Hudson River

The Colorado River The Columbia River The Hudson River The Mississippi River The Missouri River The Ohio River

Rivers in American Life and Times

Daniel E. Harmon

FRONTIS: Plan of New York City from 1775

CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse

Staff for THE HUDSON RIVER EXECUTIVE EDITOR Lee Marcott PRODUCTION EDITOR Megan Emery PHOTO EDITOR Sarah Bloom SERIES DESIGNER Keith Trego COVER DESIGNER Keith Trego LAYOUT 21st Century Publishing and Communications, Inc. ©2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

www.chelseahouse.com First Printing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harmon, Daniel E. Hudson River/by Daniel E. Harmon. v. cm.—(Rivers in American life and times) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: The “Rhine” of the western world—Henry Hudson, mystery mariner— The Dutch period—Growth and war under English rule—Soldiers, painters, and loggers—River lights and locales—The modern era brings industrial-size headaches. ISBN 0-7910-7727-6 1. Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)—Description and travel—Juvenile literature. 2. Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)—History—Juvenile literature. [1. Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)—History. 2. Hudson River Valley (N.Y. and N.J.)—History.] I. Title. II. Series. F127.H8H23 2003 917.47'3—dc22 2003023916

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The “Rhine” of the Western World

1

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

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The Dutch Period

24

Growth and War Under English Rule

34

Soldiers, Painters, and Loggers

46

River Lights and Locales

60

The Modern Era Brings Industrial-Size Headaches

70

CHRONOLOGY AND TIMELINE

84

NOTES

87

BIBLIOGRAPHY

88

WEBSITES

91

INDEX

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The “Rhine” of the Western World

2 THE HUDSON RIVER

I

n Europe, the River Rhine is legendary for its beauty. Composers and poets have written eloquently of its wooded banks. For centuries, “Rhinelanders” have vacationed, painted, rowed, courted, hiked, and daydreamed on and alongside the river. The Rhine is also legendary for its strategic role in history. Flowing northward from Switzerland through Germany and Holland (the Netherlands), it has carried armies, barges, royalty, robbers, and common travelers all the way to the North Sea. When Dutch immigrants departed for the New World across the Atlantic Ocean in the early seventeenth century, they lamented the appealing vistas and fertile soils they were leaving behind. They wondered whether the western continent possibly could hold such a noble and idyllic waterway as their Rhine. By midpassage on the rollicking, often storm-roiled Atlantic, they must have pined longingly for the quiet and familiar bays, marshes, channels, and coves of the Rhine delta around Amsterdam. Once in the New World, however, the Dutch found a remarkable facsimile of all of these at the entrance to a river that ran through the colony of New Netherland, later to become New York. An English explorer sailing for Holland had ventured into its upper reaches in 1609. History would reward his efforts by giving the river his name: the Hudson. Henry Hudson himself called it the North River, a name by which many people knew the lower part of the river as late as the twentieth century. During the early years of the colonial era, it was also labeled the Mauritius River, for the Dutch prince, Maurice of Nassau. Like the Rhine, it flowed through a glorious setting and was destined to have an immense and colorful historical impact. “It took little imagination to see the Hudson as an American Rhine,” wrote geographer and author D. W. Meinig in a study of New York’s geographical history. Meinig depicted the Hudson—like the Rhine—as “a broad, navigable passageway deep into the continent from which, in time, a mighty traffic and tribute would naturally accrue to those who commanded the portal [river mouth].” 1

The “Rhine” of the Western World

The Hudson River is known for its beautiful scenery and was an important subject for American landscape painters from the “Hudson River School” of artists in the 1800s. This nineteenth-century print shows the headwaters of the Hudson in the Adirondack Mountains.

The river is of meager length—approximately 315 miles (the Mississippi, in stark contrast, flows more than 2,300 miles)—but it is striking in many ways. Famous for its scenery, it became an important subject of early American landscape painters. The Hudson River School of artists, including such notables as Thomas Cole and Frederick Edwin Church, were inspired by the valley and waterway during the 1800s. They relished the unmatched views of the Catskill Mountains to the west and the vast, lovely farms to the east. Their river and upland scenes were striking in their own right and influenced their approach to the painting of landscapes near and far.

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4 THE HUDSON RIVER The Hudson is a river noted almost as much for its diversity as for its beauty. Some writers have described the Hudson Valley in terms of a three-part domain: upper, middle, and lower. More simply, the upper river is characteristically very different from the lower. The Hudson’s “ebb and flow” literally changes dramatically near Troy, New York, roughly its midpoint. The source of the river is in the Adirondack Mountains— specifically, Lake Tear of the Clouds on the side of 5,300-foot Mount Marcy. Other brooks and streams join the one flowing from Mount Marcy, widening the waterway. The Adirondacks are a timeworn range of the upper Appalachian Mountain system, about 15 million years old. Some of the world’s oldest known igneous and metamorphic rock configurations are in the Adirondacks, which extend between the Mohawk and St. Lawrence river valleys in upstate New York. Known worldwide today for their winter resorts, the Adirondacks are populated thickly by spruce, pines, hemlocks, evergreens, maples, and oaks, and they contain beautiful lakes numbering in the hundreds. The Hudson is one of several rivers born in these picturesque heights. At first, the river flows briskly down from the Adirondacks, with waterfalls and wild rapids flanked by hilly forests and farms. Kayakers and whitewater rafters consider the upper Hudson one of the prime destinations in the eastern part of the country for its thrills and scenery. The rugged features, which so dearly appeal to kayakers and rafters, are the same ones that historically have presented an obstacle to river commerce above Albany and Troy. At the same time, however, the fast-flowing upper stretches of the river have powered lumber and textile mills. The river carried millions of logs down from the mountains during the timber boom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Mohawk River, the Hudson’s largest tributary, joins it several miles above Troy. Below Troy, as it courses to the sea at New York Harbor, the Hudson broadens and passes through a deep, glacier-carved valley. Because it lies at a low elevation

The “Rhine” of the Western World

(Troy is two feet above sea level), the lower river is affected by ocean tides all the way from New York Harbor to Troy. Thus, the entire lower Hudson is an estuary, a region where fresh water from an inland river meets and mingles with ocean brine. As far north as Newburgh, the Hudson is a saltwater river. For another 15 miles, approximately to Poughkeepsie—75 miles from the harbor—the water is a brackish (somewhat salty) mixture. At Troy, the water is fresh, but the river surface nonetheless rises and falls twice daily, with four-and-a-half foot tides. Native Algonquian people referred to this characteristic in their name for the river. They called it the “Muhheakantuck”— a river that “flows both ways” or is “constantly in motion.” Tides strongly affect the Hudson and other estuaries, much as they do coastal beaches and dunes. Not far north of the New York metro area, between Peekskill and Croton, three-mile-wide Haverstraw Bay must regularly be dredged for shipping because tides and eddies constantly pull sand into the channel. Seagoing ships can ply the river as far north as Albany, the state capital, more than 100 miles inland. In summer, sailboats and yachts are common sights on the lower Hudson. In winter, great sections of ice pile against riverside wharves, and the river assumes an altogether different character. The upper Hudson is noted for its wild scenery, and the middle and lower lengths offer their own flavor of natural grandeur. The Catskill Mountains in the middle valley have provided unforgettable vistas for river travelers for thousands of years. Author Washington Irving, a native son of the Hudson, described the “Kaatskill” highlands: They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are seen away to the west of the river, swelling up to a noble height and lording it over the surrounding country. Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When

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6 THE HUDSON RIVER the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but, sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather in a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.2

Storm King Mountain, just north of West Point, looms proud—at times intimidating—above the western riverbank. Early Dutch boatmen swore it was the home of angry spirits who hurled down lightning-laced gales to capsize their vessels. Storm King faces another mountain, Breakneck Ridge, on the eastern shore. This is the point on the Hudson that early Dutch mariners called the “Wey Gat”—the Wind Gate. Tortuous (winding) tidal currents and screaming winds made the passage formidable for sail-powered vessels. An island in the river here, Pollepel, was a moonshiners’ hideaway in the late nineteenth century. The Taconic Mountains lie along the eastern Hudson Valley at the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. Close along the eastern riverbank, commuter trains carry workers between their homes up the valley and their jobs in the sprawling metropolis below. Because of the unmatched river and countryside views, rail buffs consider a train ride between Albany and New York City a special delight. A plan for a high-speed train line would transform much of the Hudson River valley into a commuter zone. Lower regions include the dreamy Hudson Highlands above Peekskill and, just above New York City, a stretch of dramatic 500-foot cliffs called the Palisades, which extend 40 miles northward to Newburgh. To Native Americans, the Palisades were known as “Wehawken Awk”—rocks that resemble trees. The 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail—the world’s longest mountain trail, reaching from Georgia to Maine—crosses the Hudson at the Bear Mountain Bridge a few miles below West Point. From the top of Bear Mountain, hikers can see much of the Hudson Valley, from the Catskills in the north to the New York City skyline in the

The “Rhine” of the Western World

south. At parks up and down the valley, countless hiking trails meander through woods and along mountainsides. In recent years, environmental interpretive centers have been established to teach visitors details of the valley’s natural richness and the need to preserve it. The river is almost a mile wide as it approaches Manhattan. The lower Hudson is the world’s largest freshwater estuary. Wetland marshes along the river just above metropolitan New York City support a remarkable assortment of fish, fowl, and mammals. Near the mouth is The Narrows, a rocky section between Staten Island and Long Island. In addition to the sheer pleasure of scenic drives, hikes, and boat rides, visitors and residents find a treasury of historical interests in the valley. Lighthouses—common as coastal landmarks but not so common on rivers—built during the 1800s remind us that the Hudson has been an important shipping thoroughfare between the Atlantic coast and ports far inland. On Huguenot Street in New Paltz, a valley town a few miles west of the river, some of the stone houses date to the seventeenth century. Farmers along the Hudson can show visitors boxes of Native American artifacts, some more than a thousand years old, that they have picked up in their fields and forests. Saugerties Landing harks to the glorious steamship era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when vessels crowded with tourists chugged up the river from New York. Altogether, the Hudson River system drains more than 13,000 square miles of land. It was defined over a period of millions of years. One writer speculated that an “ancestral stream,” if not the actual river itself, may have existed since the Cretaceous Period—a period lasting 75 million years.3 Many of the Hudson Valley’s interesting features are the work of glaciers, half-mile-thick ice surfaces that blanketed the continent more than 10,000 years ago. Glaciation resulted, for example, in dramatic cliffs at places along the river. Melting torrents at the end of the glacial era are believed to have created what is today known as the Hudson Submarine Canyon beneath the Atlantic,

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8 THE HUDSON RIVER extending more than 500 miles into the sea off the East Coast. The underwater canyon reaches a depth of about 3,600 feet. As rich and fascinating as the valley’s geological history is its record of civilization. Archaeologists believe that humans inhabited the New York State region as long ago as 12,000 years, although settlement in the Hudson Valley apparently came much later. Scientists think that the Lenape people—whose subgroups included the Mahicans, Delaware, Wappinger, and Esopus—lived in the valley region 4,000 years, possibly more, before the first Europeans arrived in the 1500s and 1600s. Some speculate that the first inhabitants of the Hudson Valley were offspring of a race of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into what is now Alaska and Canada during the last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago, and gradually spread eastward and southward. By A.D. 1000—the time Europeans call the Middle Ages—a race of Native Americans who spoke the Algonquian (or Algonkian) language were dominant in the area. They were not the sole inhabitants of the region. Around 1570, five tribes of a different stock—Mohawk, Onandaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca— banded into a tribal nation, the Iroquois Confederacy. A century and a half later, they were joined by the Tuscarora to form what history remembers as the Six Nations. A founder of this tribal confederation—the best-developed union of Indian tribes during the era of European colonization and expansion— appears to have been a chief named Hayowentha. Some scholars believe he was Onandaga and others think he was Mohawk, but he is remembered in Native American lore as a protector of his people, one who possessed supernatural powers. Three hundred years later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized him in the poetic masterpiece “Song of Hiawatha.” In summer, chiefs and elder members of the confederacy tribes met near modern-day Syracuse, New York, at the largest Onandaga village. They debated matters that affected them all, making decisions based on majority rule; each tribe had one vote. They dominated other tribes in the Hudson Valley and New England, forcing them to pay tribute. Although they would

The “Rhine” of the Western World

9

THE EUROPEAN ARRIVAL It is possible Vikings visited the Hudson River Valley in the eleventh century. Some historians believe that John and Sebastian Cabot of England (Italian-born, actually) may have touched at or near the river mouth on their voyages to the North American coast in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The next Europeans to spy what is now New York Harbor and the entrance to the Hudson River were probably the crews of Giovanni da Verrazano and Estavan Gomez. The former was an explorer from Italy sailing for France and the latter sailed for Portugal. Their objective was the same as that of so many European sea captains of the era: to find a direct route to China by sailing west. These were times of great hardships for seamen, including small and cramped, leaky, and often unsafe vessels; rotting food and dwindling stores of drinking water; shipboard diseases that could ravage a crew and render a voyage barely manageable; and storms that did even worse damage. They were also times of unprecedented adventure and, to the rare few who attained their goals, fortune. Many a veteran sailor who swore he would never take to the sea again did so, and many a youngster in the port towns of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Holland swore he would become a master mariner some day. Soon after Verrazano’s fleet set sail from Europe in 1524, three of his four ships were damaged by storms. He arrived in the remaining vessel at what is now the North Carolina coast. In the course of exploring northward (as far as Newfoundland, ultimately), he paused briefly at the mouth of the Hudson River. Verrazano described “a very agreeable location within two small prominent hills, in the midst of which flowed to the sea a very great river, which was deep within the mouth.” Entering the river in the ship’s boat for a distance of half a league (one and a half miles), the seamen were impressed by natives who greeted them from a distance, “clothed with the feathers of birds of various colors.”* Close investigation of the site was not to be. “In an instant, as is wont to happen in navigation, a gale of unfavorable wind blowing in from the sea, we were forced to return to the ship, leaving the said land with much regret because of the commodiousness and beauty, thinking it was not without some properties of value, all of its hills showing indications of minerals.”** In the centuries to follow, the area would yield “properties of value” indeed—and minerals would prove to be only a small part of the region’s wealth. The following year, Gomez is believed to have visited the area. As far as is known, almost a century would pass before the arrival of the next Europeans. They were the Dutch and English crewmen of one of the most puzzling figures of the age of European exploration. * Leonard Outhwaite, Unrolling the Map: The Story of Exploration. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935, p 123. ** Ibid.

10 THE HUDSON RIVER not mount a lasting, unified resistance to the Europeans, the confederacy tribes managed to resolve dangerous differences among themselves. The Hudson Valley today is considered a melting pot of residents whose family roots can be traced to many countries. Before the Europeans arrived, the area was a melting pot of Native American groups. Mahicans (also known as Mohegans or Mohicans) inhabited the western bank of the upper Hudson Valley. The Delaware occupied the western Hudson Valley from below the Catskills into the Delaware Valley, and the Manhattan lived on the coastal island that now bears their name. These and other Eastern Woodlands Indians farmed, hunted, and fished. The women grew corn, squash, and beans. Their farming tools were simple: pointed wooden sticks for making holes in the ground for planting, primitive hoes, and—most important—their bare hands. Meanwhile, they gathered berries, nuts, and roots from the wild. They cooked “greens” from the leaves of certain wild plants and made soups of seasonally available foods. In springtime, they tapped maple trees for syrup. Indian families also brought home animals and birds from the woods and fish from the rivers, streams, and lakes. They moved around, finding different kinds of food in different places at different times of the year. Wild animals provided them not just with meat but with clothing, from thin loincloths and moccasins to heavy fur capes. For adornment, they used shells, porcupine quills, bones, and other naturally available items. They used certain herbs and plant parts as medicines, but deadly plagues introduced into the native population by European traders and settlers often proved incurable. Algonquian peoples lived in circular wigwams, but the Iroquois built longhouses. A longhouse consisted of bark siding over pole frames, with an angled roof similar to that used in European-style buildings. It was about 20 feet wide and up to 200 feet long and had an opening at each end. Several fires were kept burning down the center of the earthen floor, and as many as 10 families occupied a single longhouse.

The “Rhine” of the Western World

Native Americans in this region traveled mainly on foot, using snowshoes in winter. They fashioned simple toboggans to drag light loads. For transportation on the Hudson River and on the region’s lakes and streams, they carved dugouts from large logs or crafted frame canoes with birch or elm bark sides. Native American influence in the Hudson River Valley began drawing to a close soon after a sail appeared on the Atlantic horizon in September 1609. Aboard the ship were white seafarers who spoke an alien language. The Indians had heard legends of such pale, bearded men, but they could not have imagined that within a few generations, much of the magnificent territory they freely roamed would be taken over and proclaimed offlimits to them.

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Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

H

enry Hudson was a laughable and, in the end, tragic failure in his own time. He tried repeatedly to find the Northwest Passage, the fabled and elusive sea route between Europe and the Orient, and never came close. He tried a northeastern route and failed again. When, on his third voyage, he plied up the river that now bears his name, he was turned back near the site of modernday Albany, New York. Probes into other New World inlets were equally unsuccessful. For Hudson’s ambitious backers, it mattered little that these explorations helped connect major pieces of the puzzle that was the North American continent. Finally, his own crewmen became so disillusioned with Hudson that they mutinied and cast him adrift in an open boat in a vast and frigid bay. The mutineers then sailed home. Hudson, with his son and a few faithful companions, floated into the foggy mysteries of the ages, leaving no trace. Hindsight, however, always knows better than opinions of the day. We understand now that Hudson’s contributions to Europeans’ knowledge of world geography were enormous. Meanwhile, the contributions of his river and his bay to the history of North America speak for themselves. No early records of Hudson’s life have been found. Historians believe that he was born sometime between 1565 and 1575. He grew up in the London of Queen Elizabeth I during an era of high adventure and uncertainty. While Hudson was a boy, Elizabeth’s legendary “sea dogs,” notably Sir Francis Drake and Sir Richard Hawkins, were defeating the Spanish Armada and harassing foreign shipping, bringing home treasures and stories bound to inspire any wide-eyed English lad to a sailor’s life. Explorers of the time sailed with primitive navigational equipment, such as the astrolabe, to measure their positions. (The astrolabe, later replaced by the sextant, was an instrument that could show the positions of the sun and other heavenly objects.) Maps were notoriously—in many cases wildly— misleading. Globes were a novelty. Many people still doubted that the world was round.

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14 THE HUDSON RIVER Records indicate that several of Hudson’s relatives may have been involved in exploration and mercantile expansion overseas. As a youth, Henry Hudson no doubt spent much time around the wharves of the River Thames in London, “learning the ropes” of seafaring and absorbing volumes of information and misinformation from the sailors. We know practically nothing of his career until 1607, by which time he was a ship’s captain with impressive credentials. Early that year, he persuaded the Muscovy Company, a group of English merchants keenly interested in new, shorter routes to faraway ports of trade, to sponsor him on a quest for a direct sea route to the Orient. Evidence suggests that Hudson claimed to have confidential information that could lead him to succeed where other explorers had failed. Hudson’s family was among the founders and supporters of the Muscovy Company. The organization had originally established lucrative trade with Russia (it took its name from the Russian city of Moscow). Now, it was eager to develop trade for spices in the western Pacific islands. Spices, including cinnamon and cloves, were highly valued during the ages before modern techniques of food preservation were invented. For centuries, European merchants had trekked in caravans across the Middle East into the heart of the Orient to bring back spices, cloth, and other exotic goods, but overland routes across three continents were extremely dangerous and a round trip took years. By 1500, Portuguese and Spanish ships were rounding the lower tip of Africa to reach Oriental trading ports. This, too, was a dangerous, epic undertaking. European navigators believed that there had to be a shorter, faster, safer passage. In May 1607, the Muscovy Company sent Hudson on his first attempt to find a new passage to Asia. The proposed direction was literally over the top of the world. Predictably, the voyage was rather brief. Ice blocked the northerly progress of Hudson’s small ship, wistfully named the Hope-well, near the island of Spitzbergen, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle. Obviously, a direct passage across the North Pole would not be possible. The mission established more than this. Hudson kept a detailed

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

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SOUTHWARD FROM CANADA Barely two months before Henry Hudson groped upriver from the future New York Harbor, a French explorer was probing southward from Montreal on the Richelieu River. This man, Samuel de Champlain, arrived at what would become a historically important lake that extended more than 100 miles southward toward the Hudson River headwaters. Together, the two great valleys— Lake Champlain and the Richelieu to the north and the Hudson to the south— combined to form a natural divide between New York and New England. In precolonial times and into the nineteenth century, Indian and European travelers portaged their canoes overland along the edge of the Adirondacks between the Hudson and Richelieu river systems. British General John Burgoyne was stalled in this middle passage while leading his army southward from Canada toward Albany during the American Revolution. In the summer of 1776, it took three weeks for Burgoyne’s soldiers to clear a 23-mile road through the area forests and swamps. By the time Burgoyne’s force reached the upper Hudson, his military strategy was hopelessly altered by a sequence of events that would lead to his critical defeat.

log, providing considerable new information for future voyagers about the coasts of Greenland and Spitzbergen. At the latter, he observed “more whales in the bay than ever any man could number,” 4 setting off a lively arctic whaling competition among the European nations. The Muscovy Company, evidently impressed by Hudson’s account even though disappointed by his abbreviated journey, financed another try the next year, again aboard the Hope-well. On this voyage, Hudson set out northward as before and then steered eastward. He hoped to reach the Pacific Ocean by skirting northern Europe along the Siberian coast. Although Hudson and his crew were sailing in the warm months, they soon found their way again blocked by ice. With little to show for his second voyage, Hudson lost the support of the Muscovy Company. He despaired of ever leading another expedition. A new sponsor came looking for him, however, a fledgling organization of merchants in Holland called the

16 THE HUDSON RIVER Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. Dutch merchants were establishing a series of trading ports in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, which meant that they, too, were interested in a shorter route to those waters. In fact, they offered a reward for the discovery of a northerly passage. The company’s leaders met with Hudson and offered him a modest fee to sail for them in the spring of 1609. On this trip, Hudson was not supposed to sail in the direction of the New World that would reveal to him the beauty of the now famous river. His contract with the Dutch East India Company called for him once again to search for a northeasterly opening between the coast of Russia and the ice-filled arctic waters. The explorer believed that the northeast held less likelihood of success than the northwest, however. Company officials, apparently aware of his inclinations, worded the contract in terms that specifically forbade him from taking any other approach. If the northeasterly probe failed, they said, a different route might be the objective of a future expedition. For this mission, the company gave Hudson a ship of debatable quality, the 70-foot Halve Maene (Half Moon). He and a crew of 20 sailed from Amsterdam on March 25, 1609. Very quickly, it was obvious they would not get very far toward finding a Northeast Passage. Sailing along the Norwegian coast, they encountered fierce, icy storms. Harsh seas—or perhaps, some historians speculate, a mutinous crew—forced Hudson to turn around before they could even round the North Cape and search for a passage to the east. At this turning point, in mid-May, Hudson (by the terms of the contract) was supposed to return to Amsterdam and report to his merchant backers. Instead, he ordered the helmsman to set a new course to the southwest. If he found a direct passage, he knew it would matter little to the company directors whether the course was to the east or west. Lacking their permission, he surely could obtain their forgiveness—assuming he succeeded. The Atlantic crossing took almost two months. Midway, a ferocious gale carried away one of the Half Moon’s three masts.

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

Henry Hudson first reached North American shores in 1609 probably hoping to find the fabled Northwest Passage from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. This engraving depicts Hudson landing on the shores of present-day New York, greeted by Native Americans, many of whom were extremely kind to the visitors and willingly shared food and goods with them.

Several weeks later, the crew happily found themselves in the midst of a French fishing fleet off the Newfoundland coast. They netted their own share of fresh herring and cod and continued down along Nova Scotia. In mid-July, they put ashore on what is now the coast of Maine. They repaired the battered Half Moon and traded with the natives and then proceeded southwest along the North American shoreline. When we think of the Northwest Passage, we think of ice-jammed seas at the top of Canada. In Hudson’s day, however, European explorers believed—based on rumors and their flawed maps—that a placid, balmy inlet might lead them from the mid-Atlantic coast

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18 THE HUDSON RIVER (the modern-day Chesapeake Bay region) through the New World landmass to the Pacific Ocean. It seems likely that Hudson, in 1609, was hoping to find this mythical passage. Repeatedly rocked by storms, the mariners made their way as far south as present-day Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Then they came about to the north. On September 3, they anchored near the site of what would become the world’s most famous port city. One of the crewmen, Robert Juet, described the event in his journal: The Land is very pleasant and high, and bold to fall withal. At three of the clock in the after-noone, wee came to three great Rivers. So we stood along to the Northernmost, thinking to have gone into it; but we found it to have a very shoald barre before it, for we had but ten foot water. Then wee cast about to the Southward, and found two fathoms, three fathoms, and three and a quarter, till we came to the Souther side of them, then we had five and sixe fathoms, and Anchored. So wee sent in our Boate to sound, and they found no lesse water than foure, five, sixe, and seven fathoms, and returned in an houre and a halfe. So wee weighed and went in, and rode in five fathoms Ozie ground, and saw many Salmons, and Mullets, and Rayes, very great.5

The Europeans were greeted by chanting Native Americans of the Lenape tribe clad in animal hides. During the next few days, the Indians gave the visitors tobacco and corn. Hudson and his men invited some of them aboard the Half Moon. Juet recorded one scene: This day many of the people came aboard, some in Mantles of Feathers, and some in Skinnes of divers sorts of good Furres. Some women also came to us with Hempe. They had red Copper Tabacco pipes, and other things of Copper they did weare about their neckes. At night they went on Land againe, so wee rode very quiet, but durst not trust them.6

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

Hudson’s own journal provided more details: When I came on shore, the swarthy natives all stood and sang in their fashion. Their clothing consists of the skins of foxes and other animals, which they dress and make the garments from skins of various sorts. Their food is Turkish wheat [Indian corn, called maize], which they cook by baking, and it is excellent eating. They soon came on board, one after another, in their canoes, which are made of a single piece of wood. Their weapons are bows and arrows, pointed with sharp stones, which they fasten with hard resin. They had no houses, but slept under the blue heavens, some on mats of bulrushes interwoven, and some on the leaves of trees. They always carry with them all their goods, as well as their food and green tobacco, which is strong and good for use. They appear to be a friendly people, but are much inclined to steal, and are adroit in carrying away whatever they take a fancy to.7

As Hudson and his men began to explore the mouth of what he would label the “North River” and check the depths of the channel, they encountered a hostile side to the natives. Attacks by Indians in war canoes and riverside ambushes resulted in one Half Moon crewman’s death and the wounding of several others. The Europeans retaliated with musket and cannon fire, killing half a dozen natives in separate incidents. For two weeks in September, the Half Moon nosed slowly upriver, with Hudson and his crew hoping that this might be part of a route to the Pacific Ocean. The little ship progressed through the Catskills, where Hudson was greeted respectfully and treated to a feast of dog meat by a tribe of Mohican (Mahican) Indians. Unlike the Lenape, the Mohican hosts went of out of their way to assure the visitors of their friendship. Finally, the ship anchored in the vicinity of present-day Albany. While a small detachment of sailors took a boat to explore upriver, the men aboard the Half Moon restocked the hold with fresh water and bartered with the Indians for vegetables. The

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20 THE HUDSON RIVER natives invited the English commander to a tribal house fashioned of tree bark where he dined on pigeon and dog. The boating party returned, reporting that the channel upriver was too shallow for the Half Moon to navigate. The ship, in fact, had already journeyed into hazardous depths. Soon after turning about toward the Atlantic, the vessel ran aground. Fortunately, the water level rose with the tide and set it free. A greater hazard was the Europeans’ deteriorating relationship with the Indians. While the ship was anchored for trading in the vicinity of present-day Poughkeepsie, a native reportedly was caught stealing. In the ensuing fray, he and several other Indians were killed. The next day, the sailors were obliged to ward off a war party with a cannon salvo, killing several more natives. Hudson was done with exploring for the year. He set sail for Europe on October 4 and arrived in Dartmouth, England, a month later. Despite the tragic encounters with some of the natives and his disappointment at not finding the elusive Northwest Passage, Hudson was deeply impressed by what he had seen and learned. He marveled at the beauty and bounty of the river valley and recognized that many of the Indians desired friendship. A passage from his journal reveals his impressions: The land is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every description. The natives are a very good people; for, when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows, and taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire, etc.8

In the early centuries of European sea exploration, no expedition ever turned out exactly as planned. On this one, however, Hudson had contradicted his orders so drastically that skeptics at home immediately challenged his motives. To many Dutchmen, he was no less than a traitor. They openly accused him of accepting Dutch support and using it to serve the interests of his native England. Why else would he have returned to England,

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

not Holland? Why else would he have crossed the Atlantic to begin with, directly violating his contract? The English never allowed Hudson to go to Amsterdam to report to the Dutch East India Company on his 1609 expedition. Instead, he reported to Holland’s ambassador in London. This heightens speculation that Hudson’s allegiance had not been to the backers of the voyage but to his home government. Many Englishmen also considered him a traitor for accepting a Dutch-sponsored commission. In Hudson’s defense, some historians have suggested that the explorer was largely at the mercy of an unruly crew, most of whom were English. Moreover, the Dutch sailors themselves seemed opposed to returning to Amsterdam. Perhaps they feared punishment for certain mutinous or other unsavory acts they had committed during the voyage. Perhaps they feared Dutch officials would punish the entire crew for disobeying the instructions to ply east not west. Henry Hudson made one more voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. For his final expedition, he was engaged by the British East India Company, a league of English merchants, to seek a passage over the top of the North American continent. With a crew of 22, he sailed aboard a ship named the Discovery on April 17, 1610. There was trouble practically from the moment the ship weighed anchor. Distrust between the commander and crew is evident from the few records that exist. Juet—the crewman on whose journal historians rely for details of the 1609 voyage—in particular appears to have begun stirring bad feelings among the crew toward Hudson long before the Discovery entered arctic waters. Hudson steered slightly north of west from England, crossing the entrance to what is now called the Davis Strait between Greenland and the Canadian mainland. He passed south of Baffin Island and into the massive bay that today bears his name. Much of the voyage west of Greenland was through thick pack ice, which tested both skill and nerves and apparently made Hudson himself wonder whether he should turn back. He put the question to the crew, who voted to continue their search for the Northwest Passage.

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22 THE HUDSON RIVER In the southern reaches of the bay, the commander zigzagged futilely, not realizing he was sailing on a body of water that had no opening to the west. He ordered the ship beached and camp set up for the coming winter. It was a miserable, bitterly cold season. Food was dangerously scarce. By the time the ice receded enough the following spring for the Discovery to be refloated, the men were on starvation rations. Juet and another crewman named Henry Greene led a mutiny on June 22, 1611. Hudson, his son John, and several men who were either devoutly loyal or too sick to help the mutineers sail the ship were set adrift in an open boat. The rebels gave them a small allotment of food and some weapons for hunting, but the fate of the castaways in such a harsh environment was hardly in doubt. After a fatal encounter with natives and nearly starving on the return voyage across the Atlantic, seven famished sailors eventually reached England aboard the Discovery. They had been reduced to eating moss, bird bones, sawdust, and candle wax. Perhaps the government, as well as the public, was more sympathetic than angry, because although mutiny was a capital offense, none were punished. No definitive trace of Hudson and his companions was ever found. Remarkably, for an explorer who thoroughly failed in four successive missions, Hudson lives on in having a great bay, an important river, a strait, and a variety of human landmarks named after him. Because the Dutch had sent Hudson on his third voyage, it was Holland that claimed the lands along the Hudson River. The first permanent Dutch settlement was established 15 years after Hudson’s 1609 voyage. Called Fort Orange, it was built at the site of present-day Albany. Two years later, in 1626, Dutch colonists led by Peter Minuit bargained with the Canarsie Indians for permission to settle Manhattan Island at the river mouth. This became New Amsterdam. The “cost” to the Dutch was ridiculously trivial—trinkets and tools worth about $25. Historians have concluded that the Canarsie people believed

Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner

they were agreeing merely to share the island with the Europeans. The Dutch preferred an interpretation that was quite different. New Amsterdam, as they saw it, now belonged to them. They soon built a fortress on lower Manhattan Island, but it would not remain long in their control. This was a century when Holland was gripped in a power struggle with England and other European nations. England would soon take New Amsterdam from the Dutch, and New Amsterdam would become New York. Before these historic events, however, the Dutch would establish their presence in the Hudson Valley—permanently.

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The Dutch Period

The Dutch Period

T

he Hudson Valley, combined with the Delaware River Valley to the south, came to be known as New Netherland. The Delaware River flows southward from the Catskills to form the modern-day border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey; it then passes through Philadelphia and into Delaware Bay. The Dutch may have been unhappy with Henry Hudson, but they immediately took advantage of the stake he gave them to the North American continent, and it was in this manner that the colony’s quaint, brief “Dutch period” began. A year after Hudson’s visit to the area, the Dutch East India Company began sending ships across the Atlantic and all the way up the North (Hudson) River estuary to trade for animal pelts. Historian Maud Wilder Goodwin, in Dutch and English on the Hudson, pointed out that at first, “the aim of all these voyages was commerce rather than colonization. Shiploads of tobacco and furs were demanded by the promoters, and to obtain these traders and not farmers were needed.” 9 This trade flourished from the outset and would continue for two centuries, long after the Dutch gave up control of the colony. Almost immediately, commerce led to the establishment of rustic trading posts. Fortresses and permanent settlements would follow. It was the Dutch West India Company that actually set about colonizing New Netherland. In 1621, the government of the Netherlands chartered this new mercantile organization, a counterpart to the Dutch East India Company, to develop trade in the Americas. The first Dutch child was born in New Netherland in 1625. Between 1624 and 1626, fortresses were built on Manhattan Island and at strategic points up the river as far as Fort Orange, which would become Albany. In fact, Fort Orange—not Manhattan—attracted the first permanent Dutch residents. They called their civilian settlement Beverwyck. One writer has described the colony of New York as acquiring “a Manhattan focus and a Hudson axis” 10 during the 166 years between Henry Hudson’s first tentative exploration and the start of the American Revolution. In a nutshell, the heart of the

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26 THE HUDSON RIVER colony was the Hudson River Valley. The early settlers were comparatively prosperous for their time and place. Their crops flourished, and they continued to develop a lively, friendly trade with the Native Americans. In autumn of 1626, officials in the home country received noteworthy tidings from the settlements. The Arms of Amsterdam arrived there with a cargo of New World valuables that included more than 7,000 beaver pelts, about 850 otter hides, 48 mink skins, 36 wildcat skins, 34 rat skins and supplies of native oak and hickory wood. Fur and good wood were very important to the whole New Netherland venture because they brought high prices in Europe. These were finite resources, however. In time, trappers and traders would have to operate farther and farther westward in their quest for furs and prime timber. Goodwin observed, The chronicle of these years is melancholy reading for lovers of animals, for never before in the history of the continent was there such a wholesale, organized slaughter of the unoffending creatures of the forest. Beavers were the greatest sufferers. Their skins became a medium of currency, and some of the salaries in the early days of the colony were paid in so many “beavers.” 11

Along with its cargo, the Arms of Amsterdam brought good news. The mariners reported that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the women also have borne some children there. They have purchased the Island of Manhattes [Manhattan] from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders. . . . They had all their grains sowed by the middle of May, and reaped by the middle of August. They send samples of summer grain; such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, canary seed, beans and flax.12

Obviously, the Dutch settlers here were faring far better than the English in Jamestown, Virginia, (established 1607) and

The Dutch Period

Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620). The English settlements were older but languished in despair. Jamestown colonists were still reeling from years of starvation, Indian massacres, drought, and disease. Their leaders so longed for a successful wheat crop, in the aftermath of one barren season after another, that they were offering a reward to the first farmer who could grow it. Meanwhile, the Mayflower contingent at Plymouth had yet to produce ample foodstuffs to spare any “samples” with which to impress the king and Parliament. The Dutch, in contrast, had arrived very well prepared, with more than a hundred head of livestock, seeds, tools, furniture, and “country people” who knew how to live off the land and establish successful farms. In retrospect, it is also recognized that the Dutch in New Netherland held the important advantage of climate: they were not hampered by the frigid winters of New England to the north and the plague-spawning summer humidity of the James River to the south. Pioneer colonists were a hardy—and in many ways crude— lot. Most were illiterate and, although devoutly religious, were given to swearing and drinking. They dressed simply and coarsely, donning animal furs in cold weather. The women were as able-bodied as the men; they helped build small log dwellings, worked the fields, and shot a gun to defend themselves when necessary. Once settled, the newcomers enjoyed the bounties of the wilderness—often delivered to their doors by Indians eager to trade. One early account mentions a typical exchange: a freshslain stag for a European jackknife. A hefty chunk of venison cost mere pennies or trinkets. The Dutch also shot game. Geese rose so thickly from the marshes that on one occasion a hunter named Henry de Backer reportedly fired a single shot into a flock and brought down 11 fowl. Flocks of pigeons and partridges sometimes blocked the sun. In many cases, wild game literally delivered itself to the settlers’ chopping blocks; it was said that deer and wild turkey wandered into the hog pens of Beverwyck to eat with the domestic swine.

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28 THE HUDSON RIVER Fish, large turtles, and other water creatures were plentiful. Records tell of six-foot lobsters in the bay. These giants were reportedly common until the American Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when repeated naval cannon salvoes drove them from the area. Foot-long oysters added to New Amsterdam table fare. Historian Alice Morse Earle, writing more than a century ago, described some of the bounty from the sea: “Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded in New York as in England and Holland at the same date. The ling and herring of the old country gave place in New York to shad. The greatest pain was taken in preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful shad.” 13 There were also bountiful orchards. Soon after their arrival, the Dutch planted and began cultivating fruit trees. Within a century, New York apples and cider were widely recognized for their flavor. Peaches became so common that the inhabitants did not bother to tend the trees. Cherries and plums beckoned from the roadsides. “All travellers and passers-by could pick and eat at will,” wrote an eighteenth-century traveling Swedish naturalist named Peter Kalm.14 Vegetables also grew well in the valley soil. Potatoes, parsnips, turnips, carrots, beets, lettuce, radishes, squash, and pumpkins were plentiful. The river, all the while, was New Netherland’s lifeline. Goodwin wrote, The newly discovered river soon began to be alive with sail, high-pooped vessels from over sea, and smaller vlie booten [“flyboats”], which plied between New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, loaded with supplies and household goods. Tying the prow of his boat to a tree at the water’s edge, the enterprising skipper turned peddler and opened his packs of beguiling wares for the housewife at the farm beside the river. Together with the goods in his pack, he doubtless also opened his budget of news from the other settlements and told the farmer’s wife how the houses about the fort at Manhattan had increased to thirty, how the new Director was strengthening the fort, and how all promised well for the future of New Netherland.15

The Dutch Period

The relative prosperity of the colony continued for years. There are no tales of blight and starvation in New Netherland as there are in the records of other New World settlements. In fact, the colonists there did so well that they quickly began supplying the Dutch West Indies colonies with some of their grains, fruits, and dairy products. Cargo ships based in New Amsterdam not only made the Atlantic crossing but set courses up and down the coast and to the Caribbean. It is surprising, then, that Holland did not seriously set about to “grow” its handsome new colony. Geographer-author D. W. Meinig has surmised that this was “less a matter of the difficulties and dangers abroad [in the colonies] than the comforts and securities of home. Holland was simply too prosperous, tolerant, and tranquil, too ‘pleasant and charming’ itself to produce any considerable body of discontented, and New Netherland was too lacking in sources of quick wealth, such as gold or tobacco, to lure the greedy and speculative.” 16 In 1629, the West India Company advertised the “patroon” system for New Netherland. It offered vast tracts of land in the Hudson Valley to adventurous colonizers who would pledge to have at least 50 adults living on the property by the end of the fourth year. The patroon tracts encompassed 16 miles of riverfront and basically reached as deep into the wilderness as the settlers cared to settle. One problem with these massive dimensions was that settlement was less feasible the farther from the riverbanks farmers ventured. Another problem was that tracts so large were ridiculously unmanageable; 50 or even hundreds of Europeans would have been swallowed up in such domains. A greater problem, which doomed the patroon system from the outset, was the difficulty of attracting 50 adult settlers who were willing to toil for an overlord. Farm families in Holland were not at all excited by the prospect of becoming tenant farmers on a patroon estate in New Netherland. “No sane mind,” wrote historian Goodwin, “could have expected the Dutch colonists to return without protest to a medieval system of government.” 17 Only one patroon venture lasted: Rensselaerswyck, the realm of

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30 THE HUDSON RIVER an ambitious Dutchman named Van Rensselaer. His seemingly boundless estate sprawled forth from both sides of the river in the vicinity of Fort Orange. After the general failure of the patroon plan, the Dutch resorted to more common incentives for settlers, such as modest farm grants. Still, most Old World families remained uninterested in pulling up stakes from Holland, hazarding a transatlantic crossing, and starting a new life on a little-known continent. Apart from Beverwyck (Fort Orange), most early Dutch settlers lived in what is now the greater New York City area, as well as on Long Island and a few miles up into the Hudson valley. A small gathering at Esopus—modern-day Kingston—was the only group of settlers who dared to brave the wilderness and unpredictable natives between Fort Orange and the river mouth. Today, many of the villages and subcenters of New York City bear Dutch names: Brooklyn (initially Breuckelen), Harlem (initially Nieuw Haarlem—named after Haarlem in the Netherlands), and Bronx (initially Bronck’s). Dutch influence continues in the surroundings and upriver: Groote Vlachte became Big Flat, Schaenheckstede on the Mohawk River became Schenectady, and the “kill” appendage—as in Peekskill and Catskill—refers to creeks or streams. Creeks and streams—and the river itself—were the arteries of the new colony. Increasingly, small European ships and boats joined bark canoes and rafts on the Hudson. Lively commerce developed. Although the Dutch in New Netherland generally fared better than colonists elsewhere, they did face hardships and perils. Violent disputes often arose with the native tribes. In 1655, a Dutchman saw an aging Indian picking fruit in his peach orchard and fatally shot the poacher. In the aftermath, a large war party sacked New Amsterdam and other area settlements, killing about 100 residents and taking 150 captives. An even greater threat, however, was posed by European rivals. The Dutch were ever wary of Swedish colonists to the south. Over the sea, war broke out in 1652 between Holland and its

The Dutch Period

The Dutch colony in New Netherland fared better than other North American colonies but it still faced significant hardships, including violent conflicts with Native Americans, threats from European rivals, and decreasing support from home. When England announced its claim on New Netherland in 1664, governor Peter Stuyvesant realized resistance would be futile and surrendered the colony to England, as seen in this painting.

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32 THE HUDSON RIVER

THE QUICK DEMISE OF DUTCH RULE With its parent Dutch West India Company offering little interest and support, New Netherland was ripe for change by 1660. Protecting the colony against Indian hostilities and infringement by other settlers was an expensive proposition, and company directors doubted its worth. Conflicts with the Native Americans, often sparked by Dutch cruelty, occurred at different locations along the river during the late 1650s and early 1660s. In 1663, the colonists were hit hard by natural woes: an outbreak of smallpox, a strong earthquake, and a flooding of the Hudson River. The floodwaters destroyed crops on many valley farms. Thus, it was to a dejected, befuddled colony that an English war fleet was sent the following year. After brief negotiations and without firing a single cannon salvo, the English took New Amsterdam and gave it a new name: New York.

former ally, England. Although the war did not spread to the American colonies, the Dutch along the Hudson and the New Englanders up the coast frantically fortified their settlements. In many ways, the Dutch in America were on their own, with dwindling support from the home country. The Dutch West India Company increasingly ignored its Hudson settlements and refused to finance their protection. In their newfound territory, meanwhile, Dutch settlers were not exactly happy. Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general (governor) of New Netherland from 1647 until its demise 17 years later, was a hard leader. Stuyvesant had lost a leg while directing Dutch West India Company efforts against the Portuguese in the Caribbean Sea. His subordinates called him “Old Silver Nails” because his wooden leg was banded with silver and secured with silver nails. Violently intolerant of colonists’ complaints, Stuyvesant often banged his peg in fury, relegating New Amsterdamers to cowed subjugation. Long after his death, it was insisted that the stump leg of Peter Stuyvesant could be heard at night, storming through the aisles of the church where he was buried.

The Dutch Period

Nonetheless, Stuyvesant’s stern countenance and authoritarian methods faltered against the trend of history. Lacking substantial support from the old country, New Netherland was doomed. By 1663, Stuyvesant himself saw the handwriting on the wall. He reported to Holland that “it is wholly out of our power to keep the sinking ship afloat any longer.” 18 For years, English traders had been at odds with their Dutch counterparts in the Hudson Valley. Now the colony was theirs for the taking. In 1664, King Charles II announced England’s claim to the territory. He asserted that John and Sebastian Cabot, Italian mariners in the service of England, had visited the area of Manhattan long before Henry Hudson’s 1609 expedition. (Charles apparently neglected to take into account the names “Verrazano” and “Gomez,” who, using his own logic, might have muddied these diplomatic waters by suggesting possible French and Portuguese rights to the territory.) He sent Colonel Richard Nicolls and 500 soldiers aboard four warships to take possession of New Amsterdam. There was no fighting. Stuyvesant stalled, but he knew resistance would be futile. He soberly surrendered the colony, which was renamed New York.

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Growth and War Under English Rule

Growth and War Under English Rule

K

ing Charles granted the colony to his brother James, Duke of York, but the English wisely made no attempt to push out the Dutch farmers and villagers or seize their property. For almost a year, they let Dutch leaders continue to run the city government of New York much as they had when it was New Amsterdam. Even after they changed some of the Dutch names to English and began requiring local officials to swear allegiance to the duke, they interfered in the old system only as much as necessary to establish control. Unity and harmony were the main order of business. Thus, the initial Dutch influence was kept intact. It would remain permanently entrenched throughout the colony. Much of the credit for the peaceful transition belongs to Richard Nicolls, the conquering army officer who was appointed the colony’s first English governor. Nicolls treated the Dutch fairly, and they appreciated him dearly. “When he resigned his post after four years of service,” reported Goodwin, “New York was deeply regretful over his departure and Cornelis Steenwyck, the Dutch mayor of the city, gave a farewell banquet in his honor.” 19 The population of the whole colony of New Netherland at the time of the English takeover was only 8,000; about 1,500 of the colonists lived in New Amsterdam. Here was a locale gifted with several key natural advantages, yet in four decades, it had attracted only a third as many European colonists as New England, whose settlers faced many hardships. The change from Dutch to British flags brought little practical difference in the lives of the settlers. Most of the Dutch kept their property and went about earning a living with their farms and shops. Although England held military control, it did not seek to dominate the colony with a rush of English immigrants. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, the governors of the New York colony began making generous land grants to settlers in the Hudson Valley. Within a generation, virtually the entire region, all the way to Saratoga, was held by private landowners. In many situations, no surveys were made. Grant

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36 THE HUDSON RIVER holders claimed vague, boundless domains. Conflicts and confusion resulted. The holdings (or at least the claims) were so gargantuan that new settlers were discouraged. The valley became the dominion of comparatively few landowners— mostly Dutch—too few to engage in large-scale farming. In 1732, New York Surveyor-General Cadwallader Colden lamented the absence of cultivation on the Hudson Valley land grants “tho they contain some of the best of the Lands, and the most conveniently situated.” Colden explained that “the Grantees themselves are not, nor never were in a Capacity to improve such large Tracts and other People will not become their Vassals or Tenants.” 20 Not long afterward, Swedish botanist Peter Kalm likewise expressed bewilderment at the sparseness of agriculture along the Hudson. The estates he saw in his travels displayed “fine plowed fields, well-built farms and good orchards,” but they were few and far between. What little they did yield, however, was of notable quality. In Kalm’s opinion, the flour produced from Hudson Valley grains was “the best in all North America.” 21 Colden’s theory for the slow growth seems logical, but valley settlement was also hampered by the uncertainties of rural life. Notable among these were hostile Indians and periodic clashes with French pioneers and traders to the north. In 1690, Schenectady’s 80 houses were burned by French and Indian marauders. In 1745, Saratoga fell under attack by the French. The former disaster occurred during King William’s War, the latter during King George’s War— two of the four major conflicts between French and English forces over control of the North American colonies. The result was that most valley settlers retreated to the relative safety of a few scattered river towns. New York City grew steadily, however, primarily because of its position as a mid-Atlantic port. Trade was basically the only productive activity the city had going for it—and that was more than adequate. Its merchants prospered and built fine homes, and wealthy colonists from New England and the West Indies

Growth and War Under English Rule

Though life in the New York colony was hampered by hostile Indians and clashes between the French and the English, the harbor city grew steadily because of its importance as a Mid-Atlantic port. Merchants and wealthy colonists flocked to New York City because of its commercial advantages and also because of its emerging reputation as a fashionable city. This 1837 painting shows ships entering the harbor between New York and New Jersey.

took notice. Some decided to relocate to New York, mainly for commercial advantages but also because it was emerging as a fashionable, bustling city. In 1691, 30 trading ships, sloops, and ketches were based at the port of New York. The fleet increased steadily during the 1700s. In 1749, 157 commercial vessels were on record in the colony; in 1762, there were 477 ships; and in 1772—three years before the beginning of the American Revolution—there were 709. They plied the coastal waters and the North Atlantic,

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38 THE HUDSON RIVER regularly bringing in molasses and rum from the Caribbean and factory products from England. In exchange, the colony by this time was producing a broad variety of sellable merchandise. The farmers were harvesting several types of grain, raising livestock, and marketing secondary farm commodities, including beeswax. Second, although wild game numbers were thinning in the eastern wilderness, trappers and hunters were still bringing bundle after bundle of animal hides to market in Albany for shipment downriver. In addition, the timber industry was booming as colonists took to the river valleys to send down logs for ship spars and houses. Mining, most notably of iron ore, was also flourishing. Finally, the handy colonists were manufacturing all sorts of valuable goods from all of these raw products, from flour to shoes and hats to candles to cabinets to beer. Besides the saltwater fleet, a small contingent of sloops ran the Hudson River between New York, Kingston, and Albany. These passages could be idyllic, but there were certain risks. In the late 1600s, pirates operating in the Atlantic and Caribbean were a great menace to colonial shipping. They invaded even the Hudson itself. Period documents in Albany reported in 1696 that “pirates in great numbers infest the Hudson River at its mouth and waylay vessels on their way to Albany, speeding out from covers and from behind islands and again returning to the rocky shores, or ascending the mountains along the river to conceal their plunder.” 22 Many a pirate and privateer strode the streets of New York, among them the world-renowned Captain William Kidd, who was hanged in May 1701 at Execution Dock. Despite such threats, the interior ports grew in importance and in size. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Albany County’s population was more vibrant than New York County’s at the river mouth. The port county grew from about 5,000 to 7,200 residents, and Albany County grew from 1,500 to 6,500. With the treaty that ended the French and Indian Wars in 1763, the Hudson Valley’s population exploded. Larger schooners

Growth and War Under English Rule

and sloops began to sail the river. By the beginning of the American Revolution, Albany County had more than 40,000 inhabitants—twice the population of New York County. Farmers even began populating the upper reaches of the valley north of Albany. Meinig observed, however, that New York’s growth was surprisingly modest compared with that of other regions. Its 1775 population of 185,000 ranked it in the middle of the 13 American colonies. Meinig wrote, No other colony had anything like a Hudson River to allow such easy penetration into the interior, yet settlers of North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania had made much farther westward advances, while Yankees of New England had spread up the Connecticut Valley, far outdistancing the Yorkers in the parallel Hudson-Champlain trough. 23

German families, in New York as in other colonies, accounted for a large percentage of the eighteenth-century growth. The names of some of the Hudson Valley towns today reflect this lineage: Germantown, Newburgh, Rhinecliff, Staatsburg. Meanwhile, English and Scots Irish migrants arrived overland from New England. English rule gradually altered the cultural profile of the New York colony, eventually making it similar to the other 12 British colonies along the East Coast. Although Dutch continued to be the primary language of the region as late as the mid-1700s and the Dutch culture was etched permanently in the hills, villages, and waterfronts, youngsters of old Dutch families began to speak English as well. English it would remain—but a different form of English. Incensed by what they considered heavy-handed domination by the Crown, colonists in the New World began clamoring for independence. Matters boiled over violently in 1775. Quite unlike the peaceful transition of 1664, New York’s next change in government would result from a bloodbath.

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40 THE HUDSON RIVER The American Revolution has been called the “first American civil war” because families and communities split their allegiances. Relatives and neighbors frequently fought against one another. Skirmishes, raids, and intrigues between Tories (British allies) and Patriots (independence fighters) were probably nowhere more intense than in the colony of New York. Naturally, the Hudson River was the scene of countless military adventures, follies, and tragedies. During six years of active fighting (the Revolution actually lasted eight years), some Hudson Valley estate owners fled. The British torched Kingston. New York City was in British hands, and its citizens were angrily divided, some supporting the revolution and others staunchly loyal to the Crown. In the spring of 1778, rebels blockaded the Hudson at West Point with a 47-ton, 500-yard chain to halt the passage of British warships, and it was at West Point that one of the most infamous episodes of treason in world history unfolded two years later. From the beginning, the Hudson was a key geographical factor in a British scheme to end the war quickly—with calamitous results. In the winter of 1776 –1777, British general “Gentleman” John Burgoyne was spending the cold months at home in London, comfortably distant from the uprising in the American colonies. Burgoyne was a capable, flamboyant field commander. His objective of the moment was typically ambitious, and “Hudson’s River,” as it was identified on period maps, would be important to its success. Burgoyne believed that he could lead an army down from Canada, converge with other British forces in the vicinity of Albany, crush the rebellion, and retire in glory to England. His plan, titled “Thoughts for Conducting the War from the Side of Canada,” was persuasive and won the approval of King George III. The following June, Burgoyne was at the head of more than 7,000 soldiers and 30 carts of personal luxuries (wine, books, and fine clothes), driving southward toward Albany.

Growth and War Under English Rule

Burgoyne’s force swiftly captured the American stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain and marched on Albany. If all went according to plan, they would be joined there by General William Howe’s army coming up the Hudson from the port of New York and by a third British force hastening from the west along the Mohawk River. The scheme fell apart as Burgoyne’s army literally bogged down while trying to cut a road between Fort Ticonderoga and the Hudson headwaters. Howe decided to move on Philadelphia instead of cooperating with Burgoyne, and the western British unit was decimated by desertions and plagued with delays. What Burgoyne encountered when he finally arrived on the Hudson was a massive American army entrenched near the town of Stillwater. In what history remembers as the Saratoga Campaign—a series of battles, skirmishes, and military chess maneuvers over a period of three weeks— Burgoyne was forced to surrender his entire army to American general Horatio Gates in October 1777. Ever the social animal, Burgoyne partied to the bitter end at a Tory mansion fireside while his soldiers shivered and deserted in the cold, dank autumn woods. Historians consider the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga an early turning point in the Revolutionary War. It bolstered patriot morale; gave the starving, half-naked colonial soldiers precious captured supplies; and persuaded France to enter the conflict on America’s side. Some calculate that it was here, on the upper Hudson, that England lost the American Revolution. Four years would pass, however, before the climactic triumph at Yorktown, Virginia. Throughout the war, among the most important American forts was the one constructed at West Point in early 1778, about 50 miles upriver from New York Harbor. The Americans heavily fortified West Point, because this installation would have to guard the upper Hudson Valley against a British naval attack. Using logs as floats, they strung an enormous chain across the river from West Point to

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MARGARET CORBIN The American Revolution spawned many heroes and heroines. Some carried out truly unique and outstanding exploits. The acts of others were exaggerated, making the performers and performances seem much more important than they actually were. In still other instances, historians question whether the individuals actually existed or whether they actually executed the deeds for which they were credited. Lacking reliable documentation, some scholars rank the legend of Molly Pitcher in the middle category. She was a real person—Molly Hays of Pennsylvania— who, like many wives, followed her husband, John, a gunner, into combat. She earned her nickname fetching water for the soldiers. She earned her fame at the Battle of Monmouth, New Jersey. When her husband and others of his cannon detail fell wounded by a British shell, she grabbed the rammer pole and took his place. Her fearless, effective work caught the eye of George Washington, who made her a noncommissioned officer in the Continental Army. Regardless of whether the story is true, in full or in part, women clearly performed similar acts of courage throughout the conflict. One bona fide heroine emerged at Fort Washington, a Hudson River fortress near Manhattan. Margaret Corbin, like Molly Hays, was a native of Pennsylvania. The wife of a cannoneer, she served the soldiers in the field by nursing, sewing, washing, and cooking. Domestic work was forgotten in November 1776, when 13,000 British and Hessians under General William Howe besieged the American outpost. When her husband was killed in an explosion, she insisted on taking his place with the cannon crew. The British took the fort, killing or wounding 500 American defenders and capturing 2,500 more. Margaret herself was wounded in action. Hessian captors treated 25-year-old Margaret for her wounds and then released her. Records show that the Pennsylvania government awarded her $30 for her bold deed. Congress was more generous, voting her a soldier’s half-pay and a suit of clothes. Though suffering a permanent arm injury, she further served her country as a guard in the West Point Corps of Invalids. After the war, she lived in the West Point area until her death in 1800. She is buried at West Point.

Constitution Island, just off the river’s eastern shore. (The rebels were not concerned about simultaneously blocking the movement of their own navy, which was comparatively slight throughout the colonies and nonexistent on the Hudson River.)

Growth and War Under English Rule

As it turned out, the chain, although a necessary precaution, never proved its worth; no British fleet ever attempted to break past it into the middle section of the river valley. Assigned to command the fort in August 1780 was a general whose name would become synonymous with “traitor.” Benedict Arnold arrived on the Hudson a bitter, grudging officer. Earlier that year, he had been court-martialed and reprimanded for profiteering in his role as Continental Army commander at Philadelphia. Arnold was furious with General George Washington and his other superiors—including the Continental Congress. Flamboyant, like Burgoyne, he also happened to be a debtor in need of funds. Moreover, he was subject to the influence of his young wife, the former Peggy Shippen, whose family supported the Crown. In summary, perhaps more surprising than Arnold’s treachery was Washington’s expression of disbelief when he discovered it. Arnold’s treasonous plan was a bold one. Soon after assuming command of West Point, Arnold conspired to surrender it to the British for 20,000 English pounds—a king’s ransom in that era. Fortunately for the Americans, sentries at Tarrytown captured Arnold’s accomplice, British major John André, when André tried to slip through American lines. The documents concealed in his boots were incriminating, and the conspiracy was discovered. Learning of André’s capture, Arnold fled West Point and had himself rowed to a British ship standing downriver. Although the plot had failed, Arnold was paid more than 6,000 pounds and made a general in the British army. André was hanged a week after his capture. Arnold fought for the British until Yorktown. He died in England in 1801, scorned by London society. The sad irony of the affair was that Arnold, until his court-martial and act of treason, had been an exceptional commander who seemed destined to become one of America’s first great heroes. Indeed, he had been seriously wounded leading a charge that helped defeat Burgoyne in the 1777 Saratoga Campaign.

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44 THE HUDSON RIVER Today, other wartime episodes are commemorated by historical organizations throughout the Hudson Valley. There is the Stony Point Battlefield in Rockland County, where American General Anthony Wayne’s corps surprised a sleeping British force in the middle of a night in 1779. At the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, visitors can see a chip on the banister allegedly made by tomahawk-wielding Tories who raided the home; they were trying to kidnap the wife of Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s aide-de-camp. The end of the war was publicly announced in 1783 on the grounds of the Hasbrouck House in Newburgh, where Washington and his staff spent more than a year waiting impatiently for the peace treaty to be completed in Paris. It was a trying, delicate situation for Washington. Some of the soldiers under his command had not been paid for six years, and although they had won the war, they remained poorly clothed and fed. By the spring of 1783, his officers and men were angry to the point of marching on Philadelphia to demand fair treatment from the Continental Congress. Some historians believe that Washington, had he been so inclined, could have led them and established himself as a military dictator, just as Napoleon would do in France 16 years later. Instead, Washington quelled the pending revolt in his famous Newburgh Address of March 15. In mid-speech, he put on his spectacles—which only his closest aides ever had seen him wear—and explained modestly to the soldiers that “I have not only grown gray but almost blind in your service.” 24 Deeply moved, many of the hardened fighters wept at this simple, poignant act. The march against Congress never happened. In a sense, George Washington’s spectacles were more important than his military leadership in making the new nation a democracy rather than a dictatorship. The last two decades of the 1700s saw the demise not only of British control in the Hudson Valley but also of the Native Americans’ legendary Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois had become allied with the British during the pre-Revolutionary military struggle between British and French forces in the

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region. During the Revolution, two confederacy tribes, the Tuscarora and Oneida, sided with the Americans, and others remained loyal to the British. In one battle in 1779, a large American force defeated the Mohawk and destroyed their crops. After the Revolution, the Iroquois tribes made a treaty with the new government. The Mohawk, Cayuga, and Oneida migrated to Canada and the Great Lakes territories. Those who stayed in New York would soon find themselves relegated to the growing nation’s reservation system.

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s the new nation began to evolve, the Hudson River Valley began to experience astonishing growth and development. It was already the site of prosperous farms and orchards, some of which were extensive estates. Towns in the valley prospered and grew, supporting a variety of merchants and professionals. Entrepreneurs had begun to export great shipments of timber and iron ore. Factories produced cloth and dye. Soon, the placid setting would attract artists with an eye for unmatched natural beauty. The terrain along the shoreline attracted the military, and the westward reaches of the river system would form a natural component of a vital new route west. Thus, the broad river valley through eastern New York also began to assume national importance. Despite the fact that West Point had turned out to be more a source of embarrassment than a pivotal guardian of the patriotic cause during the Revolution, it deeply impressed the new American government. Unquestionably, its location was strategically important. Revolutionaries built the original army post on a bluff overlooking the Hudson in 1778 to bombard any British vessels trying to slip upriver. Ship cannons were not their only concern. Because the Royal Navy dominated coastal waters, inland communication between the northern and southern colonies was vital; if the British seized control of the Hudson River, that line of communication would be severed. For this reason alone, Benedict Arnold was able to demand a hefty sum from the British military command for delivering West Point into their hands. Had his plot not been foiled, it might have changed the course of American history. The West Point location remained vital even after the war, because the nation was by no means secure from foreign threats. In 1802, Congress passed legislation to establish the United States Military Academy at this fort, which had been, at least to the New York colony, a focal point of the Revolution. The government’s purpose was to train not just battlefield leaders here but also government engineers—the corps of professionals

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During the Revolutionary War, one of the most important American forts was at West Point, about 50 miles up the Hudson from New York Harbor. The location, shown here in this 1834 painting, remained vital after the conclusion of the war, first as an Army port intended to bombard foreign vessels slipping upriver, and then as the home of the United States Military Academy. Today, more than 4,000 women and men attend West Point, and its graduates have long provided the basis of U.S. Army leadership.

who would design and build many of America’s bridges, railroads, and canals. Ten cadets were enrolled when the academy opened— appropriately—on July 4 of that year. Today, more than 4,000 men and women are enrolled. Throughout the nation’s history,

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West Point graduates have provided the basis of our military leadership. Many officers on both sides of the Civil War, including Grant and Lee, were trained at West Point. In addition to its two centuries of service as the U.S. army’s premier officer training school, West Point claims a distinguished bit of military trivia: It has been continuously occupied by the army longer than any other military post in America. Fortunately, vessels traveling the river after the war were commercial ships, not battle wagons. At the same time, commercial shipping was evolving out of the age of sail. Inventors of the day were experimenting with steam power. If steam could be applied to transportation, they realized, it would change the world. The Hudson River became a busy thoroughfare for steamboats during the nineteenth century. In large part, the river gave birth to the steamboat era in America. The man credited with making steam-powered riverboats commercially successful in America was Robert Fulton, a Pennsylvanian. After trying futilely to interest European leaders in his steamboat experiments, Fulton returned to America and engineered The North River Steamboat, later renamed the Clermont. Fulton gained the backing of Robert R. Livingston, an influential New York statesman and U.S. minister to France. Livingston controlled much of the Hudson River’s boat traffic during the early years of the new century. The Clermont was not the first steamer to ply American waters. In the 1780s, a Connecticut inventor, John Fitch, had built a steamer and put it into passenger service on the Delaware River. This effort failed to turn a profit, and Fitch, impoverished and depressed, had committed suicide. Others had experimented with steam-powered boats in New England, Virginia, and Europe. Fulton’s enterprise was different. Although his idea was not his own, he was able to earn money with the Clermont and subsequent steamers. Much of the credit for that belongs to the river he chose: the Hudson. The Clermont’s first paying run, from New York to Albany on September 4–5, 1807, took 32 hours;

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50 THE HUDSON RIVER sailing ships typically took four days. Fourteen passengers paid $7 each for the ride. Within a month, the Clermont was running a regular schedule, carrying more than 60 passengers on each run. By the end of the season, at the onset of winter, the boat was a financial success. Fulton, once a frustrated inventor struggling to hawk his ideas to any government that would grant him an audience, became a wealthy man. For the first few years of steam power, he and Livingston held a government-granted monopoly along the Hudson. Fulton later helped develop steam ferry service on the East River. During the War of 1812, he served in the defense of his country by designing an armored steam barge—history’s first steam-powered warship—to help protect New York Harbor from the British navy. The contraption, dubbed Fulton the First, was never attacked, but it was a notable step in the evolution of naval warfare. Fulton had a legion of competitors. A year after he introduced the Clermont, an inventor named John Stephens, Jr., launched his own steamboat on the Hudson. Stephens quickly realized that his Phoenix would have a better chance of success away from his rival Fulton, so he relocated to the Delaware River. In June 1809, the Phoenix made history, becoming the world’s first ocean-going steamer when it overcame rough weather and a cantankerous engine to complete its 150-mile relocation down the coast from New York. Thanks in part to the steamboat, the population of the Hudson Valley increased steadily. From 1790 to 1820, it grew by 150,000 residents. Much of this was rural growth, because farms were developed farther out from the prime riverbank locales. New river towns emerged as well. Albany was already a major port city. Steamboat service was extended upriver to Troy. Below, major steamer ports of call were Hudson, Kingston, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie. In 1825, a landmark event occurred that would make the Hudson one of America’s most heavily trafficked rivers. The Erie Canal, eight years under construction, was completed

Soldiers, Painters, and Loggers

across 363 miles of central New York State. It connected the town of Buffalo, on Lake Erie, with Troy, on the upper Hudson, via the Mohawk River Valley. That meant that goods and passengers could be transported by water, at affordable rates, all the way between New York City and the Great Lakes. Later, an extension canal to Lake Ontario was completed. Building the canal would have been an enormous undertaking even with modern technology. In the early 1800s, it was absolutely daunting—and expensive. The state legislature appropriated $6 million for the project. Work began on July 4, 1817, at mid-route: Rome, New York. Digging proceeded eastward and westward from there. The canal was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide at the surface, tapering to 28 feet wide at the bottom. A wide path was leveled along one side for the animals that would tow canal boats at the end of a rope. Workers were paid comparatively well, 80 cents a day, and they certainly earned it. Not only did the canal require years of woodland clearing and digging, it also called for a system of aqueducts and locks for lowering and raising the water level at certain points. The great engineering challenge of the project was the radical difference in elevation from one end to the other. Albany is at an elevation almost 570 feet lower than Buffalo. In late October 1825, the last section of the canal was finished. Governor DeWitt Clinton, a key political figure behind the project from its beginning, led a convoy of dignitaries aboard five canal boats in the first passage. It took them a week to pass from Buffalo to the Hudson River at Troy. Thus began a steady succession of vessels of various types and sizes, from the small shanty boats of wandering peddlers and laborers to the fast packet boats that carried goods and travelers. Beginning in 1835, a $45-million improvement project enlarged the canal to a width of 70 feet and a depth of 7 feet. By the time the expansion was finished in 1862, steam power was replacing horsepower along the canal. The impact of the canal was felt far beyond New York State. It gave the growing eastern states—and the world across the

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52 THE HUDSON RIVER Atlantic Ocean—a vital new means of reaching the young nation’s upper midwestern frontier. With the Great Lakes connection, it also opened another relatively easy route between the East and timber-rich central Canada. Very quickly, the canal helped make New York the busiest American port city—a prime entry point for immigrants and an international shipping capital. Meanwhile, it made much of upstate and western New York highly attractive to new farmers, who now would have a convenient means of shipping out their produce. Canals and the remnants of abandoned canals, many of them built in the nineteenth century, are common up and down the Hudson Valley. For almost two centuries, they have connected the Hudson with other river systems and geographic areas. On the lower Hudson, the 108-mile Delaware and Hudson Canal opened in 1828. For 70 years, it bore coal barges from northern Pennsylvania to Kingston and Rondout on the Hudson. The coal provided affordable energy for New York City below as well as for towns to the north. In the end, the canal company—here as in so many other places—would switch from mule-drawn barges to rail transport. Thus, the Hudson became essentially a great “working” river, a thoroughfare serving economic purposes. The river valley, as the first Dutch settlers had recognized instantly, also offered the natural ingredients for pleasurable pursuits, and Americans were ready to focus some of their attention on these. After its second war with Great Britain (the War of 1812; 1812–1814), America was a weak young nation, but it was also a nation on the threshold of an historic growth spurt. Although international threats remained, political parties railed at one another over national policy issues, and life was arduous for most citizens, a time had come when Americans could begin to enjoy their independence and the natural beauty around them. Bert D. Yaeger, in his book on the Hudson River School of artists, observed that in the previous century, Americans had shown “little interest in the concept of art as a reflection of American natural splendor.” That was now changing. “When a sizable

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Throughout the nineteenth century, the towns along the Hudson River grew dramatically. Immigration was at its peak, and New York City’s population reached one million. Despite the emergence of railroads, the Hudson remained a heavily trafficked river essential to commerce. This print of a panoramic view of New York shows the busy harbor in 1880.

urban elite and middle class, began to come into their own during the early nineteenth century, tourism soon followed. People sought out pleasure and recreation through sightseeing. . . .” 25 Artists were among them. Upriver from New York, they found the Hudson Valley and the Catskill Mountains a perfect setting for pursuing their passion. They were absorbed by the heavy mists that veiled the valley, by the rolling fields and rustic farmsteads, and by the lonely, mysterious forests. Thomas Cole, considered the “father” and perhaps the most famous painter of

54 THE HUDSON RIVER the Hudson River School, wrote in 1841, “The Hudson, for natural magnificence, is unsurpassed.” 26 Cole came to America from England in 1819 while still in his teens. He received his earliest artistic training from a wandering portrait painter while living in Ohio and then enrolled in a fine arts school in Pennsylvania to develop his passion. In 1825, an arts patron named George Washington Bruen saw some of Cole’s landscapes on exhibit in a New York shop. Impressed, Bruen paid for Cole to take a painting excursion up the Hudson to the Catskills. When he returned later that year, Cole quickly sold several of his new works to men of importance in the art world. With new patrons to support him, Cole immersed himself in a rich variety of subjects. He settled in the Hudson River town of Catskill. During fair-weather months, he traveled—often by foot, perhaps accompanied by another artist—around New York and New England, sketching scenes that caught his fancy. When winter wrapped its icy grip around Catskill, Cole’s studio was cozily alive as the artist converted his sketches into the paintings that would make him legendary. By the time of his death in 1848, he had produced a number of remarkable works and had inspired other artists. Painters of the Hudson River School, which emerged as the new nation’s first school of landscape painting, were part of the Romantic movement in art. They produced an internationally respected body of work from the mid-nineteenth century until about 1870. Among the representatives of this school were Thomas Doughty, William Sidney Mount, Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett, Thomas Moran, and Frederick Church. Church, who was Cole’s one and only student, came to be regarded by many as the greatest painter in America. He is remembered for his extraordinary renderings of spectacular landmarks, including Niagara Falls, icebergs, and volcanoes. Unlike most artists, Church became not only famous but also very wealthy. Doughty was a successful businessman who gave up his career to devote all of his time to painting landscapes. He fell in love

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with the Hudson Valley and depicted it in a reserved, simple style. Kensett turned to painting after working as an engraver of banknotes and maps; he focused his work on pristine, remote landscapes and seascapes unaffected by humans. Moran, a latterday artist of the Hudson River School (he was only 11 at the time of Thomas Cole’s death), did some of his most memorable work based on his travels with a surveying expedition in the Pacific Northwest. Mount gave the world a visual record of the pastoral life described by Washington Irving in his famous stories set in rural New York. Durand was an important supporter of Cole before the latter became prominent in New York art circles. He painted what is probably his most famous work, Kindred Spirits, the year after Cole’s death. It shows Cole and popular poet William Cullen Bryant—Cole and Doughty’s mutual friend—viewing a Catskill river gorge from a rocky ledge high above. The name does not mean that this school of artists painted only Hudson River scenes. Most artists in the Hudson River School studied in Europe and were steeped in the tradition of the Old World masters. (Cole himself returned to Europe for an extended period several years before his death.) The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 attracted great interest in the beauty of the Hudson Valley, previously unrealized by many Americans and foreigners, but by 1850, westward explorers and pioneers were drawing attention away from the East to a whole new horizon of natural treasures. Many of the Hudson River School’s best-known works are from a variety of locations, from the Great Lakes to the New England coast. By the second half of the century, these painters were turning their palettes and talents to the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, and the Yosemite Valley. Some of Church’s best-known renderings, such as Cotopaxi, are from his travels in South America. These artists’ common bond was not so much geography as purpose. They took great pride in America’s natural beauty, and they deliberately sought to establish a new style, different from the styles that had emerged from established European schools of painting.

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56 THE HUDSON RIVER Since the era of the Hudson River School, succeeding generations of artists have discovered the valley for themselves. The widely popular Currier and Ives prints from the mid-1800s included many Adirondack scenes of the Hudson’s headwaters. Today, artists of many genres continue to find fresh subjects and renewed inspiration in the waters, hills, and residents of the Hudson. The paintings and drawings of the area’s natural resources brought others to the valley with different motives. Gone was the heyday of the fur trader, but the Hudson Valley held other untapped resources of many kinds. Clearly the most visible assets, from the perspective of ambitious fortune seekers, were the trees. The first European explorers of New York— Champlain venturing down from Canada, Hudson northward from Manhattan Island—were immediately impressed by the forests they saw. Timber has been important to society throughout the European occupation of the Hudson River Valley. Settlers did not cut trees merely to clear farmland; they used the wood for a multitude of purposes. Throughout almost four centuries, New York logs have paved roads, supported railways and bridges, and been reduced to charcoal for stoking iron mine furnaces. Wood was the settlers’ first mode of heating. They obtained it freely and easily on Hudson Valley farms while city dwellers down at Manhattan Island at the mid-nineteenth century were spending 10 percent of their income on wood for heating. Much of the wood for the city came from the valley. It has been said that the New York timber industry began with the arrival of the earliest European settlers. They cut wood for their own uses and, soon thereafter, began selling it. Logs from the Adirondacks were floated down the northern lakes and the Richelieu River to Montreal on the Saint Lawrence River. Likewise, loggers to the south began to use the Hudson much as truckers use today’s interstate highways. Most trees in the Adirondacks were hardwoods, but because softwoods like pine and spruce float much better, those were the

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varieties loggers went after. Hardy lumberjacks spent late autumn and winter months chopping millions of trees that were floated downriver with the spring thaw. Logs and sawed boards were at first tied into rafts for the trip downstream. A later method was to send the logs down individually from their entry points on the river and collect them farther below with a boom across the current. Logs were as valuable a commodity to many early New Yorkers as steers later were to western ranchers. Just as cattle attracted the interest of rustlers, logs attracted criminal attention. Timber thieves posed such a serious menace that in 1804 the New York State Legislature specifically outlawed the theft of timber rafts. In 1825, the lawmakers required that timber companies stamp— literally “brand”—their logs before launching them into the Hudson for passage to destinations below. Some loggers were not above “rescuing” stray spars launched downstream by rivals. Loggers engaged in “log drives” much as ranchers used cattle drives to move livestock over long distances, but log drives were more dangerous. They began in the frigid mountain streams and smaller rivers that feed the Hudson. Thousands upon thousands of logs sometimes created virtual fields of wood that spanned a river from side to side. Their “herders,” manned with poles and sometimes dynamite, would skip across the rolling spars to keep them moving with the current. The combination of swirling, freezing waters and long, heavy logs made for obvious hazards, especially in stretches of rapids like the Hudson River Gorge above Glens Falls. Log drives created another peculiar difficulty and hazard: the jam. A jam began when a log ran up on a rock or snag and other logs piled up behind it. Lumberjacks were stationed atop certain river rocks and other notorious jam points to stave off logs before a problem could arise, but jams were inevitable. Sometimes thousands of logs were stalled miles upriver. Breaking a jam required locating the “key” log that controlled the pack and carefully chopping it to relieve the tons of pressure behind it. This was the most dangerous part of a generally risky profession.

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58 THE HUDSON RIVER Jam breakers were paid exceptional wages, as much as $4 a day, at the turn of the twentieth century. Paul Schneider, in his historical work The Adirondacks, surmised, “It was hard on a body; log drivers over the age of thirty-five were rare. Pretty much anyone who stuck with the business that long, and managed to avoid being killed in a logjam, retired with rheumatism.” 27 By 1850, New York was a greater lumber-producing state than Maine, where most of the prime timber had all been cut. An estimated 2,000 mills were operating in the Adirondack Mountains, and landowners received good prices for timber. During the 1800s, the number of spruce trees on a tract of land was the major factor in determining the land’s value. The supply of spruce did not meet the demands of the expanding paper industry. Logging companies were soon forced to cut smaller trees than the foot-thick giants originally harvested. The minimum diameter was reduced to ten inches, then five. Some companies began cutting hemlock trees as an alternative to spruce. With the development of rail lines, the timber industry was no longer reliant on streams and rivers for transport. Because flotation was no longer a requirement, this gave logging companies a new option; it meant hardwoods as well as softwoods could be harvested. Iron was discovered in the Adirondack Mountains in the mid-nineteenth century. To melt the raw iron ore, wood-stoked furnaces were kept burning constantly. This placed even more demand on the logging industry. One of the nation’s largest iron foundries was at Cold Spring in Putnam County. The iron era in the Adirondacks lasted only a few years, because transportation to and from the mines proved too difficult and the ore was of mixed quality. While the mines operated, however, they made their mark on the Hudson River by damming the waterway and installing waterwheels to generate power. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Hudson Valley grew dramatically. Immigration—at first mainly from western Europe and later from eastern and southern Europe—reached its peak.

Soldiers, Painters, and Loggers

New York City grew to a million residents around 1860, becoming America’s largest city. River towns also grew. This spiraling growth, coupled with the advent of steam power, made the Hudson a heavily trafficked river. Although railways overtook seaways as the primary inland transportation method in the late 1800s, the river remained important to commerce. Thanks largely to its established importance in international shipping—and to its appeal to pleasure boaters—the river bustles even today with craft of every size.

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River Lights and Locales

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y the turn of the twentieth century, many Hudson River towns and cities were known internationally. Foreign shipping made some of them international ports, and others profited from myriad industries, trade ventures, and professions that relied on the important waterway for transportation. Lighthouses indicate just how vital and busy the Hudson had become by this time. During the nineteenth century, with increasing ship traffic generated by the completion of the Erie Canal, the United States Lighthouse Service built nine “family” lighthouses on the Hudson. These were essential fixtures at hazardous points along the river. Keepers and their families lived in them, weathering storms and winter ice floes— ice thick enough at times to damage lighthouse foundations. In some cases, the tenders were isolated from the mainland and the world beyond for extended periods. Their task was to keep the light lenses and other components clean and working properly. The first Hudson lighthouse was built at Stony Point in 1826. Seven still exist. Among them is the “Little Red Lighthouse” at Jeffreys Hook, which operated near the site of the modern-day George Washington Bridge from 1921 to 1947. Another, the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse at Hudson, is still active after 125 years. Especially notable is the Esopus Lighthouse, nicknamed the “Maid of the Meadow,” a wooden structure near Kingston that preservationists have saved from dilapidation. Today, it still defies winter ice floes from its perch in the river current. Each river city and town had its own character, preserved today in old buildings that still stand and in local histories. An overview of Hudson ports and valley towns between the mouth and the headwaters reveals a grotesque contrast between the gargantuan and the quaintly unimposing. As for the gargantuan, the metropolis that grew around the island of Manhattan would warrant close study for its sheer dimensions alone. New York City’s standing today among the crème de la crème of world-class metropolises

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New York City’s position at the mouth of the Hudson is an important reason behind its standing today as a world-class metropolis. As a midway point between northern and southern colonies it was always a port busy with trade and the arrival of first colonists, and later immigrants. This sketch from 1869 shows the docks and surrounding streets crowded with boats, merchants, and people.

results primarily from its location at the Hudson’s mouth. The Dutch West India Company decided early on that “the island of Manhattes” (Manhattan) would be its New World capital. The company wanted settlers to establish Dutch dominance on that island before spreading into the mainland. In drafting the charter for its seventeenth-century patroon plan, it stipulated that “all fruits and wares that are produced on the

River Lights and Locales

North [Hudson] River and lands lying thereabout” must pass through New Amsterdam (New York). Furthermore, patroons in New Netherland were granted permission to trade with settlements along the full extent of America’s eastern seaboard “provided that they do again return with all such goods as they shall get in trade to the island of Manhattes. . . .” 28 In short, the Dutch quickly recognized that they held claim to a superlative jewel among New World landing sites. They set about to take full advantage of its value as a trade base. This they did, with much success, during the mid-1600s. New Netherland shippers traded vigorously with the English colonists. More important, New Amsterdam, because of its midway position, became a very busy port where England’s coastal vessels called while plying the seas between its southern and northern colonies. New Amsterdam rose to such importance in the jockeying for colonial position that the English found cause to wrench it from Dutch control in 1664. From that time on, New York, as the English renamed it, has been in countless ways a center of international attention. The Dutch settlers laid out New Amsterdam to resemble closely the seaports in their home country. Historian Thomas J. Wertenbaker observed that New Amsterdam had “the same curving streets lined with quaint houses, the same use of every open space for gardens or orchards, the same canals running through the heart of the town, the same sky-line with its tiled roofs, church tower and picturesque windmill, the same waterfront with its wharves and ships, and protectoring batteries.” 29 Despite its strong Dutch appearance and ambience, Manhattan quickly became a settlement of broad diversity. In 1646, only 20 years after its founding, a visiting priest reported that as many as 18 languages were spoken in the colony. English and Flemish settlers had by then joined the Dutch settlers, and African slaves were numerous. At least 10 religions, including Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, were represented.

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64 THE HUDSON RIVER Thus, New York’s legacy as a melting pot of civilization began almost immediately. This did not change. In the centuries that followed, immigrants from Europe and other continents constantly arrived by ship. Almost half of New York City’s one million inhabitants during the Civil War era were born in other countries. Ellis Island was the official point of entry for immigrants into the United States from 1892 to 1954. Many remained in the vicinity of their arrival port. Others made their way to destinations north, south, and west. Many newcomers, like the first Dutch colonists of the early seventeenth century, marveled as they traveled slowly up the Hudson River by boat past the Palisades, the picturesque farms, and the Catskills. Newburgh, on the west side of the river just north of West Point, is of special historical importance: It was here that George Washington kept his headquarters during the final months of the American Revolution. History buffs can examine relics of the period at the stone Hasbrouck House where Washington lodged. The site was considered so significant to the country’s heritage that it was designated the original National Historic Site. Newburgh is also home to other landmarks. Poughkeepsie was one of the boisterous Hudson River whaling towns of the early nineteenth century. Its modern image is quite different. A branch of International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation is headquartered at Poughkeepsie today. So is the Clearwater, the 106-foot teaching sloop fitted out in 1969 by folk musicians—most notably Pete Seeger—who wanted to educate students and the public about the importance of preserving the Hudson. One of America’s most famous colleges, Vassar, is in Poughkeepsie. Founded as a women’s college in 1861 by a well-to-do brewer named Matthew Vassar, it was the first college campus to include a museum and art gallery. Naturally, the gallery’s large collection today features many works by the Hudson River School of artists.

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The Clearwater, a sloop built in 1969 by folk musicians to promote the anti-pollution cause, is photographed here, sailing down the Hudson past a junkyard. It is headquartered in Poughkeepsie, a once boisterous whaling town that is now home to such diverse organizations as IBM Corporation and Vassar College.

Kingston, the first capital of New York, was once a thriving quarry town, sending high-quality bricks and stones to downtown New York City and beyond. It was also a bustling steamboat-building port whose vessels plied the river during the 1800s. Now it serves as an agricultural market for dairy and fruit farms whose foods are shipped to the metropolis below. Kingston is unique for its riverside beaches, convenient to sunbathers who do not have time for the 90-mile trip to

66 THE HUDSON RIVER the ocean. The Hudson River Maritime Museum is at riverside in Kingston. Saugerties, once a popular steamboat landing, was an industrial city during the 1800s, producing paper, bricks, and commercial ice. A special point of interest is the Saugerties Lighthouse, where guests intrigued by lighthouse lore have an opportunity to spend the night at a “lighthouse bed-andbreakfast.” The city of Hudson, although 100 miles upriver from the ocean, became a rowdy whalers’ port from the post – Revolutionary War period until around 1830. This curious legacy came about because a handful of prominent New England whaling families, fearing future hostilities with European naval fleets, decided to remove from the coast to a secure, remote river base. Despite its salty roughness, early Hudson had an impressive opera house, hotels, and newspapers. Nearby industries produced such commodities as furniture and textiles. One of the more unusual museums of the region, the American Museum of Fire Fighting, is in Hudson. It displays engines, pumps, firefighters’ clothing, and other items, some of them almost two centuries old. Beverwyck, the old Dutch civilian settlement at Fort Orange on the western bank of the river, also has played a dominant role in the state’s history since early settlement times. The name, later changed by the English to Albany, connoted the Dutchmen’s intention to earn their fortunes trading for beaver (bever) and other wild animal furs. Iroquois Indians brought as many as 60,000 beaver pelts a year to Beverwyck; most eventually found buyers in Europe. As Albany, the city became the state capital in 1797. Today, Albany’s population is approximately 100,000. International cargo ships call at Albany, an official port of entry, as well as at New York City. The impressive Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza houses not only state government facilities but also cultural and shopping areas. Troy, a city that took its name from the legendary ancient

River Lights and Locales

kingdom in Asia Minor and lies about six miles upriver from Albany on the eastern side, was established in 1646. It occupies a particularly important location because it faces the mouth of the Mohawk River, the tributary that flows into the Hudson. During the 1900s, Troy became an iron-processing town and apparel manufacturing center. Large quantities of weapons used by the Union Army during the Civil War were produced at Troy. Troy’s population of 50,000 to 60,000 was approximately the same at the end of the twentieth century as it was during the Civil War era. Saratoga Springs is named for natural springs that Native Americans revered for their alleged medicinal powers. The mineral springs came to the attention of European settlers in 1771, when friendly Iroquois Indians carried a British army officer there to heal a leg injury. After the Revolution, enterprising Americans cleared an access trail to the springs. A resort hotel was built there in 1802, around which a village quickly grew and flourished. By the 1820s, New York City had soda fountains whose owners clamored for Saratoga Springs water to sell their customers. The springs’ fame spread, here and abroad. By 1840, 12,000 visitors a year were making their way into the hills west of the port of Schuylerville to find out for themselves whether the curative claims were genuine. In time, Saratoga Springs became one of the world’s most famous resorts. Today, Saratoga Springs is more famous for its horseracing than for its medicinal springs. The Hudson Valley is a renowned center of horseracing and breeding, and Saratoga Springs is the equestrian focal point. It is the site of the country’s oldest racetrack, built in 1863, and the National Museum of Thoroughbred Racing. Saratoga Springs is also known for its cultural events. Fort Edward dates to the years of the French and Indian Wars. The English built outposts here and at other key locations in the area to protect their frontier settlers in the upper Hudson Valley and lower Lake Champlain. These

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68 THE HUDSON RIVER

RAILS RIVAL THE RIVER On an ice-impacted river like the Hudson, even steam engines could not move people and cargo by ship after the surface froze solid. This was brought home to shippers in late autumn of 1831, when winter arrived earlier than predicted. A sudden deep freeze iced the river and locked in boats loaded with fresh pork and beef from valley farms at the Poughkeepsie docks. The cold system descended before crews had time to react. At the time, America was entering the railroad era. About 6,000 miles of track were laid in the eastern states by 1850. By late 1851, a rail line along the eastern side of the Hudson extended from New York City to Greenbush, opposite Albany. Nine years earlier, a line had been completed parallel to the Erie Canal, all the way from Buffalo on the lakes to Albany on the Hudson. Although trains were faster than canal boats and were less affected by winter freezes, Erie Canal barges at mid-century still carried several times more bulk cargo than trains. An enlargement of the canal in the early 1860s gave it new life as the primary route for grain cargoes between the midwestern breadbasket and the port of New York. Gradually, though, canals were being replaced by railroads. No one understood this better than canal company directors, who moved to build rail lines alongside their waterways.

remote forts proved difficult to hold. Fort Edward was the entry and departure point on the Hudson for traders moving between the river itself and points north (Lake Champlain and Canada); above here, they had to travel overland to and from the lakes and the Richelieu River system. In the twentieth century, Fort Edward enjoyed industrial development, but it was plagued by an environmental waste crisis that is explained later in this book. Glens Falls, at the base of the Hudson headwaters, became a center of Adirondack logging in the mid-1800s. About four miles above the city was the “Big Boom,” a 200-yard-long system of barriers constructed across the water in 1851. Here, masses of logs floating down from the mountains were

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By the 1850s, America was entering the railroad era as thousands of miles of track were laid and railroad bridges were built, like this one across the Hudson at Albany. Though canals remained primary routes in the Hudson River region through the nineteenth century, trains were faster and less susceptible to winter freezes, and gradually replaced canals.

stopped, sorted, and diverted to sawmills and docks. The supply of spruce in the Adirondacks dwindled in the late 1800s although the Big Boom operated until 1952. The legacy of the Hudson Valley is richly varied. An international business and cultural capital, whaling towns and quarry towns, colonial and Revolutionary War forts, centers of industry, fur-trading hubs—only a history-making river could provide such a variety of sites with a common bond.

The Modern Era Brings Industrial-Size Headaches

The Modern Era Brings Industrial-Size Headaches

T

he Industrial Revolution—the shift from a predominantly agricultural economy to one based on mass-produced factory products—began in England and by the early 1800s was spreading through the eastern United States. Long a major water route, with many natural assets along its shores, the Hudson Valley could hardly have avoided becoming an industrial zone, at least in part. Factories in the region produced a variety of goods, from shirts to ships, grain products to bricks, paper to glass. In 1850, almost one-fourth of all manufacturing done in America was in New York State. The greater New York City area was by far the center of this manufacturing hub, which spread from one end of the state to the other. Although the Hudson Valley was not industrially dominant, it was a strong area of production, especially between the mountain ranges around Albany and Troy. Some of the wealthiest industrialists and their inheritors chose the Hudson Valley for their personal residences during this period. One example was Frederick W. Vanderbilt, who built a mansion in Hyde Park. Vanderbilt, who ran a railroad, was a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of America’s most famous shipping-railroad magnates and financiers. The home in Hyde Park, recognized as one of the finest Italian Renaissance houses in the world, was finished in 1898. Frederick Vanderbilt had bought the property from a grandson of John Jacob Astor, one of the nation’s richest men during the first half of the 1800s. Previously, the property had been owned by a colonial governor of New York and by Dr. John Bard, George Washington’s personal doctor. Other famous valley landmarks evolved differently. Also in Hyde Park is the residence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Named Springwood, it began its existence as a rather ordinary farmhouse in 1826. After Roosevelt’s father bought the property in 1867, it underwent 50 years of steady expansion. The president eventually left the estate as a federally owned property. The mid-twentieth century saw an astonishing growth in industry in the middle Hudson Valley. The cities of Poughkeepsie,

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72 THE HUDSON RIVER Newburgh, Kingston, and Hudson attracted hundreds of new factories after World War II, creating thousands of jobs. Specialty machinery was a production leader. Other industrial output ranged from cement to airplane parts. The river itself was more vital to American industry than the land along its banks, because it moved tons upon tons of factory products from the northern interior of the country to the coast. As the industrial era progressed into the twentieth century, barges and ships on the Hudson transported modern as well as traditional cargoes. A prominent example of these new commodities was automobiles. In connection with the New York State canal system and the Great Lakes, the Hudson provided a practical route for manufacturers to ship new cars from Detroit—the “auto capital of the world”—to the port of New York. Then came the electronics age. One of the largest industrial operations in the valley’s history was International Business Machines (IBM). IBM at one time employed almost 25,000 workers at several locations. That was changed by a shifting focus dictated by the evolving computer industry. In the early 1990s, IBM downsized its Hudson area work force by more than half. The elimination of thousands of jobs had a predictable impact on the local economy, forcing many small-scale merchants and service professionals out of business. Industrialization affected the Hudson River in many ways. Cargo shipping obviously increased, although much of the factory tonnage during the later industrial era was distributed by freight car and truck. At the same time, some of the factories were beginning to affect the river in unpleasant ways. In fact, by the mid-1900s, the industrial boom in the Hudson Valley was creating environmental problems of calamitous proportions. Fish tasting of oil dampened the water’s reputation as an angler’s paradise, and this was merely symptomatic. Oil slicks and untreated sewage flowed downstream from factories, docks, and cities. Environmental advocates raised alarms that the historic Hudson had become a “virtual cesspool” 30 and a “vast sewer.” 31

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Though the Hudson Valley reaped economic benefits from the Industrial Revolution, industrialization also had negative effects. Factories dumped trash and hazardous waste in the area, and river pollution was a serious problem by the 1960s and 1970s. General Electric was one company targeted by environmental groups for contaminating the river with dangerous chemicals from its plants, like the one in Fort Edward pictured here in 2001. These problems have prompted the government to pass strict nationwide pollution control and environmental preservation laws.

A river of national renown, the Hudson became one of the focal points of the environmental movement that gained strength during the 1960s and 1970s. Among the most infamous pollutants were PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), chemical compounds used for electrical

74 THE HUDSON RIVER insulation. In the 1970s, environmentalists waged a highly publicized campaign against General Electric Company for its discharge of PCBs into the water. Beginning in the 1940s, GE plants at Fort Edward and Hudson Falls had used the river as a natural waste disposal mechanism. PCBs now are known to contribute to various human health crises, from birth defects to cancer. The injury to nature was even broader. Fish, birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants all are believed to have suffered; the extent of the damage is still under study. PCB contamination naturally concentrated around the upper Hudson discharge locations, but traces of it passed down to New York City and the open Atlantic. Alarming levels of PCBs were detected in wildlife far downriver. Because of the extensive threat, the federal government’s Hudson River PCBs Superfund cleanup site now includes 200 miles of the river, from Hudson Falls to New York Harbor. The government banned PCBs and, in 1983, made Fort Edward a priority cleanup area. A long-term problem is that PCBs linger in the environment, and disturbing them in a moving river current may threaten the river downstream. Years after the crisis of PCBs in the Hudson River was confronted, environmental groups, government agencies, and industries continue to debate the best way to cleanse the river of these pollutants. Many people want the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to order dredging of the river to remove PCBs. Unfortunately, dredging—including normal dredging to improve navigation—may dislodge stores of underwater PCBs and send them downriver. The EPA has indicated that dredging is in order for the Hudson but is granting more time for the preparation of it than environmental activists think is necessary. In May 2003, the EPA announced an agreement with GE “to perform the project design work required before dredging can begin.” Besides the delicate question of disturbance-caused contamination downstream is the highly charged debate over where the toxic chemical will be disposed of, if and when it is extracted.

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Citizens of the valley have given notice that they do not want Hudson River PCBs to end up in their local landfills. In short, the discharge of unused PCBs into the upper Hudson during the mid-twentieth century has created a daunting entanglement of environmental problems that now affect everything from river recreation to industrial operations to navigation. Ultimately, any solution the government authorizes is almost certain to produce unpleasant side effects of its own. “Which course of action will cause the least further damage?” is the question all parties now debate. Another Superfund cleanup site on the Hudson is Cold Spring, which lies on the eastern riverbank opposite West Point. A foundry at Cold Spring produced army ordnance during the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, a battery manufacturer at Cold Spring polluted the area with cadmium, a metallic waste product. Like PCBs, cadmium is hazardous to human health and it presented a complex cleanup dilemma. These problems, particularly the PCB controversy, were instrumental in bringing about tighter hazardous waste control laws and regulations in New York State and nationwide during the 1980s. Predictably, in response to the pollution alarms, environmentalists and preservationists have formed a number of regional and local organizations to keep close watch over planned development and industrial activities along the river. A dozen such entities now comprise the Friends of a Clean Hudson Coalition. Storm King Mountain, on the western bank near West Point, was an early landmark cause for environmentalists. In the 1960s, the Consolidated Edison Company sought to build a mammoth electric plant at the base of Storm King. The plan was to draw millions of gallons of water from the river to generate electrical power. Protestors waged a 20-year legal battle to block the project. At the time of this writing, some environmentalists are challenging a proposed 1,800-acre cement plant and mine in

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76 THE HUDSON RIVER

A BIGGER WATERWAY The Hudson’s importance as a shipping link between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast diminished substantially after 1959. In that year, the Saint Lawrence Seaway project, a joint venture between Canada and the United States, was completed. It enabled saltwater shipping to navigate all the way between Lake Ontario and the sea. This larger, direct water connector was not used earlier because of differences in the water level. The Saint Lawrence River drops steadily between Lake Ontario and Montreal, 180 miles downstream. Dangerous rapids had challenged canoeing Indians and white trappers for centuries and made ship navigation impossible. To overcome the problem, during the 1800s, the Canadian government began constructing a system of canals and locks to provide controlled passage for vessels to certain destinations farther inland. In 1954, Canada and the United States began work on a major throughway that employs dredged river channels as well as canals and locks where necessary. Although ice thwarts shipping during the cold months, the seaway now carries a high volume of traffic that otherwise would have to follow the Hudson-Erie route. Combined with the use of rail transport—and, in the last half-century, interstate highway trucking (I-87 now parallels the river through the valley)—this has substantially affected the number of cargo vessels on the Hudson.

Columbia County. The opponents charge that the operation would emit millions of pounds of air pollutants annually. Industry and urban sprawl also brought more people to the valley. Much of the growth during the twentieth century, especially in the lower valley, resulted from the New York City metropolitan area expanding northward. Hundreds of thousands of new residents arrived. A 1996 estimate put the population of the greater Hudson Valley at about 2.5 million. With residential growth came commercial growth: shopping malls and business complexes. Although such growth makes for an energetic economy, it also has drawbacks. Notable among these are escalating taxes and inflation. More and more Hudson Valley farmers, for example, unable to generate adequate income

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from their crops to keep up with rising property taxes, were forced to sell out. Meanwhile, the valley’s multiplying population did not necessarily translate into more work for riverboat companies. Defeated in part by rail service, the famous Hudson River Day Line declared bankruptcy in 1948. The Cornell Steamboat Company, which had amassed a fortune towing cargo on the river, followed suit in 1964. Around 1970, when the river was coming under national scrutiny as an environmental crisis scene, naturalist and historian Robert H. Boyle pondered the strangeness of the situation. “To those who know it,” he wrote, the Hudson River is the most beautiful, messed up, productive, ignored, and surprising piece of water on the face of the earth. . . . Part of the difficulty—and much of the wonder—about the Hudson is caused by its diversity. The river is all sorts of things. It is trout stream and estuary, water supply and sewer, ship channel and shad river, playground and chamber pot. It is abused, revered, and almost always misunderstood.32

Environmentally, the Hudson has made something of a comeback during the last generation. The “virtual cesspool” of the late 1900s today flows cleaner than at the height of industrial pollution along its banks, although some river residents say they still would not eat the fish. Water plants continue to be nourished by tidal action, as they have been for ages. They, in turn, help support varieties of fish, reptiles, fowl, and fur-bearing critters. Natural preservation has been on the minds of some area residents for more than a century. Around 1870, Verplanck Colvin of Albany launched a small, prolonged campaign to have the New York State legislature create a state park in the Adirondack Mountains. He believed logging had an adverse effect on the ecology of the mountains that ultimately affected the Hudson and other regional waterways. “The Adirondack

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78 THE HUDSON RIVER Wilderness,” he wrote, “contains the springs, which are the sources of our principal rivers, and the feeders of our canals. Each summer the water supply for these rivers and canals is lessened, and commerce has suffered.” 33 The legislature responded by appointing Colvin to survey the mountains. It was Colvin who, in his exploration of Mount Marcy in 1872, is credited with identifying the precise source of the Hudson River: a diminutive mountain lake formed by glaciers thousands of years ago. Colvin described the pool as a “tear of the clouds,” and in time that became the lake’s name. The Adirondack Park was established in 1892. Two years later, a state constitutional amendment banned the destruction of trees on forest preserves. After that, in the view of some observers, the state did woefully little to protect the mountains and, in particular, the river valley below. Not until the midtwentieth century did industrial pollution alarm the public and prompt environmentalists to form a number of protective organizations. They include Scenic Hudson, Inc., Mid-Hudson Pattern for Progress, and the sloop Clearwater project. Many of the efforts of these groups are directed toward educating the public about issues that can affect the condition of the Hudson, both now and in the future. They also strive to conserve the valley’s “open space.” The Hudson River Valley Greenway is a major, long-term undertaking to create a continuum of “green” space all along the river from Albany to the harbor. Despite the pollution issue, industries unquestionably brought prosperity to the valley. They also contributed to population growth, which created a new set of problems. The negative side of “urban sprawl” is probably nowhere more feared than among Hudson Valley preservationists and environmentalists. They believe that overdevelopment during the twentieth century has hurt tourism and, ultimately, made the region unattractive to new businesses and industries. Passenger and barge traffic on the river between Albany and New York dwindled. The numbers of farms and factories alike waned in the late 1900s. For example, dairies in Dutchess

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79

Nature preservation has been on the minds of some Hudson Valley residents since the nineteenth century. The Adirondack State Park was established by Verplanck Colvin in 1892 to protect trees in the Adirondack Mountains area. This photograph shows one of the pristine lakes in the Adirondack Park.

County declined from an estimated 275 to about 40 in the last quarter of the century. Once-thriving mill towns deteriorated. Many factories were driven out of business by the changing economy and consumer demands. Some relocated to other parts of the country where cheaper labor was readily available. By 1985, the lower Hudson, from approximately Poughkeepsie to New York City, had become what travel writer Tim Mulligan

80 THE HUDSON RIVER described as “an area of near-violent contrasts . . .” Mulligan further noted, . . . the most dramatic scenery on the River in the Highlands, the total ugliness of industrial concentration near New York City, the widest and narrowest points of the Hudson, the astounding beauty of the Palisades facing the grimy, falling-down piers, extreme wealth on baronial estates in Westchester County, dire poverty in dying urban centers such as Newburgh. Here you will enjoy museums and buildings and scenery of extraordinary interest and then, within only a few miles, come upon scenes of horrendous urban development.34

Nonetheless, there is renewed optimism in the Hudson Valley. Fortunately, modern-day entrepreneurs have moved into river towns to fill some of the void left by withdrawn industries. Specialty bakeries and breweries, various skilledcraft shops, clothing boutiques, antique dealerships, and art galleries have brought a welcome new flavor of character and charm to the valley. Two dozen historic mansions in the Hudson River Valley have been opened to the public for tours, outdoor symphonies, and other events. They include Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, which was built in 1838 and was once the home of an industrial-era tycoon and, before that, a mayor of New York City. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s home, Springwood, is near the Hudson at Hyde Park. Roosevelt called Springwood his “Summer White House.” The valley is a diverse cultural center, with top-quality theatre and other artistic presentations. These are supported by affluent families, fueled by arts curricula at area universities, and augmented by the vast talent pool of New York City. The Hudson Valley’s inspirational aura has wielded its magic on creative minds since America’s birth. Just as it drew the attention of notable artists, the area has stirred the imagination of famous American literati. Washington Irving, born in New

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Despite the departure of factories and industries, the Hudson River Valley is enjoying a cultural revitalization. Many historic mansions in the area have been opened for tours and events, including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s home, Springwood, near Hyde Park, and Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, photographed here, built by industrial tycoon Jay Gould.

York City at the end of the American Revolution, repeatedly turned northward for inspiration. Some of his classic short stories, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” had Hudson River settings. His historic home, Sunnyside, overlooks the river at Tarrytown. Later generations of writers have withdrawn to the Hudson environs to find their creative muses.

82 THE HUDSON RIVER It is hardly surprising that the Hudson Valley has spawned such popular literature. From early times, as historian Maud Wilder Goodwin explained, the spirit of mystery lurked on the outskirts of the Dutch settlements, and the youthful burghers [town dwellers] of the Hudson were fed full on tales, mostly of a terrifying nature, drawn from the folklore of three races, the Dutch, the Indians, and the Africans, with some few strands interwoven from local legend and tradition that had already grown up along the banks of the Hudson.35

The Catskill town of Woodstock is about 10 miles west of the river as the crow flies, just north of Kingston. It is internationally famous for a massive rock music festival that brought hordes of young people—and worldwide attention— there in August 1969. The event, perhaps the defining moment of the “hippie” era, was staged on a farm in an adjoining county 60 miles away, but it is entered into history as the Woodstock Festival. That is not surprising, in view of Woodstock’s stature as an inspirational and educational center for artists and crafters. An arts colony called Byrdcliffe was founded in the early 1900s on a cluster of area farms. Since then, not only artists but also weavers, wood- and metalworkers, potters, and other creative professionals have regularly participated in workshops and developed their skills amid the beauty of the western Hudson Valley. Farther south, the Culinary Institute of America trains some of the world’s leading chefs and hospitality professionals in Hyde Park. The institute was founded at the end of World War II as a school to teach cooking skills to veterans. The valley is also famous for its wineries. The Hudson Valley remains a popular destination for recreation seekers. Activities and pursuits vary from foxhunting and dog breeding to cross-country and downhill skiing, and despite environmental problems, the placid Hudson attracts

The Modern Era Brings Industrial-Size Headaches

anglers today much as it did in previous centuries. It is widely famous, in fact, for its striped bass fishing from March to June when schools of bass migrate up from the river mouth to spawn. As always, the people of the Hudson River Valley remain a colorful mixture, from proud owners of ancient family estates to twenty-first century New York City professionals who commute each day to and from their valley homes. In between are those who have always been the region’s soul: ordinary townsfolk, small business owners and their staffs, farmers, and factory workers. Today, visitors and residents alike enjoy the natural beauty that so impressed the “Rhinelanders” who arrived from Europe almost 400 years ago. Botanists, birdwatchers, antiquers, hikers, bikers, boaters, motorists—new generations constantly rediscover one of America’s greatest rivers. The people of the valley have never lost sight of their history. At this writing (2003), planners are already busy developing a grand four-hundredth-anniversary celebration commemorating Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river.

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CHRONOLOGY AND TIMELINE PRIOR TO 2000 B.C. The Lenape people inhabit the Hudson Valley

region. BY A.D. 1000 Algonquian tribes dominate the valley. 1524–1525 Giovanni da Verrazano and later Estavan Gomez are

thought to have visited the area of the river mouth. C.

1570 Five tribes, believed to have been motivated by Chief

Hayowentha of the Onandaga, form the Iroquois Confederacy. 1609 Henry Hudson explores the river to approximately

modern-day Albany, New York. 1624 The Dutch West India Company begins to establish

a colony based on Manhattan Island. 1664 The English take control of New Amsterdam from

the Dutch and rename the city New York.

1524–25 Explorers Verrazano and Gomez probably view the Hudson mouth.

1664 England takes control of what becomes the New York colony.

1570 Formation of the Iroquois Confederacy.

1500

1650 1624 Dutch colony founded on Manhattan Island.

1609 Henry Hudson explores the river.

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1775 1777 Americans win important victory at Saratoga.

1778 Construction of fortress at West Point.

CHRONOLOGY AND TIMELINE 1777 During the Revolutionary War, Americans defeat

General John Burgoyne’s British invasion army in the Saratoga Campaign. 1778 The Americans build a fortress at West Point to

secure control of the Hudson during the Revolution. 1802 Congress establishes the United States Military

Academy at West Point. 1807 Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat, later named

the Clermont, makes a record-setting run between New York City and Albany. 1825 The Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes to the

port of New York via the Hudson River, is completed. 1825 Thomas Cole, the unofficial founder of the Hudson

River School of artists, comes to the attention of the New York art world with his landscape paintings.

1802 U.S. Military Academy established at West Point. 1807 Clermont’s historic steamboat run between New York and Albany.

1800

2002 Plans begin for 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration. 1872 Lake Tear of the Clouds, the Hudson’s source, is discovered.

1950

2000

1959 1825 Completion of the Unofficial founding of St. Lawrence Seaway, the Hudson River School reducing traffic on of artists. the Hudson. 1825 Completion of the Erie Canal.

1983 Government acts to clean up PCB contamination on the Hudson.

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CHRONOLOGY 1828 The Delaware & Hudson Canal is completed. 1863 The Hudson River Day Line begins offering one-day

steamboat service between Albany and New York City. 1872 Verplanck Colvin locates Lake Tear of the Clouds, the

source of the Hudson in the Adirondack Mountains. 1892 The New York State Legislature establishes the

Adirondack Park. 1899 The Delaware & Hudson Canal Company converts

to rail interests. 1948 With changing transportation, economic, and social

trends, the Hudson River Day Line ends its passenger service on the river. The Cornell Steamboat Company will shut down its cargo-towing operations in 1964. 1959 The completion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway

project means less shipping traffic for the Hudson– Erie route. 1983 Because of industrial PCB contamination, the

government designates Fort Edward a primary cleanup area. The PCB crisis is one of several that compel the formation of a strong Hudson Valley environmental coalition. 2002 New York’s governor, George Pataki, signs legislation

establishing the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Quadricentennial Commission to plan fourhundredth-anniversary celebrations of the 1609 voyages of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain. The commission will also plan the two-hundredthanniversary celebration of Robert Fulton’s 1807 steamboat service.

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NOTES CHAPTER 1: The “Rhine” of the Western World 1 John H.Thompson, ed., Geography of New York State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966, p. 126. 2 Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1964, p. 41. 3 Robert H. Boyle, The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979, p.26.

CHAPTER 2: Henry Hudson, Mystery Mariner 4 Joan Joseph, Henry Hudson: A Visual Biography. New York: Franklin Watts, 1974, p. 18. 5 J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, p. 17. 6 Jameson, Narratives, p.18 7 Ibid., p.48 8 Ibid., p.49

CHAPTER 4: Growth and War Under English Rule 19 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., p. 139 Thompson, Geography, p. 129 Ibid., p. 134 Goodwin, Dutch and English, p. 170 Thompson, Geography, p. 137 Jonathan N. Hall, Revolutionary War Quiz and Fact Book. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company, 1999, p. 97.

CHAPTER 5: Soldiers, Painters, and Loggers 25 Bert D. Yaeger, The Hudson River School: American Landscape Artists. New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1996, p. 20. 26 Patrick Smith, “Heart of the Hudson,” National Geographic, March 1996, p. 78. 27 Paul Schneider, The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness. New York: A John Macrae Book. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997, p. 214.

CHAPTER 6: River Lights and Locales

CHAPTER 3: The Dutch Period 9 Maud Wilder Goodwin, Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919, p. 18. 10 Thompson, Geography, p. 121 11 Goodwin, Dutch and English, p. 18 12 Thompson, Geography, p. 123 13 Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Days in Old New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896, p. 134. 14 Earle, Colonial Days, p. 136 15 Goodwin, Dutch and English, pp. 28–29 16 Thompson, Geography, p. 125 17 Goodwin, Dutch and English, p. 47 18 Ibid., p. 79

28 Thompson, Geography, p. 126 29 Ibid., p. 127

CHAPTER 7: The Modern Era Brings Industrial-Size Headaches 30 Smith, “Heart,” p. 78 31 Eberhard Czaya, Rivers of the World. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981, p. 230. 32 Boyle, The Hudson River, pp. 15–16 33 Schneider, The Adirondacks, p. 222. 34 Tim Mulligan, The Hudson River Valley: A History & Guide. New York: Random House, 1985, p. 145. 35 Goodwin, Dutch and English, p. 121

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, Albert W. “The Mighty Hudson.” National Geographic, July 1948. Boyle, Robert H. The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. “The Conquest of North America.” In The Encyclopedia of Discovery and Exploration. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1973. Czaya, Eberhard. Rivers of the World. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981. Czestochowski, Joseph S. The American Landscape Tradition: A Study and Gallery of Paintings. New York: E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1982. Durant, John, and Alice Durant. Pictorial History of American Ships on the High Seas and Inland Waters. New York: Castle Books, 1953. Earle, Alice Morse. Colonial Days in Old New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896. [reissued by Singing Tree Press, Detroit, 1968] Garrison, Webb. Great Stories of the American Revolution. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1990. Goodwin, Maud Wilder. Dutch and English on the Hudson: A Chronicle of Colonial New York. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919. The Guilds’ Committee for Federal Writers’ Publications, Inc. New York City Guide. New York: Random House, 1939. Hall, Jonathan N. Revolutionary War Quiz and Fact Book. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company, 1999. Harmon, Daniel E. John Burgoyne, British General. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.” In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories. New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc., 1964. James, Leonard F. Following the Frontier: American Transportation in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Jameson, J. Franklin, ed. Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909. Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993. Joseph, Joan. Henry Hudson: A Visual Biography. New York: Franklin Watts, 1974. Keller, Allan. Life Along the Hudson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997. Kelly, C. Brian, et al. Best Little Stories of the American Revolution. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 1999. Manning, Ruth. Henry Hudson. Chicago: Heinemann Library, 2001. Michaels, Joanne, and Mary-Margaret Barile. The Best of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains: An Explorer’s Guide, 3rd ed. Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1998. Mulligan, Tim. The Hudson River Valley: A History & Guide. New York: Random House, 1985. Outhwaite, Leonard. Unrolling the Map: The Story of Exploration. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935. Palmer, Tim. America by Rivers. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996. Rachlis, Eugene. The Voyages of Henry Hudson. New York: Random House, 1962. Santella, Andrew. Henry Hudson. New York: Franklin Watts, 2001. Scenic Hudson, Inc. Letter to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation re the “Hudson River Natural Resources Damage Assessment Plan,” November 27, 2002. Schneider, Paul. The Adirondacks: A History of America’s First Wilderness. New York: A John Macrae Book. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Scott, J. M. Hudson of Hudson’s Bay. New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1951. Smith, Patrick. “Heart of the Hudson.” National Geographic, March 1996. Thompson, John H., ed. Geography of New York State. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966. Truettner, William H., and Alan Wallach, eds. Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Turco, Peggy. Walks and Rambles in the Western Hudson Valley. Woodstock, VT: Backcountry Publications, 1996. Underhill, Ruth Murray. Red Man’s America: A History of Indians in the United States. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953. Vosburgh, Frederick G. “Henry Hudson, Magnificent Failure.” National Geographic, April 1939. Whitcraft, Melissa. The Hudson River. New York: Franklin Watts, 1999. Yaeger, Bert D. The Hudson River School: American Landscape Artists. New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1996.

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WEBSITES The Hudson River Maritime Museum posts a rich assortment of content online concerning the river’s history. www.ulster.net/~hrmm/museum

Scenic Hudson, Inc., works “to ensure that tomorrow’s Hudson River Valley—from Manhattan to the foothills of the Adirondacks—is environmentally and economically sustainable.” www.scenichudson.org

Historic Hudson Valley is a network of six historic sites in “Sleepy Hollow Country” and the “Great Estates Region” of the valley. Its mission is to preserve the Hudson Valley’s culture, history and landscape. www.hudsonvalley.org

Mid-Hudson Pattern for Progress is a research organization studying Hudson Valley development issues. www.pattern-for-progress.org

The D&H [Delaware & Hudson] Canal Historical Society works to preserve the history of the D&H Canal. www.canalmuseum.org

Web site of the New Netherland Museum and Half Moon Visitors Center at Albany. The museum operates the replica of the Half Moon built in 1989. www.newnetherland.org

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Web section contains information and news about the ongoing Hudson River PCB cleanup. www.epa.gov/hudson

Hudson River section of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Web site. www.dec.state.ny.us/website/hudson

The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater is a nonprofit organization in Poughkeepsie “created to defend and restore the Hudson River.” It operates a sloop that offers educational voyages and programs for students. www.clearwater.org

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WEBSITES Web site of the Hudson River Watertrail Association, a nonprofit coalition of small boaters interested in the Hudson. www.hrwa.org

Provides information on attractions, tours, fishing, etc., along the Hudson River Valley. hudsonriver.com

The Hudson River Foundation for Science & Environmental Research maintains a Web site listing its educational programs. www.hudsonriver.org

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INDEX Adirondacks, 77-78 age of, 4 discovery of iron , 58 lakes in, 4 on timber producing, 58 Adirondacks, The, (Schneider), 58 Adirondack State Park, 78-79 Albany, New York, 4, 6, 25 on pirates, 38 Algonquian peoples, 10 American Museum of Fire Fighting, 66 American Revolution, 40-45 and West Point, 48 Andre, John, 432 Appalachian Trail, 6 Arms of Amsterdam, The, 26 Arnold, Benedict, 13 his plot, 47 as traitor, 43 Associated Press/Tim Roske, 73 Astor, John Jacob, 71 Bard, John, 71 Bear Mountain, 6 “Big Boom,” 68-69 Boyle, Robert H. on the Hudson River, 77 Breakneck Ridge, 6 British East India Company, 21 Bruen, George Washington, 54 Bryant, William Cullen, 55 Burgoyne, John, 15, 40, 43 defeat of, 41 Cabot, John, 9, 32 Cabot, Sebastian, 9, 32 Canarsie Indians, 22-23 Catskill Mountains, 3, 5-6, 64 Champlain, Samuel de, 15 Church, Frederick Edwin, 54 inspired by the Hudson, 3 Clearwater, (sloop), 64-65 Clermont, (steamboat), 49-50 Clinton, Dewitt, 51

Colden, Cadwallader, 36 Cold Spring, New York, 75 Cole, Thomas as “father” of the Hudson River School, 53-54 inspired by the Hudson, 3 Colvin, Verplanck, 77-79 Consolidated Edison Company, 75 Corbin, Margaret, 42 Cornell Steamboat Company, 77 Cotopaxi, (painting), Church, 55 Culinary Institute of America, 82 Currier and Ives prints, 56 Discovery, (ship), 21 mutiny of, 22 Doughty, Thomas and painter of landscapes, 54-55 Drake, Francis, 13 Durand, Asher B., 54 Dutch East India Company, 15-16, 21, 25 sponsored Hudson’s voyage, 16 Dutch and English on the Hudson, (Goodwin), 25 “Dutch Period,” 23, 25 and immigrants, 2 on shooting of game, 27 the war in 1652, 30, 32 and well prepared, 27 Dutch West India Company, 23, 25 ignoring its Hudson settlements, 32 the “patroon,” 29 Earle, Alice Morse, 28 Ellis Island, 64 Erie canal, 50-52, 55, 61 Esopus Lighthouse, 61 Fitch, John, 49 Fort Edward, 67-68, 73-74 Fort Orange, (Beverwyck), 22, 25, 27, 66 Fort Ticonderoga, 41

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INDEX Fulton the First, (steam warship), 50 Fulton, Robert, 49-50 Gates, Horatio, 41 General Electric, 73-74 Glens Falls, 68 Gomez, Estavan, 32 and the Hudson river, 9 Goodwin, Maud Wilder, 25, 35 and the Hudson River, 28, 82 the trappers, 26 Gould, Jay, 81 Greene, Henry, 22 Halve Maene, (Half Moon), 16-19 Haverstraw Bay, 5 Hawkins, Richard, 13 Hayowentha, Chief, 8 Hays, Molly, 42 Hope-Well, (ship), 14-15 Howe, William, 41-42 Hudson-Athens Lighthouse, 61 Hudson, Henry, 2 arriving back in England, 20 and Cape Hatteras, 18-19 his contributions of geography, 13 his early years, 13 his final expedition, 21 getting to Albany, 19-20 and learning seafaring, 14 his log, 14-15 on reaching North America, 17 on trying to find Northwest passage, 13 Hudson River age of, 7 on diversity, 4 the Dutch, 22 the environmental movement, 72-73 on farming, 76-77 and glaciers, 7 importance of timber, 56 legacy of, 69 the lighthouses, 7, 61

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and loggers, 57 a “melting pot,” 10 the population explosion, 38-39 on record of civilization, 8 the scenery, 3 shipping link, 76 on steamboat era, 49 a “working” river, 52 Hudson River Day Line, 77 Hudson River Maritime Museum, 66 Hudson River School, 3, 53-54, 56 students studied in Europe, 55 Hudson Submarine Canyon, 7-8 Industrial Revolution beginning of, 71, 73 International Business Machines, (IBM), 64-65, 72 Iroquois, 10 Iroquois Confederacy, 8 demise of, 44 Irving, Washington, 80-81 his description of the Catskills, 5-6 Jam breakers, 58 Juet, Robert, 21 his journal, 18 Kalm, Peter, 28, 36 Kensett, John, F., 54 Kidd, William, 38 Kindred Spirits, (Painting), Durand, 55 King Charles II, 32, 55 King George’s War, 36 King George III, 40 Kingston first capital of New York, 65 King Williams War, 36 Lake Tear of the Clouds, 4 Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, (Irving), 81

INDEX Lenape people, 8, 18 Library of Congress, 3, 48 “Little Red Lighthouse,” 61 Livingston, Robert R., 49-50 Longfellow, H. W., 8 Lyndhurst Mansion, 80

Nicolls, Richard, 32-33, 35 North River, 2, 19 North River Steamboat, The, 49 Northwest Passage, 17-18

Manhattan, New York, 63 Maurice of Nassau, 2 Mauritius River, 2 Mayflower, (Ship), 27 Meinig, D. W., 29 comparing the Hudson to the Rhine, 2 on New York’s growth, 39 Minuit, Peter, 22 Mississippi River, 3 Mohawk River, 4 Mohican Indians, 19 Moran, Thomas, 54 Mount Marcy, 4 Mount, William Sidney, 54 “Muhheakantuck,” 5 Mulligan, Tim on the Hudson River, 79-80 Muscovy Company, 14 financed Hudson’s voyages, 15

Palisades, 64 as “Wehawken Awk,” 6 Phoenix, (steamboat), 50 Pitcher, Molly, 42 Polychlorinated biphenyls, (PCBs), 73, 75 banned in 1983, 74 Poughkeepsie, New York, 64, 71-72 Protective organizations Clearwater project, 78 Hudson River Valley Greenway, 78 Mid-Hudson Pattern for Progress, 78 Scenic Hudson, Inc., 78

Narrows, The, 7 Native Americans, 8, 10 influence on the Hudson Valley, 11 Native American Artifacts, 7 Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, 66 New Amsterdam, 22-23, 63 Newburgh, New York, 64 New Netherland, 2, 25, 35, 63 and the Hudson as a lifeline, 28 New Paltz, 7 New York, 2 its growth, 36-67, 58-59 as “melting pot,” 63-64 and pirates, 38 as world-class metropolis, 61-62

Onandaga Village, 8-9

Queen Elizabeth I, and “sea dogs,” 13 Railroad era, 68-69 Rensselaerswyck, 29-23 “Rhinelanders,” 2, 83 Richelieu River, 56, 68 Rip Van Winkle, (Irving), 81 River Rhine its role in history, 2 Roosevelt, F. D., 71, 80-81 Saint Lawrence Seaway project, 76 Saratoga Springs, 67 Saugerties Lighthouse, 66 Schneider, Paul, 58 Seeger, Pete, 64 Shippen, Peggy, 43 Six Nations, 8 “Song of Hiawatha,” (Longfellow), 8

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INDEX Springwood, 71, 80-81 Steam Ports, 50 Stephens, John, 50 Stony Point Battlefield, 44 Storm King Mountain, 6, 75 Stuyvesant, Peter, 31 as governor of New Netherland, 32 Taconic Mountains, 6 Troy, New York, 4, 66-67, 71 United States Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA), 74 United States Lighthouse Service, 61 United States Military Academy at West Point, 6, 47 providing our military leadership, 48-49

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Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 71 Vanderbilt, Frederick W., 71 Van Rensselaer, 29-30 Vassar College, 64-65 Vassar, Matthew, 64 Verrazano, Giovanni da, 32 on the Hudson River, 9 Vikings, 9 War of 1812, 52 Washington, George, 42-44, 64 Wayne, Anthony, 44 Wertenbaker, Thomas J., 63 West Point, 41-42, 47 “Wey Gat,” 6 Woodstock, New York, 82 Yaeger, Bert D., 52

PICTURE CREDITS page: 3: 17: 31: 37:

Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-3022 © Bettmann/CORBIS © Bettmann/CORBIS © Museum of the City of New York/ CORBIS 48: Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-5658 53: © Historical Pictures Archive/CORBIS

62: 65: 69: 73: 79: 81:

© CORBIS © Bettmann/CORBIS © CORBIS Associated Press, AP/Tim Roske © Bob Krist/CORBIS © Lee Snider; Lee Snider/CORBIS

Cover: © Underwood and Underwood/CORBIS Frontis: Library of Congress Map Division

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS DANIEL E. HARMON (www.danieleltonharmon.com) is an author and editor

in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He has written some 40 nonfiction books, one historical mystery short story collection, and numerous magazine and newspaper artcles. Harmon has served for many years as associate editor of Sandlapper: The Magazine of South Carolina and as editor of The Lawyer’s PC, a national computer newsletter published by West. His special interests include world history and folk music. TIM MCNEESE is an Associate Professor of History at York College in Nebraska. Professor McNeese earned an Associate of Arts degree from York College, a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and political science from Harding University, and a Master of Arts degree in history from Southwest Missouri State University. He is currently in his 27th year of teaching. Professor McNeese’s writing career has earned him a citation in the “Something About the Author” reference work. He is the author of more than fifty books and educational materials on everything from Egyptian pyramids to American Indians. He is married to Beverly McNeese, who teaches English at York College.

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