1880s, for example, it was consumed not long afterward in a suspicious blaze, said to have been ignited by angry guides who considered transporting tourists to be their exclusive right and the handrowed guide boat the only acceptable vessel for doing so.[47]
Localistic, informal associations throughout the 1880s, the guide clubs reshaped themselves in the 1890s as conservation heightened the importance of wage labor. In 1891, representatives from the region's various clubs gathered together in Saranac Lake to form the Adirondack Guides' Association (AGA)—the first time all the guides in the Adirondacks had ever been unified into a single organization. While the exact membership varied over the years, over 200 guides attended the AGA's formative meeting, and a broadside that the association published in 1897 lists 233 guides as members.[48]
Although the AGA carefully avoided calling itself a union, in a number of key respects it paralleled the craft unions founded by artisanal workers during this same period. Like a craft union, the AGA provided sickness, death, and disability benefits to members and their families, and it strove to maintain a uniform rate of pay: three dollars a day plus expenses. “The rates asked by the guides are uniform throughout the entire region … and firmly fixed,” noted the Forest Commission in 1893. “The tourist and sportsman will find that there is nothing to be gained by haggling over them.” Most important, the AGA sought to limit membership, and thus employability, to a select few. Potential AGA members had to pass through a rigorous accreditation process.
Despite these resemblances to other craft unions, the AGA possessed several features that set it apart from the typical labor organization. By far the most unusual concerned membership. While the AGA accepted only guides as full members, it invited sports hunters to join as “associate members” who paid dues but were unable to vote on any of the association's resolutions. Following his election in 1891, the AGA's first secretary, J. Herbert Miller, initiated an aggressive mailing campaign to attract as many prominent sportsmen as possible to join the AGA. Surprisingly, many sports—perhaps because of the appeal of rubbing shoulders with manly Adirondacks hunters—responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to become duespaying, nonvoting members of what was, in effect, a rural craft union. In the words of Forest and Stream, “Many of the most prominent citizens of New York State have enrolled. Among them are State officials, hotel men, prominent physicians and attorneys, members of the press and of the various Adirondacks clubs.” Another of the AGA's unusual features was its creation of the post of honorary president, which was held not by a local guide but by a prominent outsider. For most of the AGA's early years, Verplanck Colvin, the head of the Adirondack Survey, filled the position. Colvin's main duty was delivering annual addresses, in which he typically celebrated the AGA as a unique organization, able to bridge the class divide that so troubled American society elsewhere. “In this form of association you have set a wonderful example to the labor organizations of the world,” he remarked at the AGA's first annual meeting. His annual speech four years later struck a similar note: “You have brought about … the preliminary steps toward that combination of capital and labor which has been the dream of some political economists and the hope of patriots.”[50]
As Colvin's words underscore, the fact that the AGA was willing to accept both laborers (guides) and their employers (sportsmen) would seem to make it a curious union indeed, one that scarcely seems to demonstrate the class consciousness that, according to some definitions, is essential to a workers' organization.[51] As peculiar as it was, however, this arrangement offered several tactical advantages. The first and most
A final incentive for including sportsmen in the AGA was the leverage that sports provided in the union's efforts to shape regulations in the region. Each year at their main meeting, AGA members voted on resolutions recommending changes in the state's timber and game laws. In 1895, for example, the AGA voted in favor of a measure urging the New York State Legislature to enact a law “that no brook or lake trout, or venison, be sold or offered for sale in any of the counties comprising the forest preserve at any season of the year.”[55] Other measures passed in subsequent years by the AGA and by the Brown's Tract Guides' Association (BTGA, a group from the Fulton Lake district that split from the AGA in 1898 over the issue of hounding) called for increasing the quantity of state land in the park, for an end to the killing of does, and for more protection of the black bear.[56] The inclusion of well-connected associate members provided both groups with a conduit through which such resolutions could reach an audience beyond
Through such measures, the members of the AGA and BTGA sought not simply to improve their immediate working conditions but also to articulate their own vision of conservation. Members stressed their ties to the Adirondacks, which, they argued, made them especially sensitive to the condition of local plants and wildlife. Rather than threatening the region's natural resources, as conservation's degradation discourse posited them as doing, the guides envisioned themselves as “the true gamekeepers of the magnificent park in which most of their lives have been spent.” While conservationists believed that rural folk's economic dependency led them to embrace destructive practices, guides turned this dependency into a positive good, arguing that it forced them to steward local resources. A guide “sees in the forests, in the fish, in the game his stock in trade,” explained J. Herbert Miller, the AGA's secretary, in 1895. “The forests,” Miller added, “can best be protected by those residing within their borders, especially by those who are interested in their preservation that their means of livelihood may be retained.”[58]
With their allusions to virtuous locals and misguided outsiders, the AGA and BTGA shared some of the anticonservationist, antisportsman rhetoric of other Adirondackers.[59] But the guides' language of protection and their economic and social links to prominent sports also gave them the ability to forge alliances with conservationists. In fact, in the 1890s and early 1900s the AGA and the BTGA were active participants in several conservationist schemes to restore the Adirondacks wildlife. The most successful was an effort to increase the beaver population in the Adirondacks, which by 1900 had dipped to an estimated twenty animals, all located in Township 20 in Franklin County. In 1904, the Forest Commission bought seven Canadian beaver. The animals wintered in Old Forge, where they were cared for by the BTGA at its own expense. The following spring, an “Army of Liberation” composed of BTGA members released the animals at various promising spots within the park. In 1906, the Forest Commission purchased twenty-five more beaver, this time from Yellowstone National Park. The BTGA again oversaw the care and release of the animals, which took so readily to their new surroundings that by the 1920s the beaver population within the park had climbed to an estimated twenty thousand.[60]
The fact that some Adirondackers would maliciously shoot the very same animals that other community members were caring for testifies to the deep fissures that had developed within Adirondacks society by the turn of the century. Ironically, at the very moment that the region's guides had begun to accommodate the new conservationist order, other inhabitants were unleashing a wave of spectacular protests against conservation, of which the killing of the unfortunate moose and elk comprised just one example. In 1899, 1903, 1908, and again in 1913, vast forest fires swept across the park, burning more than a million acres of state and private land. While many of these fires could be attributed to the fire hazards created by the region's spreading railroad system, a significant proportion was the work of arsonists. (See Table 5.) After the forest fires of 1903, for example, which scorched over 450,000 acres in the Adirondacks, the Forest Commission declared that “some conflagrations were started by incendiaries and degenerates, prompted by malice, revenge, or criminal instincts.” Commissioners charged that “in nearly every [Adirondacks] village there is a disreputable class whose presence is inimical to the preservation of our forests. They are the men who, having been arrested at some time for violation of the Game Law or timber stealing, have a grievance against the authorities.
One potential answer to this puzzle comes to us from other nations' experiences with conservation. The scholar Ramachandra Guha, for example, has proposed that the frequent arson in India's forest districts reflects an alienation from nature produced by state forestry policies. According to Guha, peasants excluded from woodlands where they had once foraged began to view the forest not as source of sustenance but “as an entity opposed to the villager”—a symbol of their displacement and disempowerment. Consequentially, peasants retaliated by burning the woodlands they had once depended upon. In much the same manner, the historian Eugen Weber has explained the massive fires that greeted the rise of forestry in France by arguing that the French peasantry “had come to hate the forests themselves, and hoped that if they ravaged them enough they would get rid of their oppressors.”[68]
Revenge certainly explains a substantial portion of the arson in the Adirondacks. Asked years later about the region's frequent forest fires, one longtime inhabitant recalled, “Hell, we had to wait for droughts to get even. I remember my father cursing the rain that seemed to be always falling on the Adirondacks. We didn't get much chances, but we took them when we got them.”[69] Residents had multiple reasons for seeking vengeance: the state's restrictive new hunting law (“If they don't stop bothering us with this game law business, the people will burn down the whole north woods”); the Forest Commission's efforts to uproot squatters (“Threats have been made by certain squatters that if ejected they would seek revenge by burning up the North Woods”); and the prosecution of timber thieves (“If the State attempted ‘to slaughter’ these men, it would be the worst thing the State could do to preserve the lands. … the trespassers would retaliate by firing state lands”).[70] Such threats, which transformed the forest into a hostage whose very survival depended on the state not antagonizing local residents, often proved
| Causes | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Number of Fires | Acreage Burned | Carelessness | Fisherfolk | Berry Pickers[a] | Smokers | Hunters[b] | Railroads | Clearing land[c] |
aBerry pickers set fires to encourage the growth of a fresh crop of berries. | |||||||||
bHunters set fires to drive game and to create new browse for deer. | |||||||||
cFarmers used fire to prepare their fields for planting. | |||||||||
| SOURCE: Howard, Forest Fires, 19. | |||||||||
| NOTE: Forest Preserve counties were located both in the Adirondacks and in the Catskills. | |||||||||
| 1891 | 65 | 13,789 | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 7 | 18 | |
| 1892 | 33 | 1,030 | 1 | 8 | 18 | ||||
| 1893 | 13 | 8,790 | 1 | 2 | 5 | ||||
| 1894 | 50 | 17,093 | 6 | 1 | 10 | 14 | |||
| 1895 | 36 | 2,448 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 14 | |
| 1896 | 116 | 29,817 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 9 | 41 | |
| 1897 | 98 | 26,187 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 3 | 11 | |
| 1898 | 98 | 9,648 | 3 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 16 | 28 |
| 1899 | 322 | 51,565 | 7 | 15 | 30 | 11 | 62 | 24 | 31 |
| 1900 | 127 | 14,893 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 6 | 8 | 21 | 19 |
| 1901 | 7,780 | ||||||||
| 1902 | 21,356 | ||||||||
| 1903 | 643 | 464,189 | 6 | 47 | 3 | 23 | 7 | 121 | 89 |
| 1904 | 101 | 2,627 | 3 | 8 | 14 | 9 | 21 | 20 | |
| 1905 | 126 | 4,795 | 9 | 2 | 2 | 18 | 10 | 31 | 8 |
| 1906 | 142 | 12,500 | 1 | 14 | 2 | 14 | 8 | 20 | 9 |
| 1907 | 198 | 5,653 | 6 | 10 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 48 | 21 |
| 1908 | 596 | 368,072 | 15 | 19 | 14 | 34 | 100 | 89 | 21 |
| 1909 | 356 | 11,759 | 28 | 14 | 31 | 25 | 19 | 45 | 38 |
| 1910 | 277 | 12,680 | 12 | 23 | 3 | 39 | 37 | 60 | 24 |
| 1911 | 595 | 37,909 | 40 | 35 | 38 | 72 | 10 | 109 | 35 |
| 1912 | 383 | 6,990 | 13 | 37 | 7 | 59 | 10 | 93 | 17 |
| 1913 | 688 | 54,796 | 120 | 31 | 224 | 14 | 78 | 43 | |
| TOTAL | 5,063 | 1,186,366 | 159 | 375 | 177 | 551 | 310 | 819 | 524 |
| PERCENT OF TOTAL NUMBER OF FIRES | 3.1 | 7.4 | 3.5 | 10.9 | 6.1 | 16.2 | 10.4 | ||
| Causes | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arson | Campers | Lightning | Burning Buildings | Children | Logging Engines | Sawmills | Bee Hunters[d] | Blasting | Unknown[e] |
dBee hunters used fire to smoke bees out of their hives. | |||||||||
eMany cases of arson or of fires set to clear farmland may have gone unrecorded by local fire wardens who did not want to antagonize fellow community members by reporting their crimes to the Forest Commission. | |||||||||
| 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 21 | |||||
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | ||||||||
| 4 | 3 | 1 | 11 | ||||||
| 5 | 7 | ||||||||
| 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 41 | |||||
| 8 | 2 | 3 | 58 | ||||||
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 36 | ||||||
| 9 | 47 | 9 | 5 | 7 | 3 | 62 | |||
| 13 | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 35 | |||
| 6 | 6 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 327 | ||||
| 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 14 | ||||
| 5 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 31 | ||||
| 11 | 6 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 51 | ||||
| 5 | 8 | 1 | 3 | 83 | |||||
| 48 | 27 | 9 | 1 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 210 | ||
| 21 | 47 | 4 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 74 | ||
| 22 | 23 | 11 | 9 | 2 | 2 | 10 | |||
| 37 | 29 | 65 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 122 | |||
| 20 | 32 | 34 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 48 | |
| 30 | 64 | 26 | 8 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 40 | ||
| 256 | 316 | 165 | 52 | 44 | 6 | 4 | 11 | 7 | 287 |
| 5.1 | 6.2 | 3.3 | 1.0 | .8 | .1 | <0.0 | .2 | .1 | 25.4 |
quite effective in restraining officials. One reason that the Forest Commission tarried so long in ejecting squatters from state lands, for instance, was out of concern for what “a man who had a spite could cause to the State by fires.”[71]
But to focus exclusively on revenge obscures some of the other reasons Adirondackers set forest fires. Timber poachers, for example, frequently burned the area where they had illegally cut wood in the hope of erasing any traces of their trespasses. Other Adirondackers, adopting a longstanding Indian practice, burned local woodlands to encourage the growth of berries or fresh browse for livestock or wildlife. Others set fires on the private parks within the Forest Preserve with the intention of damaging estate property or driving deer and other game animals onto lands where they might be hunted.[72] And still others set fires because they sought the cash wages that employment on a firefighting crew could bring or, once on a fire-fighting crew, hoped to prolong their employment. “The poor people of a certain community cut wood on State land last winter and were fined for it,” reported Forest and Stream in 1903. “Partly to ‘get even’ and partly to earn money to make up the fines by fighting fires, the poachers were believed to have set the fires.”[73]
In addition, any full understanding of the arson that gripped the Adirondacks at the turn of the century needs to situate such acts in relation to the fire control laws that New York instituted in the region in the mid-1880s. Prior to the coming of conservation, Adirondackers had traditionally set “fallow fires” to prepare their fields for planting. This practice came under new state regulation in 1885, when Bernhard Fernow wrote the fire code for New York's new Forest Preserve. (The “first effective law against forest fires” in the nation, Fernow's code was later copied by Maine, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, among other states.) Because fallow fires sometimes strayed into nearby forests, the code required that all agricultural burning be limited to certain seasons and conducted under the supervision of fire wardens. Should any large fires break out in the vicinity, the law mandated that all residents participate on fire-fighting crews, with anyone who refused being subjected to a fine of up to twenty dollars.[74]
These changes proved unpopular with many residents, for they conflicted with the exigencies of local agriculture. Previously, Adirondackers had fired their fields in the spring, before planting, and in the fall, after the harvest. But as these were also the dry seasons in the region, the new regulations required that locals instead burn their plots in
Figure 1. Mitchell Sabattis, an Abenaki Indian and longtime resident of Long Lake, standing between two examples of the hybrid European—Native American material culture that developed in the Adirondacks during the nineteenth century: the pack basket and the Adirondack guide boat. (Photo courtesy of Adirondack Museum.)
Figure 2. A guide transporting his “sport” in the distinctive Adirondack guide boat, which combined elements of both the Native American canoe and the European rowboat. (Photo courtesy of Adirondack Museum.)
Figure 3. Two Adirondackers “jacking” deer. The man in the bow of the boat used the bright light from the lantern on his head to blind his prey. Although popular among many of the region's residents, this form of hunting was outlawed by the New York State Legislature in 1897. (Photo courtesy of Adirondack Museum.)
Figure 4. Shingles made from trees illegally cut on the Forest Preserve, abandoned by timber thieves fleeing state authorities. (Collection of author.)
Figure 5. Forest Commission officials (note the figure by the stump at right) investigating the theft of a large pine log from state lands near Raquette Lake in 1901. (Collection of author.)
Figure 6. A sign from a private park in the Adirondacks. Most estates in the region were ringed by scores of such signs, which prohibited locals from hunting, fishing, or otherwise using private parklands. (Photo courtesy of New York State Archives.)
Figure 7. One of the many signs detailing New York's regulations for the use of fire that the Forest Commission posted throughout the Adirondacks at the turn of the century. (Photo courtesy of New York State Archives.)
Figure 8. A new fire tower. Following a devastating series of forest fires in 1903 and 1908, New York authorities constructed towers such as this one at many high points in the Adirondacks, enabling Forest Commission employees to expand their surveillance of local conditions. (Photo courtesy of New York State Archives.)
Figure 9. The remnants of a poacher's cabin in Yellowstone. This particular structure was so well hidden that it was not discovered by park authorities until the 1960s. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 10. “The National Park Poacher.” The buffalo poacher Ed Howell is on the far right, with his dog curled up by his feet; the scout who brought him in, Felix Burgess, is on the left; two of the U. S. Army soldiers assigned to the park appear between them. All are outfitted with the long wooden skis that patrollers and poachers alike favored for getting around during Yellowstone's harsh winters. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 11. Ed Howell being escorted into Fort Yellowstone by army patrollers, following his arrest. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 12. G. J. Gibson, arrested by the army in 1908 for trapping beaver in Yellowstone National Park.(Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 13. Joseph Stukley, a former miner from Electric, Montana, following his arrest for hunting deer in Yellowstone. Stukley had lost his right arm in a mining accident and presumably turned to poaching because his injury made it difficult for him to find employment as a miner. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 14. A mug shot of William Binkley, taken by army photographers shortly after Binkley's 1907 conviction for poaching elk in the park. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 15. Army officers posing at Fort Yellowstone with fbuffalo heads confiscated from park poachers at the turn of the centuey. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park.)
Figure 16. A Havasupai woman photographed in the 189os. She is wearing colthing made of calioc and carring mescal ahoots in the basker on her back. (Photo courtesy of Grand Canyon Nationl Park Museum Collection.
Figure 17. Chickapanyesi as he apperared in 1898 in a photograph most likely on the plateau above Havasu Canyon. Note his rifle and the deer antler at his feet (Photo courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection.)
Figure 18. Havasupai men putting the finishing touches on a new trail along the Grand Canypn's South Rim.(Photo courtesy of Nation Archives and Records Administration.)
Figuer 19. One of the cabins constructed by the Havasupai in the early twentieth century from materals salvaged from the Grand Canyon Village drum. (photo courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection.)
Figure 20. A Havasupai family photographed in the early 193os at the camp near Grand Canyon Village.(photo courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection.)
Figure 21. Another cabin in the Havasupai camp near Grand Canyon Village. The assorted barrel and just were used to store drinking water, while the automobile—a reatively recent addition to Havasupai life—eanbled the tribe's men to serch for seasonal wage labor over a much wider geographical area.(photo courtesy of Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection.)
Given such regulations, the Adirondacker who set local woodlands on fire was engaging in an act that was deviant on a multitude of levels. Not only was he (arsonists, like poachers and timber thieves, seem to have been overwhelmingly male) asserting his disregard for the state's attempts to control the time and space where fires were permissible, he was also rejecting the model of civic duty proposed by the Forest Commission, in which “good citizens” participated on fire-fighting crews. The arson that periodically swept the region can therefore be interpreted not simply as a manifestation of revenge but as an effort by those residents who believed that the Forest Commission's regulations had unfairly deprived them of their rights to hunt, farm, or lumber to assert their—and the forests'—freedom from state supervision.[76]
Unable to halt such arsonists (“the miscreants who start these fires … enter the forest alone and unobserved … and then, aided by their knowledge of the wilderness, emerge at some point many miles distant”), the Forest Commission could only increase its fines, which by 1910 reached two thousand dollars or ten years in prison, and try to limit the fires' spread once they started. Following the devastating conflagrations of 1903 and 1908, the commission erected “observation stations” from which watchers could spot blazes as soon as they began. By 1914, there were fifty-one towers located at strategic high points