"The Featherweight and the Backwoods" and the Evolution of the Pack Canoe

Unlike Europeans elsewhere in North America, early settlers in the Adirondacks did not adopt the aboriginal bark canoe. Instead, they fell back on their own traditions and developed an unusually small, double-ended canoe that has become known as the "pack canoe. " This paper will examine the ways in which the craft evolved as a result of available technology such as fine, machine-made fastenings, cultural traditions of its users (a shift from use as a hunting canoe to use in pleasure paddling), and yachting fashion, particularly the influence of the American Canoe Association. Résumé À l'inverse des Européens qui se fixèrent ailleurs en Amérique du Nord, les premiers colons qui s'établirent dans les Adirondacks n'adoptèrent pas le canot d'écorce des autochtones. Ils retournèrent plutôt à leurs coutumes ances-trales et fabriquèrent un canot aux pointes identiques de taille particulièrement petite, baptisé « pack canoë ». Nous verrons ici comment cette embarcation a évolué du fait de la technologie disponible (notamment l'apparition de fixations usinées de bonne qualité), des traditions culturelles des utilisateurs (le canotage de plaisance ayant remplacé la chasse) et de la mode en navigation de plaisance (notamment sous l'influence de l'American Canoë Association)

Experiments in Women\u27s Rights and Feminism in the Woods: Adirondack Visitors from Anna Constable to Anne Lebastille

In the 1860s, Helen Lossing tied up her skirts out of the mud to follow her husband to Lake Tear of the Clouds. A century later, Anne LaBastille wore men’s clothes and wielded a chainsaw to build herself a cabin. As women came to the Adirondacks through the years in between, they found a place in which the natural environment dominated one’s life and thought. Here they found the freedom to experiment with changing interpretations of their nature, with relationships to men, and with dress. Not all women felt at home in the woods, while others gave up city life altogether. The vast majority were somewhere in the middle. They picked and chose, learning skills and ways of thinking that influenced the rest of their lives. This study examines the experiences of female visitors to the Adirondacks and sets these women’s experiences against the struggle for women’s rights and the development of feminism. The history of women in America between the mid nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries is rightly filled with accounts of the struggle for legal and political rights – to the ballot, to employment, to control of their property and their children. The stage is usually urban, and the actors are commonly women who wrote or spoke their pieces to crowds

The Adirondack Chronology

The Adirondack Chronology is intended to be a useful resource for researchers and others interested in the Adirondacks and Adirondack history.https://digitalworks.union.edu/arlpublications/1000/thumbnail.jp