New-York tribune., 1921-06-19
New York Forest Preserve
Is Land Of Legend and Beauty
Historian Living at Heart of His Region
Writes Complete and Admirable Story
of the Adirondacks

instructive manner that no trees need
| be blazed by other men along his trail
into the Adirondack country. The
facts of the story of this wide tract
of lake, brook, forest and mountain
are now marshaled in print with eau
/ tion in assembling and frequently
poetic touch in coloring that give us
faith in the integrity of the authors
statement and pleasure in his prose.
Names that have faded from popular
history and names that are fixed for
all time appear in this history of
the Adirondacks. Mr.. Donaldson prop
erly opens his two volumes with re-
view of the original purchases and
grants, in which figure men who dared
to separate from the settled sections of
the eighteenth century and literally
hewed way into the deeps of the
forest, to hunt, to mine iron, to estab-
llsh homes. There is no little glow OF
true romance connected with their
stories. When we come to Mount Marcy,
to Roosevelt and his peri.aus night ride
after learning of McKinley's fight for
life at Buffalo, and then to DR.. Tru-
deau, "Adirondack" Murray and Rob
ert Louis Stevenson, we are in the pres
ence of men whose names must be in
delible in the annals of this great pre-
serve
Alfred L. Donaldson so saturated
himself with the quaint, the heroic,
the lovable in the general romance oe
the Adirondacks that his history estab.
fishes itself as human document. He
gives US matter Of fact chapters on
stage lines, drivers, routes, old military
roads, numbering in the forests and
saves them from the dustbin of for
getfulness through his intimate and
kindly association with the fascinat.
ing personalities of the men who made
these chapters possible. The fellows
who cut loose from the frazzle,i
fringes of civilization a hundred wears
ago to hike off into a Wilderness and
claim and hold acres baronial in en-
tent and possibilities were not mcr.
trappers, hunters or land grabbers.
They had depths in them that reflected
in their pools the sublimity and the
comradeship of majestic places. They
were intensely individual men, they
developed into remarkable types, and
they LETT the atmosphere and the in
fiuence of their action and their
thought on the land of their posses
sion and their love. The feeling o.
the Adirondacks, if we may use the
phrase, is to be apprehended in Don
aldson's pages on Old Mountain Phelps
and Mitchell Sabattis, two guides dis
similar in race and in mood and ye1
yielding to those who met and associ-
ated with them something of the essen
tial soul of the Adirondacks.
The inception and growth Of the
sanatorium centers and of the new
world-known camps, lodges and resorts
of the Adirondacks, find place in this
work. And there is section, complete
and admirably prepared, on the legis-
lative control Of the region. We con-
fess that we can imagine no phase of
the whole story Of this heart-land of
New York that has been omitted or ir-
adequately handled in this history. The
illustrations are many and we'll chosen.
A word as to the author. Alfred L.
Donaldson lives in the Adirondacks.
From his home at Saranac Lake he
called in, while in the preliminary
stages of writing A History of the Adj
rondacks, letters from all the men he
knew or imagined had data valuable to
him in his opening survey. AS he
says, zone trail would lead to another,
and / gradually became involved in an
almost. endless chain Of letter writing
with delightful people all over the
country" And so, from the hints and
the help of men and women who knew
whereof they wrote, and from a con-
scientious and long-continued study on
the ground of the history, the trees,
the mammals and the birds Of the re-
gion, and Of its mountains and it's
weather, has emerged this final, inter
esting and authoritative record of the
Adirondacks.