This is the story of how commerce saved a forest.
In the early 1800s, there was a man serving time in jail in western New York. His name was Jesse Hawley. He was a flour merchant whose business had gone bust because it was too hard for him to bring his flour, by horse and cart, from way out west, to sell it all the way down in New York City. So he went bankrupt and was sent to debtor’s prison.
While he was killing time behind bars, he started thinking about the Hudson River. How it was unfair that people who lived along it had always had all the benefits. The native Americans had canoed up and down it, fishing and trading. The Dutch had used it to ship out beaver pelts. The British had built a whole new world on it. And now, with the Americans in charge, it was powering the young country forward. But for folks like him out west, who didn’t live along it, they were out of luck.
But then Hawley thought, “What if we can improve the Hudson? It already connects New York City to Albany, in the eastern part of the state. That’s about as far as big ships can go. Wouldn’t it be cool – call me crazy – but wouldn’t it be even better if it connected out west to where I’m from, so folks like me could easily move their products? What if – follow me here – what if we could connect the Hudson all the way to, um…the Great Lakes?”
“What?” his cell mates said. “Did you say the Great Lakes? Those are, like, 300 miles west of Albany. Yeah, we call you crazy!”
Well, Hawley wasn’t going to give up on his wild idea. And since he had a lot of time on his hands, he started writing down his thoughts. He mailed his ideas to his hometown paper under the pen name ‘Hercules.’ And it turned out the editor of the paper was crazy too, because he printed the letters. Somehow, those articles got picked up by some larger newspapers.
There was a big-shot in the state government who was the former mayor of New York, named Dewitt Clinton. He read about the idea. “Hmm,” he may have said to himself. “A lot of the trade that comes out of the Great Lakes goes up the St. Lawrence River. If we can redirect a ton of that commerce out of the Midwest down through New York, we’d become the engine room of our economy. Sounds good, I’m in!”
Now, about this time, there were tons of desperate immigrants arriving from Europe. Clinton convinced a lot of those poor guys to head to Albany and start digging a trench. They dug and they dug and they dug. Seeing this, a lot of other folks laughed at the whole thing. They said Clinton was a fool. They called his project ‘Clinton’s Ditch.’ Everyone thought that was pretty funny. But it turned out to be anything but funny. When the diggers reached solid rock, they had to remove it. Not knowing what else to do, they brought in dynamite. Lotsa dynamite. Probably too much dynamite. When they lit the fuse on that, they managed to remove the rocks, but they also managed to kill a whole bunch of the poor men who were doing the digging.
But that didn’t stop things, others just kept on digging. Mile by mile, they kept moving west. It was slow and brutal and dangerous work. Over the next eight years that it would take to dig the ditch, over a thousand men would be killed. Some would die in explosions when no one warned them that the dynamite was about to blow. Some would get caught when a section flooded, and get washed away. A whole bunch of them would get sick and die while digging through swamps. And worst of all, since many of them were Irish Catholic immigrants and were hated by the people who lived near the ditch, more than a few of them would get beaten up, murdered, or simply disappear as a reward for their hard work.
Now, no one had ever done anything quite like this before, this ditch-digging stuff was pretty new, so everyone was kinda making it up as they went along. The only engineers with any kind of experience doing anything like this were guys from the military. They had built forts and dredged rivers when they were constructing America’s defenses. And the only place where anyone taught how to do these kinds of things was down the Hudson at West Point. As Clinton’s Ditch kept moving west, some of the military professors got curious and came up to have a look. And they joined in on this trench adventure. They designed stuff like locks that could raise and lower the water level to allow big ships to flow through. And they also taught some of the basics of this kind of science to others. Eventually, this led to the creation of a degree program nearby at RPI, which became one of the first non-military engineering schools in America, much like it had been one of the first geology schools some years earlier. Pretty soon the students there were a whole lot smarter, the plans for the project kept getting better, and they had come up with cool new ways to do things. And all the while everybody kept on digging.
Eventually, after years of struggle and carnage, the crazy project got finished. ‘Clinton’s Ditch’ had done the impossible, it had connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It opened for business in 1825. And it was an even bigger idea than poor Mr. Hawley could have ever imagined. By redirecting a huge part of America’s business into and down the Hudson to the sea, it quickly supercharged New York into the most important city in the world.
Nobody was calling it ‘Clinton’s Ditch’ anymore. They were proudly calling it the Erie Canal.
Sometime later, way up north, high up in the mountains, another project was well underway. The logging companies had discovered the forests of northern New York, and they were busy along the Hudson and Raquette Rivers. Each summer and winter, when the ground was firm enough to let horses and heavy equipment in, the lumberjacks were hard at work, cutting down trees, dragging them to the rivers, and throwing them in. They were being paid by the foot, so when they found a nice stand of trees, they would just cut down the whole thing. It wasn’t long before the Adirondack rivers were choked with logs headed south towards Albany and north to the Saint Lawrence.
It was a continuation of something that had been going on for a long time. On the south end of the mountains, along the Hudson headwaters, visitors to the area around the Adirondac Iron Works had seen how the forest had been harvested to power the blast furnace. On the west side of the wilderness, Verplanck Colvin had reported the clear-cutting he had seen from the summit of Seward Mountain, and again when he completed his survey. But this kind of logging was different. This was lumbering at a whole new level. This was tree pillaging, this was forest raping, this was land plunder. And it brought with it a whole new kind of devastation.
Here’s the thing: when you clear-cut a forest, you end up killing the land, first with fire. After the logging is completed, there are lots of chunks and pieces and sawdust from the logs that were cut, and thousands of smaller trees that got crushed and piled up. It’s lying dead all over the place, drying out in the sun, slowly becoming a big tinderbox. When that gets hit by a lightning strike, or some idiot flicks a cigarette butt, it can easily flare up into a forest fire. All across the mountains, on the heels of all the logging going on, the Adirondacks were turning into one big weenie roast. Fire towers were erected on many of the peaks to try to keep an eye on things, but since folks didn’t really have the skills or the equipment to deal with a huge blaze, they usually couldn’t do much about it. The wilderness just burned. Skies that had always been crystal blue were filled with smoke.
The next way you kill the land is with water. After the big trees are gone and the remnants have all been burned away, there’s nothing left to hold the land in place when the rains come. Each spring when storms blow up from the Gulf of Mexico, if they have enough energy in them, they can spin all the way up into the mountains. And when a storm dumps several inches of rain onto open ground, the result is a disaster. Everything turns into a mud hole, then into a quagmire, and after enough rain, the ground starts to move. It slides off the mountains and into the valleys, chokes the streams, and then breaks free and starts its long slow muddy churn down the river.
One summer day not too long ago, maybe there were some buddies who decided to go fishing way up the Hudson River, where the rapids run down out of the mountains. They got their rods and gear and went up to their favorite super-secret spot. They drank a few beers and grilled a few burgers. And then they waded out into the water to cast their flies. At which point one of them might have said, “Hey guys, how come the water is all brown today?”
Meanwhile, fifty miles farther downstream, two little kids might have been visiting their grandmother who lived along the river, where it was wide and wonderful. Granny had a favorite ritual of throwing pennies off her dock for her grandchildren to dive in and retrieve off the bottom. But this particular summer, when she threw the coins in, they got lost in the muddy murk. “Hey!” she may have yelled up the stream, “what’s going on up there?”
Not many people cared much at first. It was just the way things go. Year after year, everyone got used to the river looking a little dirtier. But then one day, down at the very eastern end of the Erie Canal, where it connects with the Hudson River, maybe someone pushed the button that opens the last lock to let the ships flow out and begin their final journey down to New York. And maybe this time when they pushed that button, instead of the lock opening gently, perhaps there was a nasty screeching and then a low rumble and a shake before the door finally started to swing open. “What the heck was that?” someone might have said. “What’s the matter with our beautiful canal?”
Here’s what was wrong: there was mud mucking up the works. All that Adirondack dirt that had washed off the mountains had made its way south, past the fishing buddies at the rapids, past the two kids who couldn’t find their pennies, and all the way to the first lock of the Erie Canal. And that’s the moment when government folks in Albany started freaking out.
“No way, no fucking way,” they said. “We didn’t spend a decade and lose over a thousand lives building this wonderful thing, transforming our state into the powerhouse of the world, only to have it ruined by logging companies.”
Yeah, they knew. They knew who was causing the trouble. They knew what was happening. They had known all along. Verplanck Colvin had been warning them. It was no secret, no surprise, that clear-cutting a forest is a very, very bad idea. But they hadn’t been able to resist letting it happen, the hunger for wood was just too great, and there was so much money to be made. They had allowed the lumber companies and the paper companies to buy up land in the north country for the sole purpose of tearing the forests down. They had stood by and watched it happen. They had seen the destruction for years. And now the muddy results had flowed down the streams, flooded the river, made its way south to Albany, and had been deposited right at their own front door.
It was time for somebody to step in, to save the business of the Empire State. A commission was set up to investigate and regulate forestry in New York. But at first, it was filled with sinister guys who secretly worked for the timber companies. Whenever the forest commission set up a new law, it would be filled with loopholes to let the logging continue.
The time finally came to really do something about the problem. It was time to go big. And New York went bigger than big, it went huge. If commissions and laws can’t protect the wild places, they figured, something else, something massive, would have to be done. And that thing was a constitutional convention. The ruling class of New York came together and decided – once and for all – that the northern arm of the state needed to be protected. It was not there for people to mine for iron, or for titanium. It was not there to be monopolized by the rich. It was not there to be clear-cut for lumber. It was not there to be pillaged or plundered.
It was there for the reasons that it had always been there. It was there to be a glorious dome of ancient mountain rock. It was there to be a wild forest paradise for animals to live in, and for people to adventure in, if they dared. It was there to provide clean air to the skies. It was there to provide fresh water to everyone downstream. It was there for casting flies, and for diving for pennies. It was there – only a few hours’ journey from the old French city of Quebec, the old Dutch city of New Amsterdam, and the old British city of Boston – to be an American buffer against the power of American progress.
And to make double-sure that the wilderness watershed was completely protected, they pulled out maps of upstate New York that had been created by Verplanck Colvin and his surveying team. They started coloring in red all the areas that formed the headwaters of the Hudson, Raquette and Ausable Rivers, and all the lakes and forests and mountains within that massive area. They debated and discussed, and eventually agreed that from that day forward, New York State would aggressively buy up any land within that area whenever it came up for sale. And then, to summarize all their efforts, someone grabbed a blue pen, and drew a defining line around the whole area. And when they added up all the land within that boundary, inside that ‘Blue Line,’ they suddenly realized that – Seriously? You must be joking! – they had created an environmental preserve that contained almost six million acres. That’s bigger than, say, the state of Connecticut. And the state of Delaware. And the state of Rhode Island. COMBINED.
Nope, New York was most definitely not messing around. They decided that’s how it was going to be and how it was going to stay. And they did it in a way that would be very hard to ever reverse. They wrote it all down, they made it an amendment to the state constitution, they voted on it, they approved it, and they made it permanent.
On that day in 1894, and for every day to come, the Empire State decided that their mighty Adirondacks ‘shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.’
