For many, the story of the settling of the Adirondacks goes something like this: The area was a vast, uninhabited wilderness until white settlers came to start mining, lumbering and, later, vacationing. Yes, a few Native Americans traveled through the Adirondacks in pre-colonial times, but they never actually lived there.
It’s a tale that has been perpetuated by everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem “The Adirondacs” to Alfred Donaldson, a banker whose 1921 two-volume book, “A History of the Adirondacks,” noted that “Indians never made any part of what is now the Adirondack Park their permanent home.”
The problem, several historians and archeologists say, is it’s not true. And continuing this myth, they say, is an injustice to the Indigenous people who were—and still are—there.
“The idea that this was unclaimed space is factually wrong,” Camille Townsend, a Rutgers University history professor specializing in Native
