Geoscience Reference
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perish together' (Francis Parkman in Sylvester 1877:24), and their disappearance
from the area was remarkably swift. Byron-Curtiss (1976:73) places their
'withdrawal' from New York and New England at the close of the American
Revolution. In the Adirondack region, Native Americans were noticeably absent
from the mid- to late nineteenth-century accounts of Headley (1849) and Sears (in
Brenan 1962).
Ironically, and of particular consequence to wolf restoration, the economic and
political marginalisation of the region's early white settlers (i.e. those successful at
displacing the region's native population) was achieved through the redefinition of
the Adirondack landscape as a place of leisure and sport (cf. Williams 1973). Below,
I explore this process of marginalisation through an account of the evolution of
landscape description and representation. The similarities which it maintains to that
described above are noteworthy. Indeed, local economic activities themselves
emerged as 'threatening' to this novel meaning of landscape. In the process, it is my
aim to show how these parallel processes of wolf extermination and the
marginalisation of early settlers, especially the latter, remain at the core of any
resistance to wolf restoration that may exist today.
Landscape definition and exclusion
Early descriptions of the Adirondack region were provided by male journalists from
New York City whose travels to and accounts of the area were written up for an
anticipatory urban audience eager to learn of this neighbouring wilderness (e.g.
Sears in Brenan 1962; Headley 1849; Murray 1869; Sylvester 1877). Their
Romantic, contradictory portraits of the region, describing the area as at once
'savage' and 'sublime', enticed the throngs of vacationers that would begin arriving
by the latter half of the nineteenth century.
These authors often described a 'wild' and 'untamed wilderness' (see above).
Headley (1849), Williams (1871) and Sylvester (1877), writing in the mid-
nineteenth century, commonly referred to the Adirondacks using such terms as a
'neglected' and 'unproductive waste', metaphors employed to entice the more
productive sensibilities of (urban) society and economy. At the same time, however,
these writers found in the landscape a sublimity and grandeur which they considered
forged by the hand of God:
[I]t seems as if I had seen vagueness, terror, sublimity, strength and beauty, all
embodied, so that I had a new and more definite knowledge of them. God
appears to have wrought in these old mountains with His highest power and
designed to leave a symbol of His omnipotence. Man
[sic]
is nothing here, his
very shouts die on his lips.
(Headley 1849:63)
