a “place of abandoned farms and of grand new estates”—the latter owned by names as big as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Morgan.[59]
Strangely, conservationists were under the impression that locals would welcome the changes because of the region’s history of poverty. They were surprised when residents demonstrated their disinterest in cooperating by lying to park rangers and by intentionally and sometimes maliciously breaking the law. When surveyors sought to mark property lines, residents would often act confused or purposefully mislead the surveyors. Other times, residents would destroy the boundary markers by burning or cutting down trees, or by otherwise removing the landmark that the surveyor had left behind.[60]
The Forest Commission’s second task—beyond protecting the forest—was demarcating forest boundaries and the private properties inside them. Discerning property lines and land titles, however, proved equally difficult. In addition to the non-cooperating locals, there was further title confusion as a result of logging companies in the area: Timber corporations would buy a piece of land, cut down all the trees, and then abandon it, leaving the property to be reclaimed by the state for non-payment of taxes.[61] To complicate matters further, planners had drawn the park perimeters around both legal and illegal dwellings. Many locals had, years earlier, found an unused piece of land and settled on it, neglecting to ever formally seek title—often because of the costs involved. This homestead ethic was based on the ideals of the commons and of an Ingallsian understanding that property was to be occupied and utilized; if a piece of land was unoccupied, then it was generally understood in Adirondack culture that the land was open to settlement. But, with the state’s sudden interest in the area in 1885, many of these homesteaders were overnight reclassified as squatters. There is no definitive data on the number of illegal residences at the time, but estimates range from 98 to 900—evidence of the state’s poor record-keeping. Surprisingly, squatted dwellings were not strictly a phenomenon among the lower classes; occasionally wealthy tourists would build summer homes on plots purchased illegally from locals who similarly had no right of title. Not surprisingly, however, the shanty-dwellers were the first to be evicted by the Forest Commission, while authorities tended to turn a blind eye to the politically well-connected vacationer squatters.[62]
After much resistance from squatters, the Forest Commission eventually put a hold on evictions for fear that angry locals would burn down the forest in retaliation. Instead, authorities focused on limiting new settlements and tried to ignore the old ones. According to Jacoby, because some squatters never left, certain plots in the region remain contested to this day.[63]
Unfortunately for authorities, hiring locals as park rangers was unavoidable as they knew the terrain the best, and with the new park rangers came their local allegiances. Foresters with such loyalties would often overlook criminal activity. Overzealous foresters were threatened with ostracism by their communities, and particularly problematic foresters might get mistaken for a deer and be shot “by accident.” Jacoby writes that “foresters played a dual role in the region: not only were they the means by which state power was projected into the countryside, but they were also the means by which local influence penetrated into the state. As a result, foresters had to navigate between several competing allegiances.”[64]
Inhabitants harbored similar hostilities toward private estate owners in the area. In 1903, Orrando Dexter—who was notorious for filing lawsuits against trespassers—was shot and killed as he drove his carriage down the once-public road now part of his estate. In response to this incident, security was heightened all over the park but particularly at private residences. Undeterred, locals tore down “no trespassing” signs, cut fences to release privately owned game, burned private parklands, and shot at guards. This brand of malicious reprisal led to lawsuits like Rockefeller v. Lamora, which eventually led to the park’s gradual absorption of private parklands into the grander state-owned preserve. While many residents preferred state ownership to private ownership, neither were ideal. Ingalls would have rejected either option, and indeed, inhabitants of the Adirondacks ceaselessly and remorselessly disregarded park laws in protest. [65]
Conservationists were convinced that if Adirondackers were left to do as they would, they would render the forest desolate and barren, for they lacked a sense of natural preservation. Inhabitants claimed that thery were simply exercising their “right to subsistence” by cutting wood for building and for burning, and by poaching animals for eating. Both sides of this argument teetered on the cusp of a new era in humankind’s relationship to nature: Conservationists saw humans as destroying select parts of the world (cities) with the burgeoning industrialism, and pinpointed the need for other select portions of the world (forests) to be preserved not unlike an artifact in a museum. Adirondackers, isolated from cities and from the Industrial Revolution, had a history of living off the land without pillaging it, so to them preservation tactics seemed unnecessary and bizarre.
But, as Jacoby points out, this was a transitional period for everyone in America, and even Adirondackers were not purely the subsistence livers they had once been:
If the persistence of this subsistence, nonmarket ideology illustrates the reluctance of many rural folk to embrace a completely capitalist orientation, it also reveals the uncertain ethical terrain Adirondackers had come to inhabit by the close of the nineteenth century. Residents might, in keeping with enduring agrarian notions of simplicity and self-sufficiency, give moral primacy to subsistence practices. But by the 1880s, none lived a completely subsistence lifestyle. Thus, as much as holding up subsistence as a moral ideal may have appealed to Adirondackers’ image of themselves as independent pioneers, it curtailed their ability to address the true dilemmas that they faced—issues such as how to interact with the market yet still preserve some element of personal independence or responsibility to the larger community.[66]
By preventing locals from utilizing forest resources, park authorities ushered Adirondackers into the wage-labor era: No longer able to rely on their surroundings for wood and for food, they were forced to work for wages with which to buy what used to be free of charge. If nothing else, the story of the Adirondacks was a tale of class war, to which environmental concerns were a pretext. This is a tricky plot for people today to make sense of because we are unsure which side we want to root for. We tend to align ourselves with the underdog squatters and timber poachers because we can empathize with them, but when we learn that angry locals senselessly killed moose and elk, and burned a million acres of park lands—“a symbol of their displacement and disempowerment”—to protest conservationists and perhaps rid themselves of their oppressors, suddenly we are conflicted about the role of the hero in this story.[67]
Despite the successes and failures of the nineteenth-century land reformers, and despite Ingalls’s noble idealism in regard to land occupancy, there was still a problematic element to homesteading that was unavoidable: The frontier (be it Upstate New York, Maine, or the West) was not empty wilderness as many Anglo-Americans of the time presupposed. When the goals of developers were not to conserve wilderness, they were to rapidly convert that wilderness into civilization. Either mode unavoidably adopts the old British argument that he who can use the land the most productively should have title to it, and anyone else is out of luck.[68]
That said, the lawlessness of the West appears to have been as mythical to settlers then as it is to Americans now. While pioneers were indeed entering somewhat uncharted territory and carving worlds for themselves from raw materials, John Phillip Reid argues that they still operated under the memory of law. They were “products of a legal culture” and continued to have the same expectations of each other and the same assumptions of property as if they were governed by the laws from their places of origin. These memories affected average behavior in the way that cultural customs and traditions dictate interactions with peers. One example Reid uses is the tendency for goods to be divided among groups according to the law of ownership rather than according to need, particularly on the Overland Trail. This is a replica of normal interactions under the conscious reign of formal law. When pioneers traveled beyond the reaches of such institutions, the memory of them persisted; “the remembrance was not only of things experienced, but of institutions that had only been observed,
