Adirondack Memories


	Adirondack Memories The Lament of the Philosophers Camp by Jon Kopp

Men once thought that wilderness needed to be domesticated, tamed of its wildness, defoliated and made into factories and farms. It was God’s work, so not many questioned it. Except for a group of New England pundits, who in 1858, from the staid confines of Cambridge and Boston decided to amuse themselves with a trek to the Adirondacks and left us memories worthy of our lament.

The leader of the pack was the youngest, William James Stillman, a landscape artist, and no stranger to the Adirondacks. He had made some trips to the region, usually accompanied by his faithful guide Steve Martin. Steve was the son of William F. Martin who ran “Martins Hotel” on Lower Saranac Lake. In the 1850s Martins was considered the end of civilization and the gateway to New York’s last remaining wilderness.	William J. Stillman

"Martin's Landings" - the start of the wilderness	In 1855 Stillman founded and edited a journal for essays on poetry and art called “The Crayon”. The Crayon brought Stillman to the attention of the great thinkers of Cambridge and Concord, including the poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and the anti- Darwinian, Louis Agassiz.

Just 28 years old, and back from his art studies in Paris, he decided he needed something out of the ordinary in the line of subject matter. One of his artist friends, S R Gifford, a landscape painter like himself, had been to the Adirondacks the year previous. He gave him the location of a log cabin on Upper Saranac Lake, inhabited by a farmer whose family consisted of a wife, a son and daughter; the Johnson family. Later, the family built a small hostel at Raquette Falls. “Mother Johnson” became renowned for her hospitality and delicious pancakes.

Upper Saranac Lake was little known then, except for the few sportsmen and anglers that had penetrated it. For the most part, it was known only to the lumbermen. Scattered about at intervals of ten to twenty miles, there were log houses, some of which gave hospitality in the summer to the sportsmen and in winter to the "loggers" who worked for the great lumber companies. Stillman, like many of his time, went into the wilderness hoping to find new subjects for art, spiritual freedom and a closer contact with the spiritual world. He writes; “In default of a motive in the familiar scenes, we used to frequent the wild ones” He enjoyed backwoods hospitality at the cost of $2 per week for board and lodging, and stayed the whole summer, having difficulty concentrating and distracted by the fruits of the wilderness. He writes; "I passed the whole day in the open. I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacred, but drew the line at fishing, and my rod and fly-book provided in a large degree the food of the household, for trout swarmed there. I caught, in an hour, as large a string as I could carry a mile. All the time I was not painting I was out in the boat on the lake, or wandering in the forest.” His romanticism was squashed by the reality he found in the day to day life of the residents. He wrote; "My quest was an illusion. The humanity of the backwoods was on a lower level than that of a New England village, more material, if less worldly. The men got intoxicated, and some of the women nothing less like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York” “I was ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor spiritual life in isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found what a correct philosophy would have told me before nature with no suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual existence,” In the end he writes; “I became more fascinated by the solitude and savagery of the wilderness than by anything paintable.” His Adirondack experiences and studies excited desire on the part of several of his Cambridge friends to visit the Wilderness. By the summer of 1858 the party was formed. He tried to enlist Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to no avail. He wrote; “I did my best to enroll Longfellow in the party, but though he was for a moment hesitating. I think the fact that Emerson was taking a gun settled him in the determination to decline ‘Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?’ he asked. Answered in the affirmative, he said ‘Then somebody will be shot!’ and would talk no more of going.” The company of ten, was to become known as the “Philosopher’s Club” and included; the artist himself, two poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russel Lowell; two scientist, Louis Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman; two lawyers, Ebenezer Hoar and Horatio Woodman; two doctors, Estes Howe and Amos Binney, and John Holmes, the gifted younger brother of the witty writer Oliver Wendell Holmes. Stillman wrote; "Our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time and escape from the daily groove. Arranging the details of the excursion was left to me, and I had therefore, to precede the company to the Wilderness. I had selected a site for the camp on one of the most secluded lakes, out of the line of travel of the hunters and fisher folk, a deep cul-de-sac of a lake on a stream that led nowhere, known as Follansbee Pond. There, with my guide, I built a bark camp, prepared a landing place, and then returned to Saranac in time to meet the arriving guests. “I was unfortunately prevented from accompanying them up the lakes the next morning because a boat I had been building for the occasion was not ready for the water, and so I missed what was to me of the greatest interest, the first impression on Emerson of the Wilderness’s absolute nature.” It was Emerson who captivated the young mans imagination above all of the others. Emerson’s first book was called “Nature”. Written in 1836, the book fueled an intellectual revolution called Transcendentalism, a philosophy that stressed harmony with nature, self-reliance, and intuition. Whenever the opportunity presented itself the artist took the place of Emerson's guide, and he treasured the hours he spent with him on the lake and in the woods, noting that "I gathered more insight into the character of my companions in the two or three weeks meeting of the club than all our lives in the city could have given me". Of all the mental experiences of my past life, nothing else survives with the vividness of my summers in the Adirondacks with Emerson". Stillman wrote; “Emerson, as I read him, had no self-sufficiency. He lived and felt with the minimum of personal color, reflecting nature and man; and the study of the guide, the savage man thrown out of society like a chip from a log under the ax of the chopper, returning to the status of pure individuality, — men such as our guides were, — aroused in the philosopher the enthusiasm of a new fact. He often spoke of it, and watched the men as a naturalist does the animals he classifies. The guides, among them Martin Moody of Tupper, were characterized by Stillman as “rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but, with all their physical faculties at maximum acuteness, senses on the alert, and keen as no townsman could comprehend them". They fascinated Emerson who, Stillman wrote, "had never seen man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated and to him the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine, and he studied their every action". The "Philosophers' Club", despite its happy beginning, was short-lived. In the words of Emerson's poem, "We planned that we should build near-by, a spacious lodge", but the club died in the mounting excitement which swept the nation as the Civil War loomed closer and closer. Years later, in the autumn of his life, Stillman went back to the scene of the meeting. He found it difficult to locate the site of their 1858 camp. Fire had swept the woods in that area, and the lumberman's axe had been at work in what had been absolute primeval solitude; “every fit camping ground on the shore of Follansbee had been occupied, and the whole pond spoiled by the tourist parties". He characterized as "wretched dolts" those who had put pickerel (pike) in the Raquette River thus exterminating the trout which teemed in those waters on the occasion of their earlier visit. He writes; "More than a generation has passed since then. Twenty-five years afterward I went back to the scene of the meeting. Except myself, the whole company is dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking had disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and become a horror to see, the memories are the only realities left.” A memory left to us by Stillman is his painting of the "Philosophers' Camp". It hangs in the Concord Free Public Library in Concord, Mass. It shows the gathering of the ten New England intellectuals at their Adirondack camp on Follansbee Pond. Emerson wrote a poetic journal of observations, “The Adirondacks” and dedicated it to the men of the trip. While Stillman bemoaned “Paradise Lost”, Emerson’s self reliant “Savage Man” seems to have died a slow death and for the most part gone unnoticed, primitive memories of wilderness survival, fading memories of lifestyles once practiced now banned by modern necessity, disconnecting us and turning us into voyeurs.

"The Philosophers Lament" by Jon Kopp (with a little help from Longfellow)

THIS is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring lakes Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest. This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the deer, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman? Where is the Adirondack cabin, the home of the guides -- Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands, Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven? Waste are those cabins, and the savage men gone! Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the lakes. Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion, List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest; List to the philosopher’s lament, a tale of love in the Adirondacks.