ritner masters report - university of texas at austin
TRANSCRIPT
DISCLAIMER:
This document does not meet the current format guidelines of
the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin.
It has been published for informational use only.
Copyright
by
Jesse Harrison Ritner
2019
The Report Committee Jesse Harrison Ritner Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
A More Perfect Nature: The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area,
15,000BP - present
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Erika Bsumek, Supervisor
Robert Olwell
A More Perfect Nature: The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area,
15,000BP - present
by
Jesse Harrison Ritner
Report
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin
May, 2019
iv
Acknowledgements
I would be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Erika Bsumek for the academic and
emotional support she has so kindly offered me throughout the past two years. I would
also like to thank Dr. Robert Olwell for serving on my committee.
v
Abstract
A More Perfect Nature:
The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area,
15,000BP - present
Jesse Harrison Ritner, MA
The University of Texas at Austin, 2019
Supervisor: Erika Bsumek
This report explores the history of the Minisink Valley and the stories told about it. I
examine how stories about the place influenced how people understood the past, and how
these pasts were used to imagine potential futures. I pay special attention to discourses
about nature as well as settler-colonial discourses. Lastly, I contemplate what this study
may add to current discussions around the Anthropocene.
vi
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................ vii
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1
Finding a Beginning ...........................................................................................................11
Forming and Populating the Valley ---------------------------------------------------------- 14
River People ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19
Colonial Discourses and Archival Silences .......................................................................23
Interlude: Rivers, Floods, Rafts, and Canals ------------------------------------------------ 29
Nineteenth Century Tourism ..............................................................................................36
Creating Dual Origin Stories ------------------------------------------------------------------ 38
Urban Disconnect: Canoes and Trains ------------------------------------------------------- 43
Species Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 50
Tocks Island Dam: Anthropocentric Nature ......................................................................54
Interlude: Cars, Camps, and Floods ---------------------------------------------------------- 54
New York’s Clean Water ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 55
The Army Corps of Engineers ---------------------------------------------------------------- 56
An Anthropogenic Wilderness ---------------------------------------------------------------- 59
Still Present Pasts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 62
Epilogue .............................................................................................................................68
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................73
vii
List of Illustrations
Figure 1: A map of settlements during the colonial period. ------------------------------------- 13
Figure 2:A topographical map of the Appalachian Mountain Range. -------------------------- 16
Figure 3: This postcard demonstrates the large size of the hotels at the Water Gap. --------- 52
Figure 4: Map of Interstates going to the region. -------------------------------------------------- 57
We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales
of progress nor talks of ruin tell us to think about collaborative survival. Not that this will save
us – but it might open our imaginations.
-Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World
1
Introduction
We awoke and drove east. The bus crossed the river, rattling over the Roebling
Aqueduct at Berryville, and followed the river north towards Hancock. It was still an
hour before sunrise, when we arrived in Long Eddy. Our canoes unloaded and filled, we
paddled down the Delaware. The fog was thick. Only one canoe in front and behind
were visible through it. Together our six boats made a chain linked by vision like
children holding hands. Then we felt the first rays of warmth. The fog did not dissipate;
rather, it lifted. Like a veil, it rose into the sky, minute by minute, until it cleared the
ridgelines of the Shawangunk’s to our left and the Pocono Plateau to our right. For the
first time I watched the Delaware River emerge in front of me. There were still 90 odd
miles left on our trip down the river to the Water Gap, and the access point at the Park
Service’s southern welcome center. It was 2008 and I was fourteen.
In 1969, Winifred Luten in the New York Times wrote that the Delaware’s
“landscape alternates between a rugged wilderness of forested mountains and steep cliffs,
and pastoral fields and towns.” Shallow, rocky, and often wadable, the river hiding on the
fringes of New York City’s and Philadelphia’s ever spreading metropolitan areas, still
felt free from the “ravages of civilization.”1 Eighty-three years earlier, Ralph K. Wing in
Forest and Stream wrote that “the most notable thing about the Delaware is the limpid
purity of its waters… we were able to find a spring at any time… [and] discover a basin
1 New York Times, April 27, 1969.
2
of water sweeter and more refreshing than anything city people could imagine.”2 And
over one-hundred years before him, Sven Roseen described the messages he received
through God’s grace, as he walked slowly through the Minisink Valley, preaching to
believers and non-believers alike.
All four of these are variations of a place-stories which celebrate the uniqueness
of the Minisink Valley. They are neither true nor false. But the cultural and
environmental history of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DEWA)
was built around them. They are by no means the only place-stories about the Delaware
River. Philadelphia, the first truly cosmopolitan city in the United States, sprung up along
its banks. Washington crossed it. The river floated some of the first timber in America’s
early logging boom. And, despite failing to qualify as one of the nation’s twenty largest
rivers, the Delaware and its tributaries supply water to approximately thirty-million
people, between 5% and 10% of the U.S. population.3 Its water cools some of the most
important power generators in the country, and its water is heating up faster than any
other river in the country.4 But, those are stories for another time, often based on a
preference for large cities and wide rivers. These stories are peripheral, rather than
central to the history of DEWA and the Minisink Valley in which it sits.
2 Forest & Stream, “Paddle and Current,” Nov. 18, 1886. 3 Richard Albert estimates the number at 10% of the population, while Susan Beecher and Will Price estimate the portion of the population at 5%. Richard C. Albert, Damming the Delaware: The Rise and Fall of Tocks Island Dam, 1; Will Price and Susan Beecher, “Climate Change Effects on Forests, Water Resources, and Communities of the Delaware River Basin,” in Forest Conservation in the Anthropocene: Science, Policy, and Practice, 195–208. 4 https://www.nps.gov/dewa/index.htm; Price and Beecher, “Climate Change Effects on Forests, Water Resources, and Communities of the Delaware River Basin,” 381.
3
Understanding the history of the valley and the reasons the National Park was
built, requires a study of how people thought about the place. Keith Basso writes,
“understanding of external realities are fashioned from local materials… knowing little or
nothing of the latter, one’s ability to make sense of “what is” and “what occurs” in
another’s environment is bound to be deficient.”5 The inverse is also true.
Understanding the history of “external realities” in a specific local requires an
understanding of what people think and thought “occurred,” and what they think “was.”
Coll Thrush, wrote that “place-stories are the easy way out, allowing us to avoid doing
our homework. In other words, they make appealing fiction but bad history.”6 The
propagation of place-stories through antiquarian and pop-culture literature suffuse myths
of Indigenous disappearance, pristine wilderness, and agrarian societies with
“legitimacy.” The trend is exaggerated in places like DEWA were local historians and
journalist supply the vast majority of literature on the river and its past. Journalist Frank
Dale, in Bridges over the Delaware: A History of Crossings, and Delaware Diary:
Episodes in the Life of a River, offers anecdotal and sporadic accounts of the “history” –
which for him starts with colonization – of the Delaware. Others, such as Mary A.
Shafer, in Devastation on the Delaware: Stories and Images of the Deadly Flood of 1955,
and activist Nancy Shukaitis, in Lasting Legacies of the Lower Minisink, use personal
experience to elucidate particular moments in time. They frequently cite antiquarian
histories from the nineteenth-century without a second thought or a moment of
5 Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 72. 6 Thrush, Native Seattle, 10.
4
interrogation. The histories they offer work to legitimize the place-story of the valley.
Thrush argues that place-stories are a “key method of dispossession and discrimination.”7
I would add that they are also key discourses, offering epistemologies about human and
environmental interactions within specific locales. Not all place-stories are
discriminative. They can also be redemptive, subversive, and culturally-constitutive. In
short, place-stories, whether deemed positive or negative, have what Ari Kelman calls
“causative weight.”8
But what do these stories cause? They legitimize dispossession. They naturalize
degraded landscapes. But these may both be viewed as rationalizations for past events,
not stories that cause future change. This paper, rather than focusing on how place
stories do not fit accurately with the past, looks the opposite way, interrogating how the
place-stories told in the Minisink Valley justified future actions. In discussions revolving
around the idea of the Anthropocene, scholars like Donna Haroway, Bruno Latour,
Timothy Morton, and many others have proposed ethics for a world destroyed by global
warming and human destruction. Haroway contends that we must build the Chthulucene.
Her slogan – “make kin not babies” – focuses on how people can reimagine their
relationship to non-human species.9 Latour in contrast suggests we must engage with the
world, no longer imagining ourselves as just single people in single places. For him, we
are simply facing Gaia (earth) experiencing our own destruction.10 Morton argues the
7 Thrush, Native Seattle, 15. 8 Kelman, A River and Its City, 9. 9 Haraoway, Chthulucene. 10 Latour, Facing Gaia.
5
world is already over, as such we need an ethic for a new world in which human actions
are temporally and spatially disconnected from their impacts. In short he calls for a sort
of return to David Hume’s skepticism and a rejection of Kant’s causation principle, all of
which is influenced by his reading of quantum theory.11 However, it is not enough to
simply propose new ethics. We must historicize, not only how states, empires, and
corporations destroyed the earth – although these are essential histories to write – but
histories of epistemologies of place. New ethics for the future must engage with and
within current place-stories. Place-stories tell us “what is” and as such new ethics that
denies “what is” lacks logical sense, it lacks meaning. By offering a genealogy of place
stories in the Minisink Valley, now more popularly known as DEWA, I will demonstrate
how people not only made sense of their pasts, but actively imagined and created new
futures. The stories reflect an historical awareness of changing environments. They
suggest the political and cultural weight of ideas like nature and wilderness. And they
demonstrate how place-stories worked to naturalize human replacement, species
replacement, and environmental engineering in a way that still reflected the most
important identifiers of the valley.
This is far from the first history to engage the overlaps between cultural and
ecological change in rivers or their valleys. Donald Worster’s work, Rivers of Empires:
Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West examined the relationship between
rivers and control in the American west. Framing his argument in a dense theoretical
frame work, he combined Karl Wittfogel’s idea of the “hydraulic-society,” Max Weber’s
11 Morton, Hyperobjects.
6
conception of the state as having a monopoly on legitimate violence, and Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theory of domination as a “repressive act that is total in
attention.”12 Worster argues that “democracy cannot survive where technical expertise,
accumulated capital, or their combination is allowed to take command.”13 The American
West’s irrigation is the perfect example. Worster writes that the west was billed as “a
land of untrampled freedoms.”14 But such booster rhetoric disguised state attempts to
control water and people. At the root of this process was the U.S. legal system, which in
the arid west remade water rights laws, and in the process increased capitalist
extravagance. The combination lead inevitably to imperial and environmental rise and
decline.
For Worster, control of nature was control of society. However, he does very
little to examine the legitimacy of what environmental humanists call the nature-culture
divide. Richard White, in The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River,
responded to works like Worster’s. He reinterpreted Marxist theories of labor in an
attempt to break the divide between culture and nature. For White, wok links culture to
nature, since both rivers and people “work.”15 His argument regarding the Columbia
River is as much a call to rethink what is human, natural, and artificial, as it is about the
river itself. Turning his back on environmentalists who idealized certain places and
activities over others, White emphasized how all energy came from the river. It is
12 Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, 56. 13 Ibid., 57. 14 Ibid., 4. 15 White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, x.
7
through work, both manual and technical that humans utilize the energy. The Columbia,
to White, is energy, and whether people fished or dammed the river, or traveled on top of
it, it was made to work. It became what he famously called an “organic machine.” As
Mathew Evendeen wrote in his recent article “Beyond the Organic Machine: New
Approaches in River Historiography,” White’s actual argument about labor and energy
has been largely passed over by historians of rivers; however, the idea of the organic
machine is nevertheless a common evocation. While White was certainly influential,
river historians in the early 2000s tended to embrace the cultural turn. They turned to
discourses about nature and culture and turned away from material interactions between
them.
Ari Kelman, in his book A City and its River: The Nature of Landscape in New
Orleans, argues that New Orleans and the Mississippi River socially constructed each
other. Kelman referred to nature as a “pliable social construction.”16 He continued,
“social constructions have causative weigh.”17 But nature is not always abstracted for
him, the word also reflects material realities like wind, rain, tides, and pathogens. 18
Kelman’s work is in line with historical trends of the time. The concern with discourse
as it relates to biopower can be seen in contemporaneous literature, and by and large still
dominates cultural histories fifteen years later. His contribution is the idea of “public
spaces” as a mediator through which culture and nature interact. His work is more in
debt to White’s The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
16 Ibid. 17 Kelman, A River and Its City, 9. 18 Ibid.
8
Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos than to The Organic Machine. White
argues in his earlier work that the effects of market economies are most destructive
during an environmental crisis (usually for him a drought), creating the breaking point
when Indigenous nations become dependent on the United States government. Kelman
contends that discourses have a similar causative weight to the market.19 The discussions
about what was and was not public space, for Kelman, was central to the decision about
who would bear the worst effects of the flood of 1927. As Kelman shows, there is a
critical relationship between discourses of nature, control, and the material experience of
people, even if the people who suffer most are outside the circles partaking in discourse.
Although less explicitly about rivers, the study of water management through
methods are reshaping the way historians think about rivers and water. Andrew Busch, in
City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-
Century Austin, Texas, traces the way in which dams, some inside, but many outside of
Austin’s city limits not only created the city with more trees and parks than any other in
the country, but also reshaped the lines of racial segregation in the city of Austin. David
Soll’s book on New York City, likewise traces political developments to critically engage
how controlling water outside the city often reframed the geography within the city as
well. My goal is not to replace these methodologies, but rather to build on them. By
attending to the stories people tell, I hope to demonstrate how discourse shapes “what is”
nature, what and who is controlled, and how it can be changed in the future.
19 White, The Roots of Dependency.
9
Thomas Andrews in Coyote Creek: A Deep History in the High Rockies writes,
“attending to small places remains not just worthwhile, but more important than ever as
we contemplate the vexed relationships between humanity and the natural systems on
which our lives continue to depend in this age of escalating environmental anxiety.”20
Rocks, soil, trees, sun, and water play a central role in a place’s history. The most
important lesson Anthropocene discourses teach us is that humans have always been and
will continue to be an integral part of the systems of the earth. The history of the
Minisink Valley cannot be told solely as an environmental study of geological,
ecological, and biological change. Nor can it be explained away exclusively through the
cultural, social, and political studies of the region. Instead, human migrations must
coexist with glacial recessions. The extinction of elk, the logic of settler colonialism,
environmental-engineering, an anti-dam movement, and the creation of a national park
must be allowed to speak to each other. It is not simply enough to note that humans and
environments interact, or to deconstruct the historical divide between nature and culture.
We already know as Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joanna Zylinska (as well as a
host of other feminists tell us) that humans and their environments are “always already
involved, obligated [and] entangled.”21 The question is not, as Anthropocene scholars
tend to put it, “when did the earth become anthropogenic,” but rather how and why did
we construct stories that make it so hard to make sense of the fact that it always has been.
20 Andrews, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies, 1. 21 Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, 97.
10
In this paper I examine the Minisink Valley over the longue durée. I begin with
glaciers, explore the first human interactions with the valley, and attempt to examine pre-
colonial interpretations of the valley by the Munsee. Section two explores the many
possible interpretations of nature in the colonial period. It pays attention to what we
know people thought, while also pointing to silences in the historical record. The hope is
that this can de-naturalize the more unified place-stories discussed in section three. I next
turn to the tourism industry from 1870 to 1910. The Minisink Valley during this period
was understood through dual origin stories created for the valley. Ties between settler-
colonial logics of dispossession and replacement with new “native” people were mirrored
during this period in discourses about stocked fish as “natural” to the river. Finally, in
section four, the paper explores the Tocks Island Dam controversy of the 1960s and
1970s. I demonstrate how both protestors and federal employees alike shared a common
internal logic consistently imagined nature and wilderness as anthropogenic, even while
the place-stories both pro- and anti-dammers utilized tried to interpret the valley as
pristine. In the conclusion I offer some thoughts on the valley since the controversy
ended, reflecting on the present role of Indigenous people in the valley, the ecological
state of DEWA, and exploring lessons we might learn in an era of global warming.
11
Finding a Beginning
After 1694, settlers trickled into the Minisink Valley. Slowly, from Esopus (now
Kingston, New York) Dutch families moved westward along the Neversink River, down
to its confluence with the Delaware River. There, in 1697, Mahackamack (now Port
Jervis, New York) was officially incorporated in 1697. Dutch fur traders, the Munsee,
Africans, English, and other European and indigenous travelers had followed the path
from the Hudson to the Delaware River for close to one-hundred years. The Munsee,
Mohicans, and Unami among a host of others, likely used the trail for hundreds of years
more. But by the 1730s, settlement was rapidly changing the social make-up of the
region. The Dutch no longer controlled New Amsterdam (re-christened New York a
generation or two before), the Iroquois Confederacy was expanding south into the
Susquehanna Valley. They were undoubtedly the most powerful force in now
Pennsylvania and New York. And, in 1737, John and Thomas Penn abandoned the
policy of peace – no matter how inconsistent it had been – of their father William Penn
when they claimed a huge swath of land in the infamous “walking purchase.”22 Dutch
and French families from the north and English and German families from the south
flooded into the narrow Minisink Valley. Together, they began to live tentatively on the
fertile land in the mixed pine and hemlock forests alongside the Munsee and Shawnee
Indians who inhabited the upper Delaware River’s banks. Their cohabitation was short
lived.
22 For one of many accounts of the “walking purchase” see James Merrell’s Into the American Woods.
12
Elk, moose, buffalo, and panthers, now long vanished, ran through the woods,
nestled between the Kittitinny Mountain and the Pocono Plateau.23 Other animals like
beaver were rapidly nearing extinction, already depleted from Munsee Country by Dutch
fur traders starting a century before.24 The trees in the forest were tall and mountain
laurel lined pathways through the woods. The Munsee had one village up on the
confluence of the Neversink and the Delaware, in close proximity to settler-
Mahackamack (Mahackamack was also the name of the Munsee town). Another Munsee
village sat on the lower third of what is now called Minisink Island, just south of the what
is now Milford, Pennsylvania. The Shawnee were settled near what is now Shawnee-on-
the-Delaware, where the Shawnee Creek (also a contemporary rather than historic name)
meets the main river. The settlers were spread thinner. Communities emerged, though
they could barely be called towns, many of them lacking town centers, stores, inns, or
churches for much of the colonial period, often quite near the Indigenous communities.
Just south of the Shawnee, one group congregated on Brodhead’s Creek in a town called
Dansbury (now East Stroudsburg, PA). Another, just north west of the Munsee’s island
town, settled in what is now Milford, Pennsylvania. Lastly, a group of Dutch settlers
built farms on the most fertile land in the valley, along Flatbrook near Walpack, a bend in
the river where the Munsee frequently gather in the fall to catch shad.25
23 For an extensive list of animals and plant life in the region see David Zeisberger, History of Indians …. Zeisberger learned to speak Munsee and Mohican in the Minisink Valley, and so is our best source of information regarding the appearance of the valley during the colonial period. 24 Otto, Dutch-Munsee Encounters in America 25 This information is a conglomeration of information from a variety of sources. See: Roseen’s Diary in The Dansbury Diaries; Grumet, “The Minisink Settlement;” Hilman, Old Dansbury; Hine, Old Mine Road.
13
Figure 1: A map of settlements during the colonial period. The blue pins are indigenous towns. The red pins are European settlements. The large green belt through the center of the map is what is now DEWA. The Minisink Valley in its complete form goes up to the two northern most points, and then continues up to the confluence of the Lackawaxen River with the Delaware. In totally it is approximately 100 miles in length.
Munsee is a name historians and anthropologists anachronistically apply to people
who shared the regional dialect of Algonquin. It means “people of the Minisink.” The
name demonstrates the long significance of the valley that is now the Delaware Water
Gap National Recreation Area, Worthington State Forest, and the Upper Delaware Scenic
14
and Recreational River. In 1780 David Zeisberger, presumed readers familiarity with the
term “Monsy.” In his book History of Northern American Indians, he used it as freely as
“Mohican” or “Delaware.” The Minisink people and their island home in the middle of
the river are largely forgotten today. The Minisink Valley is the home to DEWA, the
eighth most visited National Parks in the United States. The valley is rarely called by its
name, and the original inhabitants are usually referred to broadly as Lenape or Indian at
their most diminutive. But in 1737, the Minisink and the Munsee were known, and
British colonists were beginning to move in.
FORMING AND POPULATING THE VALLEY The valley we see today is quite different than the valley the Munsee enjoyed.
Today the forests are largely second and third growth. The chestnuts are gone, and
eastern hemlock are rapidly disappearing.26 Elk, buffalo, and panthers are now long
gone. And old house and “mock” farms dot the landscape. But not all is changed.
White pine and oak trees still dominate the canopy and bears, porcupines, and bobcats
still roam the woods. Mountain laurels sill line forest paths, as they have for thousands of
years.27 Dense fogs cover the valley every morning burn away in the morning sun. The
heat reveals the Delaware River below and the bald eagles soaring above. The valley,
like the river running through it, has never been static, and it is important that the 26 Chestnut trees were killed by a blight at the beginning of the twentieth century, while eastern hemlocks are highly endangered by woolly adelgids. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area is part of an extensive community attempting to save hemlocks and to reintroduce blight resistant chestnuts to the Atlantic seaboard. 27 In 1933 Governor Gifford Pinchot named mountain laurel (kalmia latifolia) the state flower of Pennsylvania. Pinchot interestingly had deep ties to this region. His ancestral home – Grey Towers - is in Milford, on the Pennsylvania side of the river. The house is now a national landmark and museum run by the Forest Service.
15
descriptions that settler left behind do not stand in as a false ecological baseline for the
Minisink. The valley is constantly changing, both with and without human help.
The geological origins of the Minisink region require two stories: one of the
valley and the other of the distinctive Delaware Water Gap. The Appalachian Mountains
were born 480 million years ago when the continents collided to build Pangea. However,
after over 400 million years, erosion from wind leveled the mountains, dramatically
flattening them. 66 million years the land began lifting again. The slopes down to the
ocean were steeper and rivers grew larger. The raising land increased water speed and
the river cut through the soft shales, dolomites, and limestones. The process repeated
again and again. No one event was large enough to carve out the deep valleys that now
weave through the Appalachian range. In contrast, the Water Gap is much more recent.28
Most studies suggest that the Water Gap is only fifteen- to twenty-thousand-
years-old. The Delaware once ran continuously through the valley between the Kittitinny
Range and the Pocono Plateau. Something like twenty-thousand years before present the
Wisconsin Glacier spread down from the artic. It travelled all the way to Saylorsburg,
Pennsylvania (its most southern tip). But it never crossed the Kittitinny Ridge. Glaciers,
far from being passive, are constantly moving. They grow and shrink. Occasionally they
even break, sliding rapidly and sometimes destructively. Over five- to ten-thousand years
the glacier, and the Delaware running below it, began to wear away at the soft, unstable
rock creating the Water Gap. The glacier began melting, and Lake Sciota was formed.
28 Dent, “Recent Past and Present Biophysical Conditions,” 36-39. Crawford, Discovering the Delaware Water Gap, 1-13.
16
The lake was approximately forty-five miles long – slightly shorter than the distance
from the Water Gap to Port Jervis. As the glacier melted the lake rose and rose. It quite
rapidly (in geological time) cut a rift through the mountains.29 The formation of the
Water Gap was so recent that some argue Minisink actually means place from which the
“water is gone.” If this is true, it suggests that the Munsee’s ancestors were in the region
when the Glacier melted.30
Figure 2: A topographical map of the Appalachian Mountain Range. (Via Wikimedia)
When the Wisconsin glacier began receding 15,00 years ago, a narrow valley
emerged from under the ice. It takes approximately 2,000 years for ice to melt and for
29 Ibid. 30 This information is from Dent, “Recent Past and Present,” 39. I am somewhat skeptical of its validity. He cites J.B. Epstein, a geologist from 1969. More recent anthropological work – Grumet and Kraft – do not mention this potential meaning for the word Minisink. That being said, the Lenape do not seem to have any history of migration within their mythology. Some contemporary Lenape claim that they were always from this land. For more on these claims see Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 30.
17
organic sentiment to emerge.31 The clay, sand, and gravel left behind by the melting ice
could only support dense, cold-weather coniferous forests similar to those in northern
Canada or Siberia today. Wind and fast-moving water whipped south-east from the
receding glacier for thousands of years. Slowly fir and spruce soaked up ground water,
reducing the force of the river, stabilizing its banks, and protecting humans and animals
alike from the vicious winds and dangerous floods. 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, early
human inhabitants of the area hunted caribou, elk, and moose.32 Life was hard.
Over the next 5,000 years, the climate warmed and the rocky soil gained fertility.
The winds softened. The climate warmed. And rainfall increased. While people
migrated in larger groups, spending more time in the valley, other species were less
fortunate. The changing climate made the cold weather forests and the caribou who
relied on it refugees. As smaller warm-weather animals, and hemlock and oak moved
into the Minisink Valley, the former residents moved north to more tundra like terrain.33
Human populations were undoubtedly beneficiaries. The warmer weather diversified
food sources and made local populations less dependent on hunting. The first human
records in northeastern North America date back approximately 11,500 years.34 What
31 Dent, “Recent Past and Present,” 39. 32 Timelines are fuzzy, but all of this likely happened within the first 2,000 to 4,000 years after the glacier receded. 33 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 24; Kraft, The Lenape, 57. 34 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, xix.
18
is much harder to determine is what these people’s relationship was to the Munsee who
settlers encountered in the seventeenth century.35
Significant influence from great lake cultures began to immerge 2,000 years
ago.36 But the most dramatic change did not occur for another thousand years. In
approximately 900 CE, local communities in the Minisink Valley started growing
cucurlita, the genius to which pumpkin and squash belong. Over the next three hundred
years they adopted corn and beans as well. While earlier populations had already
adapted to smaller game, the adoption of horticulture and the creation of a mixed
horticulture hunter-gatherer system allowed for these middle- to late-Woodland
cultures to stabilize. Mobility decreased. The local populations for the first time
returned season after season and year after year to the same sites.37 Interestingly, this
35 Anthropologist Robert Grumet notes that many living Lenape claim that they have always lived in the region. Unlike other groups, their creation stories do not seem to include large scale migrations. That being said, there are deep problems with determining what seventeenth-century Lenape believed. Herbert Kraft offers a cosmology, but it does not include a creation story. Furthermore, there are reasons to be suspicious of his recounting. It is largely based on the writings of John G.E. Heckewelder, who wrote in 1819. By the end of the seventeenth-century the vast majority of the Lenape were converted to Christianity. Kraft’s account feels distinctly Christian at times. Grumet simply avoids the topic, preferring to theorize on the work of archeologists than explore a limited cosmology. Others take similar approaches. Jean Sunderland, in her book Lenape Country, simply avoids discussing cosmologies, instead focusing her attention on political interactions. Paul Otto, in his book Dutch-Munsee Encounters, makes a similar decision. Furthermore, primary sources documents are difficult to decipher. David Zeisberger, a favorite proto-ethnographic source for the Munsee, while reliable with regards to ecology and lifeways is far from consistent when it comes to issues of religion. Furthermore, books that seek to collect primary source documentation of Lenape stories, such as John Beirhorst’s Mythology of the Lenape, fail to critically analyze the sources, even if they acknowledge the limits, and frequently suggest certain interpretations through groupings and titles. Various websites offer stories, but they are often present, intentionally speaking back to a precolonial era. While they are certainly authentic Lenape stories, it would be anachronistic to read them back onto past Lenape society. As such, with regards to Lenape origins I will avoid extensive discussion of cosmology in this essay. Kraft, The Lenape, 162-163; Grumet, The Munsee Indians, 28-29; 36 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 29. 37 Fischler and French, “Middle Woodland to Late Woodland Transition,” 159-161.
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correlates almost exactly with the moment that anthropologist Robert Grumet suggests
the linguistic split between the Umani and the Munsee occurred.38
RIVER PEOPLE
Anthropologist Robert Grumet writes, “the Munsee homeland was a land of
water.”39 The names the Munsee gave to places hint at the central role that rivers played
in their culture. The name Delaware was first applied and accepted by both Unami and
Munsee peoples along the banks of the river due to a tradition of naming groups of
people after places. As such, the communities along the Delaware River found it
reasonable that colonist would apply the same name they used for the large waterway
they relied on. Munsee communities named themselves after rivers. For instance, the
name Esopus, the northern most branch of Munsee country, derived from siipuw,
meaning creek.40 Other names were more specific, offering useful and informative
information about the places named. Musconetcong, a stream that runs from northern
New Jersey into the Delaware just below what is now Easton means “rapid stream
running,” while Hackensack, which runs towards Newark Bay, is roughly “the stream
which discharges at ground level.” Lehigh, Lackawaxen, and Lacawack all contain
38 The starkest distinction between the Unami and the Munsee dialect is the variations in “n” and “l”, which geographically occurred near the Falls on the Delaware. As such, both groups identified as Ninnepauues or Linnepauues, which was then corrupted by English as Lenape. There are also meaningful cultural distinctions between the two groups. I use the term Lenape, rather than the Indigenous versions above since contemporary Lenape refer to themselves as such. They also tend to embrace the term Delaware. Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 30. 39 Kraft, The Lenape, vii. 40 Kraft, The Lenape, vii.
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variants of Munsee words for “river fork” or “river branch.”41 Even Walpack, which
plays a central role in post-Munsee Minisink, means “a turn hole or a deep and still place
in a stream.”42 Munsee place names also reveal a reverence for islands as safe and
essential. The word Munsee roughly translates to “the people of Minisink.” While
Minisink is thought by some linguist to mean “water is gone.”43 This analysis could
suggest the importance of the valley in Munsee cosmology. Almost all accounts of
Lenape cosmology include variations of a turtle rising up out of a flood and saving some
variation of humans, spirits, or animals. As such there is a potential correlation between
Minisink Island and Turtle Island in the place where “water is gone.
Rivers defined Minisink Country, and Munsee culture reflected their significance.
The Munsee homeland originally stretched from southern Connecticut west to the
Catskills and south to the Falls on the Delaware – more or less halfway up New Jersey.44
Despite their coastal location, the Munsee culture centered on riparian ecosystems.
41 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 33. 42 Kraft, The Lenape, xvii. 43 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 30. 44 The Munsee are frequently grouped with the Delaware or Lenape Nation to the south or the Mohicans to the north. Scholars over the last twenty years have made great strides in separating the groups. Robert Grumet’s work is especially informative. His analysis is based on over 10,000 documents relating to the Munsee that he found over the course of his career. Missionaries such as David Zeisberger and Sven Roseen, who are often associated with the Delaware, were working with the Munsee, making their insights especially helpful in revealing the unique cultures of this group of people. The term Delaware, a corruption of the English Governor of Virginia’s name “De la Warr”, fits into northeastern Algonquin naming practices, of calling people by the place they were from. Hence, both Munsee and Umani may be Delaware. Munsee and Umani living in New York, New Jersey, or closer to the Susquehanna would not have used the name during the colonial period. They more likely would have called themselves Ninnepauues of Linnepauues. (“n” and “l” is the most important distinction between Munsee and Unami dialects. Interestingly, the vast majority of archeological work on the Lenape comes from Munsee territory, while the majority of written evidence is derived from Unami country. Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 6; Grumet, “The Minisink Settlement,” 178, 197; Kraft, The Lenape, 189; Fischer & French, “Middle Woodland to Late Woodland Transition, 164.
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Rivers, the blood of the earth, defined Munsee Country.45 Living in small communities
dotting the edge of rivers, colonists tended to refer to them as “river Indians.”46
Seasonality defined Munsee lifeways. When winter fields thawed, and the ice on
the Delaware melted the Munsee began planting. Women were responsible for
agricultural pursuits. They principally planted corn, making from it a sort of bread which
they cooked in ashes. But their diet was still diverse. Pumpkins, potatoes, and beans
were also staples in Munsee fields. After plantings and the first weeding the first hunt
began. In summer the deer’s fur, thinner than in winter, turned a reddish hue. These
pelts were worth more in the fur trade, and so deer took precedent during these hunts.47
Dried and salted fish, along with hunted game, provided the majority of Munsee protein
until it was time to harvest crops in the early fall. Much like other Indigenous groups in
what is now the northeast of the United States, the Munsee were highly mobile, living in
different groups and different locations depending on the availability of food in any given
season. Nevertheless, they returned certain locations time and again. Following the
harvest, the Munsee gathered in large groups to catch anadromous fish. After their
feasting and celebration, they would then break into smaller communities for the winter
hunt.48 In the winter, unlike the summer, they devoted themselves to small game, mainly
45 Lenapé Kishelamāwa'kān, http://www.native-languages.org/lenape-legends.htm. 46 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 10 47 Zeisberger, History of Northern American Indians, 12- 16. 48 Kraft, The Lenape, 138-141.
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beaver, raccoon, and fox. This continues till the spring thaw came and it was time to
plant again.49
49 Zeisberger, History of Northern American Indians, 14.
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Colonial Discourses and Archival Silences
The valley which the Dutch and German settled was cooler than today.50 In this
valley that many people (both Indigenous and European) thought of simply as woods,
communities old and new attempted to thrive side by side.51 But, the people living in the
valley considered these woods home. Nevertheless, Indigenous, European, and African
people encountered the valley with different needs, wants, desires, and governing
ideologies. The problem for historians is balancing the unequal preservation of these
diverse understandings. The mountains, which offers some protection from unwanted
visitors, confined others to a damp and cold frontier. Rivers used efficiently offered
food, water, and fertility, but they were also unpredictable. Residents drowned and froze
in the water. Homes were sometimes destroyed by floods and unsuspecting children
were known to be whisked away in the rushing water. European colonists, local
Indigenous populations, and enslaved Africans encountered the forest in decidedly
different ways. Our histories of wilderness and place must reflect this diversity.
Moravians often saw the forest as a place to speak with God. Sven Roseen, a
missionary based in Dansbury, looked to the woods for respite during his grueling travels
through the valley.52 In the fall of 1748, Roseen was walking through the forest. The
leaves of the oaks and maples were likely a soft yellow, and golden light may have
filtered down through the splotchy canopy. Walking through this autumn paradise “the
daily word occurred to [him]… for [God] made them, and redeemed them, and sanctified
50 Grumet and Richter, The Munsee Indians, 31. This cooling was a result of the end of the little ice age. 51 For the significance of the “woods,” see Merrell, Into the Woods, intro. 52 Dansbury is now known as Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
24
them.”53 He often thought about God while traveling. Away from people and politics,
Roseen connected with his spirituality. Unlike puritans who saw the woods as unused,
radical protestants often understood the woods as holey.54 Roseen was no exception.
Yet, while he liked the forest, he feared the Delaware River.
Roseen’s fear of the river, and its tendency to impede his plans, ran like a current
through his diary. On December 26, 1748, a winter freshet was delayed his travel plans.
“Now,” he wrote, “the Delaware had risen dangerously, and many tree trunks floated
down the strong current… [he] risked crossing in Thom Brinks canoe.” But the
Delaware’s tributaries were often more dangerous than the river itself. On the western
bank of the Delaware, Roseen headed south to Dansbury, but “there the Bushkill was so
high that [he] could not continue.”55 The flood continued for two days. It was only on
December 28th that “the creek had so far fallen that [he] could cross on a full horse.”56
While ethnographic, historical, and archeological evidence give a reasonable
impression of European and Munsee interpretations of the river valley, the experiences of
other Indigenous people and Africans, both free and enslaved rarely appear. Paemasing,
a Mohican convert and, perhaps more intriguingly, his wife frequently appear in Roseen’s
diary.57 Paemasing’s wife was not from the region. She came “from the South, having
53 Roseen, Diary, 16. 54 Brooke, Refiners Fire, 64. 55 Roseen, The Dansbury Diaries, 47. 56 Roseen, The Dansbury Diaries, 47. 57 It is not entirely clear what her name was. Susan Klepp, who mentions her in an unpublished article presented originally to the Shawnee historical society calls her Nataelemo, however, my reading of Roseen’s diary suggests that Nataelemo was her daughter’s name.
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been taken captive in war in her childhood.”58 Paemasing was also an outsider in the
valley. They notably lived alone, with white Christian neighbors, away from Munsee and
Shawnee villages in the valley.59 Nevertheless, Paemasing, a Mohican, likely shared
cultural and linguistic ties with Munsee in the region.60 The largely wooded valley had
different meaning to Paemising’s wife, then to Roseen. In 1749 the French and Indian
War was fast approaching. The Iroquois had already invaded the Susquehanna valley,
and the missionary towns of Wyoming, along the eastern branch of the Susquehanna
River was destroyed. Paemasing and his wife were well aware of the growing animosity
between French and British traders. They left Wyoming sometime before its destruction,
and they could not have missed the quickening migration of Munsee and Shawnee out of
the valley towards Ohio. On May 1st Paemasing and his went down to Dansbury to see
Roseen. wife commented that she “did not like to live in confined spaces.”61
While Roseen interpreted the valley through a dialectic of woods and the river,
Paemasing’s wife focused on how the environment, both cultural and material, limited
her mobility. Taken from her family as a child, and then forced to flee a Moravian
Indigenous community with her husband, she knew conflict was coming to her new
home. She was in every way an outsider. The majorities of both European Christians
58 Roseen, The Dansbury Diaries, 69. It is not clear what war this was. There is reason to think that she may have been Cherokee, since the Lenape and Cherokee engaged in war a couple decades earlier, but any number of wars, large or small, could have resulted in captives. . 59 Where exactly they live is quite ambiguous in the diary. It seems safe to say they lived on the west side of the river, within a day’s distances to Dansbury. It is not clear to me if they lived north, towards the Shawnee village, or west, higher up on Brodhead’s Creek. 60 Depending on where to the southwest his wife came from, she may have shared linguistic or cultural similarities with the Shawnee, but the diary is silent on the issue. 61 Roseen, The Dansbury Diaries, 86.
26
and non-Christian Indians saw her and her husband as a potential threat. Deprived of
community, limited by encroaching property regimes and settler farmers, the valley was
neither beautiful nor unpredictable. It more likely verged on dystopic. However, an echo
of her anxiety is all that remains.62
Even harder to access are the experiences of enslaved people within the valley. In
the winter of 1748-1749, a woman named Johanna Boston63 fled from her master
Solomon Jennings.64 Boston was 26 years old when she ran away during a particularly
severe winter.65 Paemasing founder he “half frozen.” It is not totally clear why he made
the decision, but he chose to bring her to Brodhead’s house, who chose to protect her
from Jennings.66 It is difficult to know exactly what to make of the story. She appears at
other moments in Roseen’s diary, but she never speaks, or more accurately he never
records her words. The entire story only appears in the diary as a testament to
Paemasing’s bravery, rescuing a woman who had been enslaved by a powerful man. As
62 Here I attempt to use NAIS methodologies. While we only have access to one ventriloquized sentence, by attempting to rebuild the circumstances left silent in the diary through a recreation of the world around her, we can attempt to recreate the potential futures of the speaker. This allows for a measure of agency and choice in her decision to continue living with her husband in the valley, rather than simply to consider her statement a curiosity or aberration from the general silence of Indigenous figures in colonial records. For more on decolonial or NAIS methodologies see: Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Pleasant et al., “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies.” 63 She is called Hanna in Roseen’s diary. Boston was her husband’s sir-name that was not taken till after she was freed from slavery. Nevertheless, I choose to use her chosen name in freedom, rather than her enslaved name. I here follow the lead of Susan Klepp who has previously written about the escape and freedom of Johanna Boston. 64 Klepp, “The Surprising Story of Johanna Boston, a Runaway Slave,” 5. Solomon Jennings is an interesting character. Not religious like most of the people in Northampton County he was a sort of representative for the heirs of the William Penn in the region. He was also one of three men who “walked” for the infamous “Walking Purchase”, although he apparently abandoned the walk after a measly five hours. 65 Pennsylvania Weather Records, 1644-1835, 112. 66 Interestingly Brodhead owned slaves. It is not clear why he made the decision to subvert the institution in this particular situation. Roseen, The Dansbury Diaries, 81.
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such, Boston functions as a way for Roseen to bestow praise on a Christian Indigenous
man.67 Boston herself is silenced in the narrative. We are left without even a trace of her
thoughts. Unlike Paemasing’s wife there is no colonial ventriloquism of her voice.68
There were limits to local knowledge of the landscape. Given the contours of the
land, it is hard to imagine how Boston experienced the woods, the river, or the valley.
Were they a threat to life? Or did she see freedom and protection in the woods ill-defined
paths? Did the dangerously cold weather that made her think an escape from brutal
enslavement was possible? Did she have a plan or did she simply hope to escape her
enslaver, uncertain of what would come next ?69 Even Roseen, a frequent traveler made
wrong turns in the woods, and as James Merrell recounts in Into the American Woods,
Indigenous people in their own countries sometimes found themselves lost and
wandering when following paths. Even when local Native Americans knew their way,
the path was not always so easy to find for others. For instance, a frustrated George
Washington wrote, “[W]e all know that a blaz’d path in the eyes of an Indian is a large
road: for they do not distinguish between one track and another…; i.e between a track
which will admit of carriages, and a road sufficient for them to march in.”70 To quote
Merrell once again, the first lesson about the colonial frontier “is the sheer difficulty of
getting from here to there… The imposing obstacles… from bad roads and bad weather
67 This is not the only time Roseen takes time to praise Indigenous men who have taken on the Moravian faith. Another notable example is his discussion of the man who saved four lives from the Delaware River. 68 For works on silences see: Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives. 69 For more attempts to come to terms with enslaved perspectives of wilderness is found in Walter Johnson’s River of Darkness; Miles, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_TS9VusEZg; Miles, The Dawn of Detroit. 70 Papers of George Washington, IV, 241 in Merrell, Into the American Woods, 140-1.
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to bad food and bad luck,” and Merrell’s travelers were not fleeing slavery.71 Finding
one’s way when off of well-trod paths was challenging for settlers, slaves, and
Indigenous people. The experience of rushing water, snow, ice, and the risk of a winter
freshet only made it that much riskier.
Boston, the woman fleeing slavery, was by 1748 well acquainted with the with
the region. Overall, we have a few revealing details about her life in the valley. She lived
for a time in Walpack, north of Dansbury, on the eastern side of the river. She also spent
time enslaved by Edward Robinson, the owner of the Robinson Ferry, just south of the
water gap. By the late 1740s, she was well aware of the danger of the rivers and creeks
in the winter. We know, for instance, that 1739, she saved the daughter of Isaac
Ysselstein, her second owner, when the house was washed away in a flash flood.
Furthermore, she had children, and a husband, Joseph Boston, who she married a few
years earlier.72 Still, we know little of what she experienced and how she thought about
the valley. Her life there, spent as both an enslaved woman, a wife, a rescuer, and fugitive
from her owner span a broad swath of social experience. After she fled, Boston was
eventually freed. She went on to spend her life with her husband under the protection of
Brodhead. Even so, we have few specific details that might help us reconstruct her lived
experience. Instead, the silent gaps in her story echo through history. Her continued
silence reminds us slavery’s violent past continues to affect out interpretations of
71 Merrell, Into the American Woods, 128. 72 Klepp, “The Surprising Story of Johanna Boston.”
29
encounters between people and landscapes on the colonial frontier.73 Despite her
presence, and that of other slaves in the valley, the majority of records offer
interpretations by white, often male, European settlers who sought to leave their mark on
both the landscape and the people who inhabited it. The stories of Johanna Boston and
Paemasing’s wife tell us more about what we do not know than about what we do. But
they make us weary of generalizations about colonial perspectives on wilderness. No one
experience defined colonial encounters with the Minisink Valley.
INTERLUDE: RIVERS, FLOODS, RAFTS, AND CANALS As the population in the region grew and the nature of settlement and trade
changed, people necessarily adapted themselves and the valley to fit new circumstances.
Ferries transported people across the river, logs were lashed together to float down
dangerous rapids during spring floods, and bridges, canals, and railroads were built to
transport materials from west to east and north to south. However, the aims of these
endeavors were rarely in tune with each other or strength and unpredictability of the
river. Nevertheless, the use of the river for water and transportation, and the location of
gaps in the Kittitinny Range placed the valley at the center of regional trade networks
from the beginning of the fur trade through the 1870s.
73 The best literature on these encounters likely has to do with escaped slaves in what is now the American south east. Once again, like with Johnson’s account, the location is so far removed that it is hard to compare. The risks of alligators in Florida and ice in Pennsylvania, while both dangerous, are significantly different in nature. See: Dubcovsky, Informed Power; Landers, Atlantic Creoles.
30
Rivers are frequently referred to as the first “highways,” and the European
colonization of North America attests to the real and perceived importance for
transportation, communication, and trade via waterways. However, river is a somewhat
ambiguous term. The Delaware is partially salinized as far north as Trenton. While the
river flows down towards the bay, it also rises and falls with the tides, making it
dramatically deeper and slower than further north. Above the falls on the Delaware the
river looks much different. Sometimes rapidly moving, and at other times slow and
shallow, the river could in the Minisink Valley swells by over twenty feet when snow is
quickly followed by rain. The river and its tributaries are even worse when hurricanes
come inland in the late summer and early fall. The river north of the falls was still a
“highway” and it played a pivotal role in industry and transportation, but to understand
why people continued to imagine the valley as wilderness, it is necessary to explore the
unique ways in which the upper Delaware was utilized.
The Minisink sits at a pre-colonial crossroads. The Neversink River and the
Hudson are only twenty miles apart, creating an easy route from Esopus to
Mahackamack. On the other side, a depression in the Pocono Plateau allowed for easy
travel by land between the east branch of the Susquehanna and the Delaware River, from
approximately the Delaware Water Gap to what is now Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. By
the end of the 1630s, historian Paul Otto estimates that the fur trade had more or less
eliminated the beaver population within Munsee Country. Building on their success in
the beaver trade, the Munsee maintained a central role as middlemen for the Dutch and
other Indigenous groups like the Unami, the Susquehannock, and further north, the
31
Mohicans and Mohawk.74 The Minisink and their narrow valley were far removed from
Manhattan Island, where the Dutch built New Amsterdam, but the valley had its own
advantages. Myth recounts the presence of roads to transport copper from mines in the
Minisink to Esopus on the Hudson. Archeological reports suggest the mines are myths.
There is no evidence that they were used before1750.75 The path likely existed from the
Minisink to the Hudson, because it was the quickest route for the Dutch to access furs,
and for the Minisink to acquire duffel, wampum, and iron kettles, among other
commodities they desired.76
Travel both east and west of the valley necessitated easy and well-known places
to cross both the Delaware River and the Kittitinny Mountains. The first ferry across the
Delaware opened in 1735.77 The ferry was located at the southern tip of Old Mine Road.
But crossing an irritable river was dangerous. Roseen often recounted trips over the
Delaware in canoes and ferries, frequently commenting on the risk involved. Crossing
creeks was not any safer. They often had bridges, but they were not anything we would
identify as such today. Usually a bridge was simply logs lain across a narrow point in a
creek. They lasted until they were inevitably washed way in a freshet. Bridges over the
74 The Susquehannock originally lived on what is not called the Susquehanna River. Their country stretched from roughly the branches of the river, down into what is now Maryland and Virginia. They were also called the Conestoga, and they spoke an Iroquoian dialect. Nevertheless, they frequently allied themselves with the Lenape rather than their northern linguistic cousins. By the 1730s the Iroquois had largely overrun the Susquehannock, leaving the Munsee trapped between the expanding empires of the British and the Iroquois. Susquehannock is an English corruption of the Powhattan word Susquesahanough, while Conestoga derives from the Iroquois word Kanestoge. Hewitt, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, 335-337. 75 “Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area: Geological Resources Inventory Report,” 10. 76 For more information on Dutch-Munsee trade practices see: Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in American 77 Dale, Bridges Over the Delaware River, 93.
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Delaware were not be built until after the Revolutionary War, when Pennsylvania and
New Jersey reached an agreement to promote trade between the two states. But the first
two bridges were built at Trenton and Easton, both some distance south of the Minisink
and relatively protected from the severe floods and ice jams which wreaked havoc further
north.
In 1836, Milford, Pennsylvania built the first bridge across the Delaware north of
the gap.78 But building a bridge across such a fickle stretch of river proved harder than
anticipated. Almost fordable at low water, during floods the river could swell over
twenty feet high. The bridge was severely damaged in the flood of 1841 and washed
away in 1846.79 The bridge did not survive even a decade. Bridges transported people
and materials across the river, but timber rafters found them irritating at best, and
disastrous at worst. Bridges were built were meant to weather the Delaware’s dramatic
floods, but timber rafters used these floods to move the wares down river. Two-hundred-
foot rafts rocketed down rushing rapids, but the posts and bottoms of bridges added
dangerous obstacle during highwater floods. As the bridges got stronger, the spaces for
rafts to pass under narrowed.
78 The bridge was located at what is now called Milford Beach, one of two swimming beaches in the Delaware Water Gap. It is also where at 20 years old, I toppled into the river, trying to show off my ability to jump up and down on the gunnels of a canoe… Needless to say, I received ironic applause from the sun bathers on the beach. 79 Dale, Bridges Over the Delaware River, 79. As the bridge washed down river, it wreaked havoc on other bridges below. The result was the one poorly built bridge could result in a domino effect in which almost all the bridges down through Trenton could be destroyed during particularly destructive floods.
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In 1764, legend has it that Daniel Skinner, first to attempted to float timber down
the Hudson, inventing the timber raft.80 Interestingly, he was also an early settler in the
upper Minisink Valley. The Delaware was the colonies’ first largescale timber industry.
Philadelphia was a major center for ship building, but the timber immediately
surrounding the city was quickly depleted.81 New Jersey and Pennsylvania forests
supplied maple and oak for hulls and white pine and hemlock for spars and masts.82
Timber rafting increased through the 1870s, making the Delaware one of the most
important highways in the mid-Atlantic. Rafting depended on high, fastmoving water
during spring and fall freshets.83 There were only three or four freshets a year large
enough to float rafts down to the Falls on the Delaware, where the river finally ran deep
enough to be truly navigable. As such, timber rafting was a deeply seasonal enterprise.84
Often bridges, dams, and timber rafting came into conflict. A dramatic example
was the opening of the Lackawaxen Dam in 1829. The dam was built by the Delaware
and Hudson Canal Company, in order to transport anthracite coal from the fields of
80 Dale, Delaware Diary, 22-23. 81 Dale, Delaware Diary; Dale, Crossing the Delaware. 82 Dale, Delaware Diary, 23. 83 Dale, Delaware Diary, 23. 84 Timber rafting was an incredibly dangerous enterprise. However, at times logs would simply be floated down the Delaware sans raft. Although neither is done anymore, historic memory is still present in traditions and stories told in the area. For instance, at the summer camp I attended and then was a counselor at we had a tradition called the key log ceremony. We first told a story about log jams, in which a brave man would have to go out, over the spinning logs, find the “key log” that jammed the river and cut it, only to try to run back to the bank before falling into the water and drowning under the once again rapidly moving logs. Each camper would then throw their own “key log” (a small stick) into the fire and thank another camper in person for something they recently did. While the tradition of thanking people in person for a specific action is one of my favorites, the romanization of rafting distracts from the extreme violence and danger that accompanied extractive capitalist regimes into the region. The celebration is deeply reminiscent of Roosevelt era conceptions of wilderness as hypermasculine places where nature is conquered for the good of civilization.
34
Pennsylvania to New York City. The dam stood seven feet tall. For rafters the dramatic
fall over the dam was terrifying. As the rafts dropped over the dam it bent “in the middle
from the force of gravity on both ends, and the forward oarsmen stood two feet in water
… [and] the whole framework [creaked] and [groaned] like a huge monster in terrible
agony.”85 The situation was ripe for conflict.
The coal industry, which relied on canals that stretched from east to west was in
conflict with rafters who relied on commerce that ran from north to south. The seven-
foot drop, the slow-moving canal boats crossing the river, and football field size rafts
rushing headlong into them at rapid speeds spelled disaster. In a public meeting held in
April, timber rafters stated that “if the obstruction was not immediately removed, they
would remove it by force… and they accordingly proceeded to the dam, blew it up and
tore away about eighty feet of it… clearing a passage for rafts.”86 The company quickly
rebuilt the dam. Fifteen years later, in 1846, the Canal Company, attempted to assuage
the conflict. They built the Roebling Aqueduct. Despite its beauty, while it solved the
problem of rafts and canal boats colliding, it left three large stone pillars in the water.
Measuring approximately 130 feet between each pillar, it left little wiggle-room for two-
hundred-foot rafts. Furthermore, the dam at Lackawaxen was raised to fifteen feet. The
water was central to the functioning of the canal, which over its long stretch used
multiple source to maintain its water level, and building the aqueduct required extra
water. This time a chute was made for the rafts to pass through. Tempers remained high,
85 Wood, Rafting on the Delaware River in Dale, Delaware Diary, 63. 86 Easton Argus, April, in Dale, Delaware Diary, 64.
35
but rafters and canal users eventually adjusted to the change. By the 1880s, most of the
timber on the banks of the Delaware was gone. In 1875, the Middletown Reporter wrote
that 3,140 rafts passed over the dam, but only five years later, the Port Jervis Daily
Union counted as few as 902 rafts.87 In its place, new industries and new forms of
transportation took root.
87 Middletown Daily Record, March 21, 1958 in Dale, Delaware Diary, 68.
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Nineteenth Century Tourism
By the turn of the century, much of Northeastern Pennsylvania was clear cut. As
Sarah Gallagher wrote in her history of Lambertville in 1903:
“Then I turned me and looked upon Nature; Her familiar face, as of yore, Was still green on memory’s pages, Alas, I could see it no more. The hillsides are shorn of their forests, Handsome dwellings adorn the plateau; Whate’er was romantic or rustic, There is naught of it left that I know.88
Nature appeared to flee in the face of modernity and from its ashes environmental
tourism emerged. Spurred by the massive increase in the number of trains to the region,
specific locations throughout the east became favored places to experience nature.89
Towns like Milford, Pennsylvania shrank, while Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania and
Port Jervis, New York both hubs for the transportation of anthracite coal to New York
City, Northern New Jersey, and Philadelphia, boomed.90 With rail lines in place,
passenger cars induced summer tourists to leave the cities and enjoy the beauty of the
Minisink Valley. At the turn of the century the Minisink Valley remained semi-wooded
landscape that was distinct from river towns like Lambertville, just twenty or so miles
downriver. The valley rapidly became a center of leisure for sportsmen and nature lovers
alike.
88 Gallagher, The Early History of Lambertville, 53. 89 While Forest & Stream did not start publishing till the 1870s, the mentions of the Delaware Water Gap skyrocket in 1866 in the New York Times and appear to increase through the turn of the century. 90 This was largely a result of breaks in the Kittitinny Ridge at the Water Gap and the less mountainous terrain north of Port Jervis.
37
The influx of tourists seeking refuge from their urban environments required a
reimagining of the river as a place of recreation rather than transportation. Increased
traffic to the area necessitated the strengthening of the bridges that facilitated the
transportation of raw materials and working-class laborers, while catering to influential
hunters and nature lovers from metropolitan centers. It would also require hard work to
make the area appear natural: the forests had to be constantly replanted, mythologies
needed to be created; and, histories of Indigenous forbears needed to be told. All were
used to sell the valley as a “wilderness.”91 Such efforts were necessary because parts of
the valley were already developed by various settlers and industries. Roads, bridges,
logged woods, and working farms dotted the landscape. Boosters, locals, and visitors,
however, desired untrampled nature and sought to manufacture a vision which they
concocted to sit side by side with the history of settlement. This required specific place-
stories that could be ambiguously invoked to celebrate the region.92
To attract tourists, magazines discursively disconnected the valley from urban
spaces, while simultaneously celebrating the diminished geographic distances offered by
trains. The valley’s residents and visitors alike embraced its long history of extractive
settlement through the celebration of places like Old Mine Road, while attempting to cast
the larger valley as ecologically unchanged from its pre-colonial past. Tourists especially
celebrated the area’s Indigenous history, while concurrently benefiting from the removal
91 For more on wilderness see: Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness;” Jacoby, Squatters, Poachers, and Thieves;” Mitchell, “Holy Landscapes.” 92 For books on place see: Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places; Thrush, Native Seattle. Farmer, On Zion’s Mount; Weisinger, Dreaming of Sheep; Cronon, Changes in the Land. It is from Thrush specifically that I borrow the term place-story.
38
of the very people whose past brought renewed relevance to the valley. By the summer of
1874, the Delaware Water Gap had become one of the most popular destinations for
wealthy Philadelphians and New Yorkers – it would remain so for more than a hundred
years.93 Yet, to make this vision of a reality, they required the creation of dual origin
stories, the introduction of new species, and concepts of nature and settlement which
ambiguously co-existed in a disconnected symbiosis.
CREATING DUAL ORIGIN STORIES In the 1870s, local historians offered dueling origin stories for the region. These
stories would be hybridized One version of the region’s origin recounted the mythic age
of Old Mine Road in New Jersey and New York, while the other offered a history of
pristine wilderness in Pennsylvania. Historian Jean O’Brien argues in Firstings and
Lastings: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England that antiquarian histories and
local celebrations naturalized the removal of Indigenous peoples, legitimizing their
replacement by settler societies. This process worked to de-authenticate Indigenous
identities and claims to land through a process of recounting settler’s first and the last
encounters settlers with Native Americans. Through this process settler authenticated
their claims to the land and inscribed new “meaning in particular places.”94 She
contends that in this valence New Englanders used the category of “the local” to make a
specific claim to modernity. It also reduced American Indians to a distant, pre-modern,
and largely mythical past. Modernity was in turn embodied through the discursive 93 “Fish in Season in May” Forest & Stream, May 14, 1874; “Answers to Correspondence,” Forest & Stream; June 11, 1874; “Answer to Correspondence,” Forest & Stream; September 3, 1847. 94 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xx; xiii.
39
purification of landscapes.95 In this way, wilderness and nature coexisted with
modernity. O’Brien’s analysis also applies to mid-Atlantic antiquarian histories.
By focusing on a specific locale, rather than a broad region, we can examine
specific ways in which place-stories are structured within the broader genre of settler
histories. We can examine how in places like the Minisink, where industries of
environmental tourism were central, the process of indigenizing settlers allowed people to
maintain the mirage of a pre-colonial landscape. This reimagining of place would came
to have important ramifications for both the valley and the people in it, over the next
century and a half.
Temporally placing first contact was central in initiating the primacy of settlers in
the Minisink’s past. Alfred Mathews and R.T. Peck in History of Wayne, Pike, and
Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, first published in 1886, began with the first colonial
record of the valley, Arent Schuyler’s journal. In fact, some time is spent trying to prove
that first contact was earlier than historic records suggest. The authors briefly discuss the
journal entries from 1691.96 But the discussion fails to place Dutch settlers in the valley
prior to England taking over New Netherlands. They wanted to corroborate the
mythology of Old Mine Road, and limited sources did not stop them. They wrote that
“paradoxical as it might seem, the silence of history proves much concerning these traces
95 O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, xx. Bsumek, Indian-made. 96 Mathews and Peck, History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, 12.
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of early occupation. The absence of any record of the work done here is the best proof of
its antiquity.”97
Mathews and Peck dedicate multiple pages to defending a mythological
settlement and presenting it as central to understand the history of the Pennsylvania
counties, despite the fact that it is in a truer sense the history of New York and New
Jersey counties. Mathews and Peck wrote: “The whole matter of the early settlement of
the lower Minisink so far as it can be proven may be summed up together with two or
three mere probabilities as follows:... The mines were probably worked” by Dutch
colonists “prior to 1664.” They continue, noting how the “early adventurers may have
remained in the country” to settle the region. And finally, “with this and the statement
that it is possible there were settles in the Pennsylvania Minisink, prior to 1727, but that
none can be proven earlier than Nicholas Depui’s in the year mentioned, - we close a
concise summary of what is known… concerning the beginning of the Minisink
settlement.”98 Bizarrely, the paragraph begins with a claim about what “can be proven,”
but the italics in their paragraph– probabilities, probably, may, possible, none can be
proven– demonstrate the blurred distinction between myth and history in the authors
analysis. Each italicized word suggest that no proof exists.
Importantly the emerging myth tied the valley to the metropolitan center of New
Amsterdam. According to the authors, the valley’s historical import lay in its proximity
to what would become New York City. This allowed the authors to imagine the origins of
97 Mathews and Peck, History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, 10. 98 Mathews and Peck, History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, 13. In this quotation the italics are original, but the bold font is my addition.
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white settlement further into the past than was warranted. In so doing, they authenticated
the European “nativeness” in the Valley. European settlers were true natives. Similar
claims were picked up by tourists who wrote about German and Dutch settlers. By the
late nineteenth century, the suggestion that whites were Indigenous or the first white
people in the valley was a common claim. Other writers evoked the trope of
disappearance, hinting that the Germans and Dutch, much like the Munsee, Shawnee, and
Mohicans before them, were a vanishing tribe, going extinct in the face of modernity.99
While, as the previous chapter illustrated, Indigenous people (both Unami and
Munsee) played central roles in narratives of settlement, it is notable that Mathews and
Peck ignore the extensive history of coexistence between settlers and Native people in the
valley. This exclusion was seemingly based on a claim that Moravians, and other settlers
from the south, did not penetrate the valley until just before the French and Indian War.
While partially true, historical sources available to Mathews and Peck, such as The
Dansbury Diaries, suggests a fairly sizeable and diverse Indigenous population in the
Minisink100. While conflict legitimized removal in the eyes of the settler, the retelling
and authentication of that history, did further legitimized colonization. As Michelle
Trouillot notes, “historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are
themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.”101 Narratives like those
99 “The Bronze Backs of Sussex,” Forest & Stream; February 7, 1889. 100 Grumet makes this more explicit, arguing that the Munsee do not leave the valley until 1757, and that they are not the last Native Americans to leave. Although it is harder to trace, O’Brien and Mt. Pleasant offer evidence that towns and regions rarely completely remove indigenous populations. See O’Brien, Firstings and Lastings; Mt. Pleasant, “Salt, Sand, and Sweetgrass” 101 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 55.
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offered by Mathews and Peck continued to dominate antiquarian literature through to
today.102
Mathews & Peck offer the mythic settlement in New Jersey and New York in
contrast to the mythic wilderness in Pennsylvania. Just after the story of Old Mine Road,
they interrogate the diary of Nicholas Skull, the first documents on the Pennsylvania
side.103 The passage begins with the authors turning for the first time to the environment
in its pre-colonial form. The authors describe the landscape Nicholas Skull found as a
“wilderness surrounded, world, this peaceful Arcadia, practically almost as remote from
the busy marts and centers of commerce of the New Continent, as if it had been located a
thousand instead of one hundred miles from New York and Philadelphia. The visitor – or
obtrude – was Nicholas Scull.”104 The sentence is meant to distance the Pennsylvania
side of the valley from urban centers, commerce, and capitalism. We are left to believe
that no one crossed the easily fordable river due to the lack of previous documentation.
However, only a few pages earlier they cited the lack of documentation as proof of early
settlement in New Jersey. It is Skull’s description of “wilderness” that is offered in
defense. For Mathews and Peck the divergence of these two stories necessitated a
different theory of proof. The apparent contradiction did not seem to cause them pause.
The idea that one could simply cross the river to Pennsylvania side and enter
complete and utter wilderness, while extractive mining, farming, and settlement was
102 Shukaitis, Lasting Legacies of the Minisink, 2007; Dale, Bridges over the Delaware, 2003; Dale, Delaware Diaries, 1997; Crawford, Discovering the Delaware Water Gap, 1979; Schwarze & Hillman, Old Dansbury, 1930. 103 Nicholas Dupui was the first settler according to most sources, but he left no diary or records himself. 104 Mathews and Peck, History of Wayne, Pike and Monroe Counties, Pennsylvania, 14.
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taking place on the opposite side, served two symbiotic parts of the Minisink’s place-
story. Disconnecting less settled part of Pennsylvania from the modernizing world to its
east, played a central role in the Minisink Valley claimed status as wilderness, while the
connection of New York and New Jersey legitimized Indigenous removal. As such, two
origin stories emerge. One in which resources were extracted and landscapes developed,
and another in which a wild, unsettled, Edenic place was found. In this way, the
disconnection is dual: not only is the Pennsylvania side of the valley geographically
disconnected from the colonial world, but each story about the Valley is logically and
temporally disconnected from the other.105
URBAN DISCONNECT: CANOES AND TRAINS As local historians and antiquarians told mythologized stories about the past,
other groups contemplated an idealized present. Beginning in the 1870s, articles
appeared in magazines like Forest and Stream and newspapers like the New York Times.
Such publications hit on three main themes extolling the virtues of the Valley: the relative
closeness to Philadelphia and New York; the lack of trains (sounds, smells, and
congestion of cities); and, the way the surrounding landscape reminded people of a
mythic indigenous and/or a quaint agrarian past.106 Nevertheless, authors often qualified
their sentiments. For example, in the late 19th century, sportsmen were frequently
surprised at the plethora of game and fish found in the valley. In an article in Forest and
Steam a recreational fisherman noted that the “eager sportsman still finds a fruitful field 105 Even as late as 1969, Winifred Luten wrote in the New York Times that the Pennsylvania side is wilder than the New Jersey side. Many people remark on this apparent divergence even today. 106 Brown, Inventing New England
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for his double-barreled Parker, and quite streams… still abound with trout.”107 Ralph
Wing, a canoeist, offered a similarly ambiguous account of the valley just three years
earlier. Canoeing down the river, he remarked on the “broad fertile valley with… woods
and fields as clean as a park, which replaced the wild scenery” above Port Jervis. The
river and the valley had “grown into manhood” but were still mercifully free of the
locomotive, which he called the “demon of civilization.”108 His statement, unlike the
previous, was not simply a contradiction, but was rather ambivalent. He wanted nature
and freedom from modernity, but he was skeptical of “wilderness.” Too much and too
little settlement were equally bad.
Writers who focused their attention on the abundance or lack of fish and animals
in the region, compared the health of animal populations with the declining fish and
animal populations in surrounding cities. As Charles Hardy argues in his essay “Fish or
Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin through the Perspective of Shad, 1682 to
present,” the supply of shad, once one of Philadelphia’s largest industries, was rapidly
declining as early as the 1820s.109 Shad migrated from ocean to river every spring,
making a decrease in Philadelphia shad reflective of decreases up river. Shad were not a
particularly useful measure of perceived river health on the upper Delaware; but the
presence of trout, bass, and a number of other fresh water fish offered recreational fishers
memories of more pastoral times on the tributaries of the lower Delaware and the lower
107 “Bronze Backs of Sussex,” Forest & Stream, Feb 7, 1889. 108 Wing, “Paddle and Current,” Nov. 18, 1886. 109 Hardey, “Fish or Foul;” 513. Shad fisheries began peaking in the 1870s, meaning that in Philadelphia depletion of fish populations occurred at the same time people were writing articles about the Minisink.
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Hudson.110 Forest and Stream frequently suggested the Water Gap in their “Answers to
Correspondence” section, as the “nearest locality to Philadelphia” for sportfishing, while
others commented on the quick trip from New York City.111 Hardy argues that in
Philadelphia in the 1890s, shad had become a “biological indicator of water quality” in
the river.112 Yet, his analysis can be pushed a step further. Rivers in which relatively fish
were present were often considered healthy. That being said, a healthy fish population
was determined by a seemingly limitless number. In this way fish populations
diminished because the health of a fish population was determined by how many could be
pulled out of the water in any given day. Thus, the Minisink and the upper Delaware that
cut the valley, which were full of trout and bass, were often understood as healthy and so
more natural than the urban settings, even though its naturalness was dependent on
constant restocking to maintain fish populations. This kind of rhetorical move
disconnected the lower and upper Delaware valley spatially.
Paddlers also focused on the areas distance from the city as a healthy and
enjoyable aspect of visiting the region. River recreationists often pointed out the
cognitive distance between canoeing on the river and traveling in other ways. For
instance, in a reoccurring section of Forest & Stream titled “Paddle and Current,” an
author reported on the lack of trains. The “country was mercifully free from the shriek
110 As the diminish number of fish began to be reflected in the upper reaches of the Delaware and surrounding lakes, battles were waged over who would have access to these fisheries. Wealthy urbanites, and local businessmen began to buy up properties and entire lakes, denying local working-class fishers who fished recreationally or to feed their families access to dwindling supplies. For more information see: Reynolds, “The Free Fishing Controversy.” 111 “Answers to Correspondence,” Forest & Stream; September 3, 1874. 112 Hardey, “Fish or Foul;” 507.
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and rattle of the locomotive, there being no railroad.”113 Unlike nearby regions, the
valley still had forests, “firs and pines cover[ed] the mountainsides.”114 Even rare
wildlife could be found, with one author reporting on the prevalence of the
Whippoorwills that would come and sit on a branch just before sunset and repeat their
name over and over again.115
People who Idealized the ways that the valley was separate from “civilization”
often simultaneously invoked a mythic Indigenous past. L.F. Brown, in his article
“Canoe and Camp Life Along the Delaware River,” offered a poem that invoked the
mythic origin story of untouched Indigenous nature in Mathew and Peck’s history. He
began the article with the following:
And here the Lenape warrior came, His voice toned soft and low, The joy of heal in his stalwart frame, To lay his arrows and bow At the feet of the Minisink maiden good, In token of fealty true To the fairest maiden of all the wood, Whom he humbled himself to sue.
- Pocono Rhymer In the poem Minisink is feminized, a maiden who could humble to most masculine of
men. The Pocono Rhymer transformed the valley into one of the deities of earth. The
113 This article also makes reference to the equivalence of this drive to that from Glenn Falls to Lake George, suggesting the similar appeal of the Water Gap region to the Saratoga and Lake George Region at the southern tip of the Adirondacks. “Paddle and Current,” Forest & Stream; November 18, 1886. 114 Forest & Stream; August 18, 1890. 115 “Stalking Whippoorwills, Algae, Mosses, Ferns, and Lichens at Delaware Water Gap,” Forest & Stream; June 13, 1903. The author, erroneously in my opinion, failed to mention the insistent call Whippoorwills make throughout the night, often in the same location night after night. I imagine that despite his exciting find, he lacked for shut eye that night. To hear the Whippoorwill’s call, see: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Eastern_Whip-poor-will/sounds.
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Lenape warrior, with his instrument of war and hunting, lays down his bow at her feet.
He desired her and was awed by her beauty. Yet, what did he do “to sue?” In this case,
Brown utilized the older English version of the term: meaning to follow or, perhaps,
beg.116 To lay down arms was to offer them in service to another. The Lenape was
meant presumably to be a protector of the valley, stuck in a mythologized “time of
gods,” not in the secularized and Christian modern world. Brown’s article was not a
one-off, rather it was a preview of a new book on the history and archeology of the
Lenape. The article places the factual evidence after the invocation of myth highlighting
the temporal divide between settler society and the past. The result was a temporal
divide made bridgeable through his place-story.117 The Lenape existed in mythic past,
he lived to serve an idealized version of nature. The author, however, lived in the present
– he could look to that past, romanticize it, and then use it as a regional template upon
which his own fantasies could be crafted.
Writing from his hotel room, Brown reflected that it was only once men left the
river that they could “best study nature and reflect on the ‘struggle between Darkness
and Light, between Mystery and reality.’”118 He continued, “no observant angler can
watch and study the Delaware Valley and river without wishing to know something of
their aboriginal and Indian life and legend.”119 Nature, as the angler conceptualized it,
116 Oxford English Dictionary Online: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sue 117 For more on imagined divides between Indigenous pasts and settler presents see: Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places; Deloria, Playing Indian. 118 This seems to be a quote from an article from April 1903 in the Edenborough Review, or Critical Journal. The article notes how “Rembrandt saw in nature the struggle between Darkness and Light, between Mystery and reality.” Edenborough Review, Apr 1903, 474. 119 “Canoe and Camp Life Along the Delaware River,” Forest & Stream; August 1, 1903.
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was part of the mythic Lenape past. In nature the sportsman experienced that myth.
Only upon leaving nature and returning to a modern time could he reflect more
thoroughly on his experience. This disconnect, not only reflected one of place, the
valley being spatially and materially different than the city, but also one of time, in
which the angler leap-frogged the history of colonization while engaged with nature.
Nature and society were divided, bridged by learned reflection of created relatively new
mythology. In the process, the violence of colonization, the forced removal of
Indigenous people, and the history of commerce in the valley were made invisible. The
article as such utilized the dual history, in which cities and the Minisink Valley could
only be understood in oppositional relation to each other.
Still other observers fixated on the origin story for Old Mine Road. In the
February edition of “Olde Ulster,” in 1907, the road was referred to as part of the ancient
European quest for “El Dorado.”120 As such, in his recounting of what can best be
described as his pilgrimage from Kingston down to Walpack, C.G. Hine recounted the
colonial stories during his two week long pilgrimage down Old Mine Road in 1907. He
wrote about the attack by the infamous Mohawk Joseph Brant on the defenseless Port
Jervis, as well as the “famed” Battle of Minisink during the French and Indian War.121
He told the story of how Tom Quick, the infamous “Indian slayer” watching his father
murder and scalped, helpless and unable to defend him from the other side of the
120 Reprinted in Hine, Old Mine Road, 1. 121 Hine, Old Mine Road, 126-133.
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Delaware.122 And he tells the story of how John Adams, journeying from Massachusetts
to the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War used to stay at Abraham Van
Campen’s inn.123 Central to the road’s purity was the physical experience one could
have on it: “One must both see and feel it, have been of it, as only the humble wayfarer
can be of it, have stepped from the dusty roadway to the softness of the cool, lush grass,
or stood within the covered bridge while the sudden mountain storm rages down from
the heights…”124 The point of his book was not so much to prove that Old Mine Road
was central to the history of the United States, but rather to think of it as an unchanged
historical relic touched by many familiar colonial tales. It was so close in distance to
New York that one could easily touch it and feel it, yet far enough back in time that
walking it took him back almost two-hundred-years.
Nevertheless, not everyone agreed on the purity of the Minisink region. As early
as 1889, an article on fishing noted that the “saw dust from the lumber mills has choked
the little trout streams” that fed into the Delaware River.125 While the winter before,
another complained that there used to be sport “at Delaware Water Gap, before the
completion of railroad along the east bank of the river.” He continued that canoes,
tennis courts and summer camps had come to “cover the natural lawns where erstwhile
was the bark camp of the hunter who lived to dwell from other men apart…”126 These
writers were not simply naysayers and spoilsports. The Minisink was changing, even if
122 Hine, Old Mine Road, 136. For more on Tom Quick see Griffin, American Leviathan. 123 Hine, Old Mine Road, 146-147. 124 Hine, Old Mine Road, xx. 125 “The Bronze Backs of Sussex,” Forest & Stream; February 7, 1889. 126 Forest & Stream; December 20, 1888.
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writers like Brown and Hine chose not to see it. Railroads were spreading. And New
York was planning to build dams on the river’s tributaries. Maintaining a conception of
nature while the environment degraded around them required stories that could interpret
the anthropogenic change as a contribution to the natural, wild, and agrarian states of the
valley.
SPECIES INTRODUCTION Building a place-story that made room for anthropogenic change required
addendums to the stories discussed above. State sponsored species introduction was still
new at the turn of the century. The Pennsylvania Fish Commission was established in
1866, and slowly began restocking fish in the commonwealth’s rivers.127 In 1874 Forest
and Stream reported that “the black bass (salmonids) has been an inhabitant of the
Delaware River for many years, but additional fish were put in three years ago.”128 Yet,
six years later it was claimed that the fish were not endemic to the river at all. In an
article titled “Black Bass on the Delaware,” the magazine reported that “the fish was
unknown in the Delaware previous to 1875, when several thousand were placed in the
river at different places.”129 Other editions attempted to clarify the confusion. In 1885,
the magazine suggested that “small-mouth [bass] is a more vigorous fighter in waters
where it is not native” such as the Delaware River, while the big mouth bass was hinted
to be endemic.130 Yet, the difference is not between small and large mouth bass. All bass
127 Weber et al. “History of the Management of Trout Fisheries in Pennsylvania,” 3. 128 “Answer to Correspondence,” Forest & Stream; September 3, 1874. 129 “Black Bass in the Delaware,” Forest & Stream; September 9, 1880. 130 “The Gameness of Black Bass,” Forest & Stream; February 19, 1885.
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were in fact introduced into the river.131 In fact, it was the same trains that brought coal
through the valley and people to it that facilitated the introduction of new species to the
river by the state of Pennsylvania. As time passed, stocking became larger in scale. By
1890, Forest & Stream noted that the “Susquehanna salmon (wall-eyed pike) are rapidly
increasing in the Delaware.” The Pennsylvania Fish Commission had added sixty four
years earlier, along with another 120 in 1887. The success of these species was often
measured in the load per boat. By 1890 as many as 1,600lbs of black bass was reportedly
fished out of the river daily.132 The more people fished the more important fish stocking
became. By the end of the century sport fishing was almost entirely dependent on the
yearly introduction of fish.133
The “naturalness” of these fish was certainly up for debate. It was briefly popular
in New York for chefs to preform taste tests on “natural” versus stocked fish. In 1878
one such event occurred. “Original wild trout caught by Mr. J.D. Brodhead, of the
Kittitinny House, Delaware Water Gap” were used to test against the more questionable
variety.134 The result was positive. The fish tasted the same even when stocked.
Regardless of questions regarding the quality of the fish, the knowledge that fish were
introduced to the river did not cause sportsmen to question the naturalness of the river or
its valley. The introduction of species fit easily into their conceptions of wilderness. The
same outdoorsmen who wrote about the wilderness, and who invoked mythic Indigenous
131 https://www.nps.gov/dewa/learn/nature/fish.htm; Dent, “Recent Past & Present,” Lists of Endemic Species, 47-53. 132 “Delaware River Fishing,” Forest & Stream; May 22, 1890. 133 Reynold, “The Free Fishing Controversy.” 134 “Fish in Season,” Forest & Stream; April 16, 1878.
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predecessors raved about the numerous fish in the river. As such, the health of the river
began to relate directly to the state management of its fish population.135
Figure 3: This postcard demonstrates the large size of the hotels at the Water Gap. Far from the small motels that dot the landscape today, these were places where wealthy families would spend whole summers. Famous singers and performers would tour the hotels, entertaining guests. Even Teddy Roosevelt stayed at the Kittitinny House on his way to visit his friend Gifford Pinchot at Grey Towers in Milford, Pennsylvania. (via Picryl)
The fish were removed from their native waters. And the relocated fish were no
longer connected to untouched mythic wilderness. But they were still natural.
Modernity, in the form of perfected wilderness (increased fish populations or even
replanted trees) was perfectly acceptable, and in no way diminished the perception of the
135 Hardy suggests that fish, in his case shad, were also often used to dictate the health of the river.
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place.136 Nature was not necessarily determined by what was always there, rather it was
determined, it seems, by organic markers. By the turn of the century mythic Lenape,
settler pasts, and cyborg rivers coexisted in uneasy unison.
136 Stroud, Next Door Neighbor.
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Tocks Island Dam: Anthropocentric Nature
Historians frequently write about changes in the discourses of wilderness and
naturalness in the 1960s. I build on this literature, by examining the Tocks Island Dam
controversy and the creation of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. This
case study demonstrates how local place-stories deeply affected the implementation the
ideas of nature and wilderness. In the process, it becomes clear that themes of spatial and
temporal disconnection continued to influence imaginings of pristine wildernesses.
While conflict abounded in debates surrounding this controversial project, anti- and pro-
dammers alike shared an internal logic of human improved nature. Regardless of
whether nature stood behind a large dam or in the depths of a mythic and historic valley,
everyone imagined that the Minisink would become something it was not and had never
been: perfect.
INTERLUDE: CARS, CAMPS, AND FLOODS Following 1905, magazines like Forest & Stream stopped writing so much about
the Minisink Valley. Cars allowed wealthy vacationers to summer where ever they
pleased. Coal and timber extraction in eastern Pennsylvania slowed. The trainlines
stopped beyond the cities growing suburbs. The grand hotels of Delaware Water Gap,
which were always vulnerable to fire, progressively burned down. With dwindling
interest in the region, the owners decided not to rebuild them. By the 1930s boy scout
camps and Jewish summer camps catering towards middle class urban children took the
place of glamorous hotels and camps set up for urban elites. By the early thirties, it
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appeared that the valley would be all but forgotten. It was more densely populated than
ever before, but the mythical place stories and the relatively small game no longer
interested intellectuals and sportsmen. But in 1955 Hurricanes Connie and Diane
thrashed the upper Delaware with two feet of rain in only three days, thrusting the valley
back into regional and national media. The river and its tributaries flooded like never
before. The national guard airlifted children from camps. The rushing waters ripped
stone houses and steel bridges out of the ground. In total 400 people in the upper
Delaware Valley lost their lives. The flood was the most devastating on record.
Pennsylvania and New Jersey, nationally embarrassed by their lack of preparation,
started planning for future disasters.
NEW YORK’S CLEAN WATER The 1955 flood was devastating. But, down river in Philadelphia city planners
were concerned with clean water.137 Competition with New York City was a driving
factor in Philadelphia’s search for clean water. By 1955 New York had built a dams on
the East Branch, West Branch, and Neversink tributaries of the Delaware. Philadelphia
politicians and clean water advocates began dreaming about their own mountain water
supply as early as 1929.138 By 1937 politicians and engineers were talking about a
137 Alberts, Damming the Delaware, 52. Interestingly, the flood that unleashed havoc on the upper-Delaware was strong enough to wash the solid sewage that polluted the river at Philadelphia out to sea. With the river cleaned, fish populations, especially shad populations, increased. The heft of concerns over fish and sewage that Alberts associates with the Tocks Island Dam project are given clarity in this context. Hardy, “Fish or Foul,” 526. 138 Alberts, Damming the Delaware, 34.
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mainstem dam north of the Water Gap.139 With the flood of 1955 the project gained
traction.140
THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS Pro-dammers sold Tocks Island, not only as a water source, but also as flood
protection. Both DRBC and the Army Corps of Engineers, imagined the Minisink Valley
as the center of an extensive network of dams, water systems, energy systems, and
interstates. Water and energy would flow to urban metropolises, and a series of
corresponding roads, pipelines, and wires would lead back to the Minisink Valley. The
Army Corps of Engineers raised the money for the dam. This required telling specific
stories about what the valley was and what it would be. Over the next decade the DRBC,
Congress in 1961, and the National Park Service in 1965 pledged money and resources to
buy land and to build the dam.141 The project was deemed so important that congress
authorized the national park before the government purchased or deconstructed the
reservoir.142 The administration had extensive guidelines regarding land acquisition,
which they chose to ignore. The prospect of ten-million park visitors annually overrode
concerns about justly acquiring land.143
139 Alberts, Damming the Delaware, 37. 140 Alberts, Damming the Delaware, chap. 5. Soll has a slightly different interpretation, suggesting that New York City changed the presidents for water extraction, paving the way for further attempts. It is likely that a combination of the two was true. Soll, Empire of Water, Chaps. 3-4. 141 The Park Service agreed to buy all land that surrounded the dam while the Army Corps of Engineers brought land that would be flooded. The result was a hodge-podge buying of land. Frequently properties fell into both categories. In such cases a farm might be bough but not the house, or vice versa, putting severe economic strain on people who were removed. 142 LBJ, “Departments of the Interior Administrative History,” Box, 2. 143 Ibid.
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Figure 4: Map of Interstates going to the region. The green space between the northern and southern lines is now the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.
The Army Corps of Engineers gave little consideration to either the local people.
The Corps promoted technical research on reservoir size, maximum and minimum flows,
and the potential to prevent floods or decrease the impacts of drought. With limited
funds, other studies fell through the cracks. They chose not to research impacts on fish
populations down river. The likelihood of mud flats emerging around the reservoir
during dry weather was never mentioned. The Corps also disguised the numbers of
people and buildings in the valley.144 Approximately 6,000 properties, 3,000 buildings,
and 4,000 families lived within the valley. However, the towns, homes, and businesses
144 New York Times, “Tocks Island Dam: 13-year failure,” Aug 4, 1975; “Instead of a Dam a Delaware River Ghost Town,” Sep 4, 1990.
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were largely invisible on Army Corps of Engineers maps. Their maps were then copied
by news sources such as The New York Times in articles supporting the dam, erasing
other possible issues in the process. Frequently only one or two towns appeared within
the flood zone. Maps failed to mark the valley’s network of camps, motels, farms,
homes, and restaurants. The planners time and again failed to think about the people
who would be removed. The internationality behind this project was made explicitly in
the “Annual Report 1965: Delaware River Basin Commission.” Bureaucrats (the specific
writers are unclear) promised “major economic impacts” for the region. But they also
noted the success that Lyndon Johnson’s speech on “Natural Beauty” had in building
support for the project.145 The Corps was clearly aware of the potential for controversy
surrounding the dam, and they did their best to avoid it by sharing very specific
information.
As advertised, the ACE’s and DRBC’s dam, reservoir, and, by 1965, national
recreation area dramatically changed the economy, landscape, and ecology of the region.
Within ten years classified ads in the New York Times mentioning the Tocks Island Dam
skyrocketed. The New York Times remarked in 1971, that “scores of people have been
forced to sell their homes, and others, anticipating an ultimate claim on their property,
would like to sell but no longer even expect to.”146 Even while people within the flood
zone were being forced to sell their homes, the land on the dam’s periphery was set to
become a national park, and quickly rose in value. The futures of people within the
145 LBJ, “Annual Report,” Box 2. 146 New York Times, April 16, 1971.
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region were radically disconnected from each other and divisions in and around the
valley mirrored divisions in the national press. Discourses surrounding a national park
was helping, but first someone had to explain how wilderness could be engineered from a
populated valley.
AN ANTHROPOGENIC WILDERNESS In 1965, the Tocks Island Dam project was permanently linked to a plan for to
establish a National Recreation Area. Proponents wanted to provide easy access to a
place that was disconnected from urban landscapes.147 Yet, the Minisink Valley, as the
maps above attest, (fig. 1) was more connected than ever to eastern seaboard and beyond.
The problem of convincing the public otherwise was three-fold. First, pro-dammers had
to explain the utility of a recreation area was physical connections by way of aqueducts,
pipes, and powerlines moving away from the valley, while interstates and other roads
brought people to the valley. Second, although the valley had a long history of people
introducing species, the dam-park combination required the public engage a dam as part
of nature. Lastly, claims to wilderness often require place-stories that reach deep into the
past, but dam was going to quite literally inundate both real and mythologized pasts in
favor of an imagined future.
Few believed in the recreational and economic benefit of dams more than Lyndon
Johnson.148 The park as central to Johnson’s “natural beauty” campaign. It also
dovetailed nicely with Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to “Keep America Beautiful.” In
147 LBJ, “Annual Report 1965”, FG 214 (Box 266). 148 Busch, City in a Garden, 36-37.
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his address to congress on natural beauty, President Johnson argued that “Americans
have drawn strength and inspiration from the beauty of our country.”149 Nature, he
continued, is exceedingly difficult to define, but “nature is nearly always beautiful.”150
Later that same year, in his speech given just before he signed the legislation that
established the DEWA, Johnson elaborated. “The wilderness in the East has really all but
disappeared. [But] this will be a manmade project.” He contended, “at Tocks Island we
will build a dam, and behind that dam there will form a lake 37 miles long… [surrounded
by] an area of very exceptional natural beauty, consisting of mountains and waterfalls and
trails and camping areas.” The park would fulfil “yearnings” with “roots deep in our
American dream.” In his words, it was “an almost mystical dream of virgin forests and
rich, deep soil, and a place where a man could try and discover the meaning of life.” 151
While colonial claims to land and nineteenth-century defenses of land often
depended on a claim that Indigenous people were not properly utilizing the land, Johnson
inverted this idea, arguing that Americans in fact often poor stewards of their own land.
The anthropocentrism of nineteenth-century bioengineering of fish populations and
small-scale dams paled in comparison to the imagined park. Rather than repair the past
wrongs or improve nature Johnson desired to remake it. The internal logic of Johnson’s
speeches suggests that nature in its most perfect, far from being distanced from society,
was created by it.
149LBJ, “Message on Natural Beauty,” Feb. 8, 1965, LE/PA 3 (Box 145). 150 Ibid. 3. 151 “Remarks at the Signing of a Bill Establishing the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area”, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-signing-bill-establishing-the-delaware-water-gap-national-recreation-area.
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As he looked back on human history he remarked on the violence of unmanaged
landscapes. Perhaps evoking the residents of the valley who had experienced powerful
floods, Johnson argued that man was “the unwilling pawn of the forces of his natural
environment.” Echoing sentiments of the ACE, he claimed that where “man” came to
“terms with those forces… the terms [had] really never been his own.” With the
construction of a dam and the establishment of a National Park Johnson imagined the
park would “save” approximately 30 million people in New York City and Philadelphia
who were “confined within the discomfort of noise and ugliness, surrounded by decaying
buildings and despoiled landscapes.”152 Beauty and disconnection were not in of
themselves new, but the intensity of his techno-optimism distanced his rhetoric from the
limited goals of the nineteenth century.
Importantly, Indigenous people do not appear in the place-story he told. Since
eastern wilderness areas had supposedly disappeared, Johnson’s “remade” wilderness
would be better than the original, created by human hands, and protected from floods or
thirst causing droughts. The valley would supply water to people downriver while
offering a calming and controlled – rather than threatening – engagement with nature for
visitors who wanted to leave urban areas. There was no need to prove inherited
“nativeness” to a place that never existed before.
152 Remarks at the Signing of a Bill Establishing the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-signing-bill-establishing-the-delaware-water-gap-national-recreation-area. Ironically, people now complain about decaying buildings and despoiled landscapes at DEWA. See: NewJersey.com, “Dangerous, abandoned homes are ruining a historic N.J. park, and the feds are to blame,” July 14, 2018.
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The rhetoric and consequences of Johnson’s imagined future proved too severe
from many people. In response people focused on three main places, Old Mine Road,
Sunfish Pond, and the river itself. The place-stories these people told valued the
continuation of past landscapes, not the creation of new ones. Nevertheless, the internal
logic of techno-optimism (or perhaps a better term would be anthro-optimism) was
consistent with the logic of anti-dammers. Regardless of their political stance, people
agreed that nature was and would be better in human hands.
STILL PRESENT PASTS Three sometimes ambiguous groups emerged to try and save the Minisink Valley.
The first fought to save Old Mine Road and the mythic frontier past it represented. The
second, founded by Glenn Fischer and Thomas Ritter in 1966, was called the Leni
Lenape League. They goal hoped to protect Sunfish Pond glacial lake that connected
hikers to a and pre-human past. Lastly, the Save the Delaware Coalition, a diverse group
of people and organizations focused on the historically free flowing river, seamlessly
including pre-human, Indigenous, and agrarian pasts into one.153 Each of these groups
pulled on pre-existing place-stories. However, each also called for the creation of a
protective institution to preserve and produce their often imagined historic and natural
places. Much like Johnson, the internal logic relied on the concept that the state could in
fact improve the historic and mythic qualities of these places by protecting their temporal
and spatial distances from the city and encroaching suburbs. 153 The Save the Delaware Coalition original fought to protect homeowners in the valley. When these failed, and they began fighting for a national park without a dam, the group rapidly grew. The Leni Lenape League was also a member of this group.
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In 1963 the 1907 book, Old Mine Road was reprinted. In the introduction,
Charlton Beck commented on how he was “alarmed all over again that so many old
houses and forts with markers to identify what they were might lie, sooner than anyone
dreamed, at the bottom of a watery grave.”154 As preparations got under way, a section
of anti-dammers, reflecting a national movement throughout the United States, claimed
the Minisink Valley’s significance and importance was not its ability to provide water
and power to urban centers. Instead, they argued that the temporal distance between the
modern city and the valley preserved one of the last remaining agrarian frontiers on the
East Coast. To make this claim, people once again began telling place-stories about Old
Mine Road.
The story had changed slightly from descriptions in the antiquarian histories of
authors like Peck and Mathews. With time concerns over historic evidence lost their
importance. Distinctions between the Munsee, Unami, and Mana Chunk conglomerated
into a single “Lenni Lenape,” Delaware, or at its most diminutive “Indian.” It did not
matter so much that the stories about the valley were in fact true, rather boosters relied on
the sense of disconnection provided by the road. Local historical societies took
advantage. As early as 1964, The New York Times commented on how “interest in the
Old Mine Road has intensified suddenly” and advertised that “Sussex County tours will
provide a rare opportunity to traverse part of the Old Mine Road with historians who are
steeped in the romantic flavor of the region.”155 Calls to save Old Mine Road often
154 Henry Charlton Beck, “Introduction to the 1963 printing” in C.G. Hine. The Old Mine Road. Vii. 155 New York Times, July 12, 1964.
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involved, in the end, the creation of a national park. Those who fought for its protection
felt the past could be better preserved and saved by state intervention than by people
living on the road. The protection of the past involved a radical break from it.
Old Mine Road was not the only past worth saving. As the dam project grew, it
added hydro-power to its list of benefits. The electricity was to come from a pumped
storage plant, drawing on a relatively new technology which would use Sunfish Pond for
its storage. The pond sat up on the Kittitinny ridgeline, a thousand feet above Tocks
Island. Reaching depths upwards of twenty-feet, the 44-acre glacial lake, the clear water
reveals the rocky bottom submerged under chilly water. Reaching the pond is arduous
adding to its remote affect.156 There is something magical about lakes on top of
mountains. They call on the viewer to ponder how they arrived, and to think on scales of
times far larger than those historians usually engage. Starting in 1966 Sunfish Pond
elicited such a place-story from local and national activists during the Tocks Island
controversy.
Sunfish Pond is a remnant of the Wisconsin glacier. Unlike the anthropogenic
wilderness, Johnson imagined, the pond’s defenders believed that new policies could and
should protect a distinctly pre-human wilderness. The discourse around the lake
understood it as pristine.157 By 1966, a local organization called the Lenni Lenape
League (no relation to the Lenape people) was organized by Glen Fisher and Thomas
Ritter, both from Sussex County, New jersey. Creating their own newsletter named
156 Alltrails.com ranks the 10-mile loop “hard.” In my personal experience, it is one of the most difficult trails in the park, due primarily to the steep and rocky slopes on the Kittitinny Range. 157 New York Times, September 11, 1972; Alberts, chap. 9.
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Lenape Smoke Signals, they began organizing pilgrimages.158 The first occurred in May
of 1967. It rained. The Times romanticized the hike, describing how “one of the hikers,
Raymond Baker, a lean, 59-year-old farmer from Deans N.J. stood by the pond with rain
dropping from his hat and said: “it would be an awful shame if this pond was
desecrated.”159 The poor weather deterred hikers, but the Lenni Lenape League
organized a second, more highly attended hike on June 17. Now backed by national
organizations such as the Sierra Club, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and national
figures such as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the Lenni Lenape League
powerfully demonstrated the pond was a unique spot, deserving of preservation.160
Protestors wanted a national guarantee of protection and preservation.
In reality, the pond was not so much pristine as it was poisoned. A decade before,
Worthington State Forest had put arsenic in the pond to clean it before stocking it with
trout – which, not surprisingly, could not survive in toxic water. The pond was little
known previous to the Tocks Island project. Yet, the power of the pond’s place-story
functioned through the same temporal dissonance as Old Mine Road’s or Lyndon
Johnson’s. The pond was natural because it was, supposedly, untouched. It was viewed,
158 The adoption of an Indigenous name for a group protecting a pre-human past reflects the sometimes-confusing conflation of different historical moments into a unified historical past. In many ways, the combination of their name with their project reflects the current regard for history in the National Park. Furthermore, their name reflects a rise in the 1960s of Indigenous appropriations. As well as a long continuation of political organizations named after Indigenous people. The Tammany League (named after a Lenape) is likely the most famous example in the mid-Atlatnic. For commentary on “playing Indian”, see Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. 159 New York Times, May 8, 1967. 160 Alberts, 98.
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ironically, as unaffected by humans.161 And it dated back to a seemingly mythical glacial
past. Of course, the toxic nature of the pond invalidates those myths. Still, to inverse
Johnson’s logic of “natural beauty,” the naturalness of the pond was not in its beauty,
instead its beauty was its ability to transport people back in time.
While the Lenni Lenape League fought from the New jersey side to protect
Sunfish Pond, to save the free-flowing river. By the 1970s the Save the Delaware
Coalition encompassed over 60 distinct groups, including those attempting to protect
Sunfish Pond and Old Mine Road.162 This group, more explicitly than any other
embraced the protections inherent in a national park.163 Protesters based their arguments
on a rekindling of nineteenth-century rhetoric regarding the river. For instance, Winifred
Luten wrote in 1969, that the Delaware’s “landscape alternates between a rugged
wilderness of forested mountains and steep cliffs, and pastoral fields and towns.” Noting
that the river was free from the “ravages of civilization.”164 Once again temporal and
spatial distances were reinforced. However, the river was no freer from civilization in
1969 than it was at the end of the nineteenth-century. Making a national park required
the destruction of houses, planting new trees, and hiding old roads. Far from preserving
an idyllic pre-modern past, the park required the full power of modernity.
All three of these groups, much like Johnson, celebrated mythic pasts, and
imagined continued futures built the premise of state control. While Sunfish Pond seems
161 It is not clear how many people were aware that the pond had been poisoned. 162 New York Times, June 15, 1972. 163 “Ghost Waters” http://milfordnow.com/tocks-island-enduring-controversy/19/?fbclid=IwAR3ctLFmf9myclluJDfka2a0FBUtLs0tbN4mUoCk15Q0zI2KzNpaG99oYms 164 New York Times, April 27, 1969.
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relatively unchanged since the Tocks Island controversy, both the protection of the river
and the road by the park service required extensive remaking of the landscape. Certain
buildings had to be torn down. Others maintained. Forests and agrarian fields had to be
created where previously house and yards sat. And buildings along the river were
routinely removed to create the illusion of wilderness. While perhaps less explicit, a
level of environmental-engineering was vital to protestors imaginings of the mythic
past’s future.
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Epilogue
In 1971 the Department of the Interior began seriously contemplating a National
Park without a dam, but there were obstacles. Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior
during the Johnson administration wrote in 1987 that the project was a fiasco. It included
a high dam, stopped “days before a scheduled ground breaking… a ‘war zone’ created by
the land-acquisition… a ‘colony’ of squatters… [and] a lone Lenni Lenape Indian who
appeared at a hearing to urge the feds return part of their newly acquired land to the
natives.”165 An entire book could be written exclusively about his list of mishaps.
Families watched as the Army Corps of Engineers tore down their houses. Federal
marshals forced out pacifist communalists at gun point. Mothers with young children
were forced onto the streets in the middle of winter. One father was left with only his 16-
day-old child and a bag of diapers. The federal government ignored the Lenape man. His
claim to the land seemed non-sensical to the federal government in the 1970s.
In the forward to Damming the Delaware, Udall noted that the saga was a “classic
conservation dispute.”166 Yet, his analysis presumes both an ability to universalize
conservationist projects, as well as a general (if not always deserved) celebration of the
park creation in the Minisink Valley. Responses to the Tocks Island project were much
more than a conservation movement. The creation of the dam, much like the creation of
most large dams, threatened to destroy a place which people had built stories around for
hundreds of years. Local identity, historic memory, and the very ideas of what was
165 Udall, Damming the Delaware, Forward. 166 Alberts, Damming the Delaware, xiii.
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nature and wilderness were tied to the free-flowing river. The attempt to create a dam
was too dramatic of a recreation of the place-story of the Minisink Valley. It is true that
neither Old Mine Road, nor Sunfish Pond were pristine or unchanged places. But,
nowhere truly is. Rhetoric sought to preserve places disconnected in time and space.
The internal logic each place-story offered were dependent on a modern conception of
anthropogenic nature, made more perfect through human intervention. This had
consequences that are still felt today.
Old Mine Road still exists. Yet, it is far removed from what it once was. Of the
three-thousand buildings once in the Minisink Valley only 700 remain. Those that do,
have turned away from the stories they once held. Deprived of their residents even the
most popular destinations on the road, such as the Van Campen Inn, are in continuing
states of disrepair. It is a truism in historic preservation that the best ways to preserve
buildings is to use them. No longer social, their stories are fading away. Sunfish Pond’s
recent past is equally ambiguous. Freed from the fanfare of the 1960s, the pond still sits
next to the Appalachian trail. It is still beautiful, but it is relatively unvisited considering
the five million estimated visitors to the valley yearly.167
The ecological state of the park is also different than it was in the 1960s. Over
hiked, over visited, and littered with trash, so-called invasive species such as trees of
heaven, which happily grow in the dry soil quickly colonized former yards and gardens.
The invasion of woolly adelgids have decimated the eastern hemlocks. Other species
167 Trista Thornberry-Ehrlich, “Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area Geologic Resources Inventory Report,” n.d., vii.
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tend to take their place in the dry soil left behind, making their replacement with young
hemlocks quite difficult. The destruction of these trees and their replacements by new
species threatens to profoundly change the ecology of the region, drying out forest floors,
it could affect anything from bird and reptile life to the types of fish that live in the river.
Global warming also offers new risks for the region. River temperature and air
temperatures are increasing, precipitation is on the rise, but more winter precipitation
falling as rain rather than as snow. This can increase erosion, damage forests, change the
flow of the river, and affect agriculture in the region.168
Place-stories are also changing making room for people previously denied access.
Perhaps most interesting case is the recent campaign to bring Delaware teenagers to the
National Park.169 The work of the national park stands in sharp contrast to the past two-
hundred-and-fifty-years of Indigenous-settler interactions. After almost one-hundred-
and-fifty years of building temporal and spatial disconnections, the pilgrimage of
Indigenous teenagers no longer seems to threaten settlers claims to the land. The
National Park, simultaneously existing in pre-human, pre-colonial, and frontier pasts,
opens up room for Lenape teens to make claims to the land. The land in no way
represents modern America, despite what seems like an objective reality that it is made
by modernity, and so their claims and their visible presence, at least in this moment, does
not seem threaten the legitimacy of the settler state.
168 Price and Beecher, “Climate Change Effects on Forests, Water Resources, and Communities of the Delaware River Basin,” 381. 169 Water Gap: Return to the Homeland
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The example of the Lenape teenagers speaks to the continuing importance of
place -stories. But, these stories also offer us insights into thinking environmentally on a
local level. To return one last time to the Tocks Island Dam dispute, the Federal
Government and the anti-dammers all shared an internal logic of what I called anthro-
optimism. But why were some of the imagined anthropogenic futures were acceptable
and others were not? The issue at stake was not protecting human’s homes, that cause
was lost long before the dam was stopped. Similarly, the goal was not explicitly to
protect recreation or tourism. There are plenty of reasons to believe that a massive lake
would have been more economically transformative for the region than the river-based
national park has been. Rather, the place-stories offered by Johnson and the Army Corps
of Engineers fundamentally misunderstood “what is,” or in this case “what was” for the
people living in and near the valley. It was not simply clean water, numbers of trees, or
wild animals. Rather, the valley offered stories that defined the people who interacted
with it. It brought people into long forgotten pasts. It justified settlement by many
families who dated back to the colonial period. While humans may have created these
stories, they were held within the landscape itself, and people were dependent on their
ability to imagine the landscape as relatively stable in order to cope with daily, yearly,
and generational changes.
It is hard to “make sense of “what is” and “what occurs” in another’s
environment.”170 Perhaps the most disturbing part of most of the discussions about the
Anthropocene is peoples unwillingness to attempt to do so. There are of course
170 Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 72.
72
exceptions. Despite all its flaws, Anna Tsing’s book Mushroom at the End of the World,
offers profound insights into place-making and the potential for sustainable futures in
disturbed Oregon forests.171 This paper has demonstrated that past place-stories not only
tell us how people imagine the past, but how these stories play central roles in imagining
and creating futures based around environmental-engineering. The stories allowed
people to imagine fish-stocking as natural, the recreation of wilderness as preservation,
and to make themselves natives in a foreign land. “What is,” “what occurred,” and “what
can be” are fashioned first and foremost from the stories people tell about. Scholars,
planners, engineers, and politicians must learn about the place-stories told in the locales
they study and work with. Their solutions must take these stories seriously, working
within their epistemologies of land, water, animals, and pasts. What this study
demonstrates, if anything, is that a truth-statement that nature and culture are always
connected lacks sense in many places. Solutions to future problems, whether they are the
decolonization of space or creating resiliency in an era of global warming must both
acknowledge and work within local networks of knowledge and place-making.
171 While they do not take on issues of the Anthropocene Wesigner’s Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country and Kruickshank’s Do Glaciers Listen also deserve note here for their influence on this paper and my conclusion.
73
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