Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Similarly,
Pen cannot convey the idea of its sublimity, the pencil fails to even suggest
the blended strength and delicacy of the scene. The rude laugh is hushed, the
boisterous shout dies out on reverential lips, the body shrinks down, feeling
its own littleness, the soul expands and rising above the earth, claims kinship
with its Creator, questioning not his existence.
(Stoddard [1878] in Becker 1963:11)
An evocative blending of the savage and sublime continues with Headley's (1849: v,
145) description of the region's forests, describing them on one occasion as 'a
neglected waste' while later referring to them as a primeval and pristine wilderness
whose creation 'man has had no hand in'. Contrasting descriptions of the
Adirondack landscape and its forests are found throughout early narratives.
Williams (1871:103, 100) referred to parts of the region as a 'desert…repulsive and
uninteresting' while describing others as 'shrouded by…primeval forests,
[remaining] almost as it came from the hands of its Creator'. Continuing the trend,
the Adirondack mountains were frequently likened to the 'glorious' Alps of
Switzerland (Headley 1849; Kitchen 1920:114; Sylvester 1877:43; Williams 1871:
101; but see Williams 1973:128), its wilderness to that of the 'darkest' Amazon
forest (Sears in Brenan 1962:16).
These dichotomous descriptions (racial metaphors of light and dark, savage and
sublime) had the intended effect of introducing to an urban population of
increasing material wealth a landscape of awe and inspiration, a 'neglected' yet
wondrous 'playground' in their own backyard there for the taking and the taming.
By the 1870s, vacationers by the thousands were arriving in the region via rail and
steamboat, staying at any one of a dozen or more of the grand hotels that had
sprouted up in the area (Higgins 1931; Williams 1871). They came to hunt and to
fish. They came for their health: '[T]here prevails in the atmosphere…a pureness, an
elasticity and vitality that impart health and afford an indescribable physical
enjoyment in the mechanical process of inspiration' (Williams 1871: 101; see also
Headley 1849:20). It became the seasonal home to the likes of the Vanderbilts,
Rockefellers, Morgans and Whitneys. It was lionised in the writings of visiting
literati such as Emerson, Cooper, Frost and Longfellow, on the canvases of Homer,
Martin and Durand.
Following close behind this deluge of urban visitors and their place-based
ideology were frequent and often fervent calls for regional conservation and
temperance in exploitation. The genesis of these concerns resided with influential
urban vacationers and seasonal residents, among whom there was dwindling
tolerance for, among other things, the established natural resource-based economic
activities. These were now labelled as environmentally destructive and perverse to the
landscape's emerging definition as 'playground'. Writing for
Forest
and Stream
magazine in the 1880s, Sears's call for preservation was not atypical:
