A wolf in the garden - Animal Spaces, Beastly Places - page 148

columnist for the New York City-based outdoor journal, Forest and Stream, who
spent months at a time travelling the Adirondack interior (Brenan 1962).
As the above accounts reflect, at the same time that the Adirondacks were
becoming a safe haven for animals retreating under heavy pressure from human
settlement outside of the region, the area was being heavily promoted by New York
City-based journalists, artists and enthusiasts. Writing for an urban audience eager
to escape the rapidly expanding pressures of late nineteenth-century city life, a desire
facilitated by rapidly increasing industrial wealth and mobility, 12 these boosters
lured wealthy urbanites by the thousands to the 'wilderness next door'. The region
was triumphed in the journalism of Sears, Headley and Sylvester (1877), the
paintings of Winslow Homer, Asher Durand and Homer Martin, and the prose of
Emerson, Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper. Soon, travel guides began to
appear en masse, expediting the area's emergence as 'one of the most thronged
pleasure routes on the continent' (Williams 1871:81). An 1864 New York Times
editorial proclaimed the Adirondack region 'A Central Park for the World'. By the
turn of the twentieth century, the Adirondacks were popularly considered a
'playground' for New York City's vacationing elite, one
large enough to afford all the teeming population of the east an opportunity
to find place within it for the restoration of health, the pursuit of game in
season, and all the delights that a summer paradise and an autumn hunting
ground can offer.
(Kitchen 1920:111; Miller 1917:17)
Within a period of roughly two decades the place had fundamentally changed, both
physically and imaginatively. The Adirondacks were no longer the remote and
untamed wilderness that instilled its earliest explorers and chroniclers with
wonderment and fear (see below), but a place tamed of its 'wild' and 'dangerous'
past, a landscape of leisure and the pursuit of sport, health and recreation. This
change in the meaning of place was accompanied, necessarily, by a commensurate
change in the place of wolves, assuring their ultimate disappearance from the region.
In New York, therefore, the wolf was the victim of two back-to-back changes,
pastoral followed by playground, in landscape meaning. Through these cultural
changes, the wolf not only lost its place in the landscape but, indeed, found itself re-
placed by animals more culturally acceptable, more economically viable.
Re-placing the wolf in New York
With the settling of New York, wolves and other 'loathsome animals' 13 were quickly
re-placed in the socio-physical landscape by animals more culturally suitable, more
economically valuable. The introduction of domestic livestock was among the first
and the most significant steps taken by early settlers to 'tame' the New York
landscape. Not only was ridding the region of wolves demanded, but, perhaps more