There were people living in the Adirondacks even before the forests that we now classify as “wilderness” emerged from the soil.
That is the story that Curt Stager and David Kanietakeron Fadden tell in “The First Adirondackers: 12,000 Years of Indigenous Peoples in the Adirondack Uplands.”
Utilizing natural science, archaeology, anthropology and local traditions, while building upon the work of scholars such as Melissa Otis, author of the groundbreaking “Rural Indigenous: a History of Iroquoian and Algonquian Peoples of the Adirondacks,” Stager and Fadden refute the conventional notion that the Adirondacks were uninhabited before the arrival of the French, the Dutch and the British.
According to Stager, a professor of science at Paul Smith’s College and the author of several books about humans, the environment and the interaction between the two, the purported absence of Native Americans from the Adirondacks was a convenient fiction.
“The Old Military Tract, which encompasses Lake Placid, for instance, was taken from the Mohawks to be divided into lots and given to veterans of the American Revolution in lieu of payment. Since the land was deemed ‘uninhabited,’ the new government could just take it,” Stager said at the annual meeting of the Adirondack Research Consortium, held in Lake Placid April 15-16.
As recently as 2004, a scientist as distinguished and as highly regarded as Jerry Jenkins could assert, without evidence, that the region was too inhospitable for habitation.
“Indigenous people live in the Arctic today and have done so for centuries. If they can live up there, why in the world could they not live here? Presumably, they invented snowshoes for a reason,” said Stager.
Common sense will dispose of the argument that the Adirondack climate was too brutal to be livable. But archaeological evidence indicating that the Adirondacks were occupied by indigenous peoples – for thousands of years – is available, too.
A large heavy ancient clay pot discovered by a hunter below a cliff ledge in the 1940s, for instance, is a sign that indigenous peoples did not merely pass through the Adirondacks – another common misconception – but made use of them as a home base or range.
“If you were just passing through, why would you carry a fragile clay pot, one certainly made in this area, on a journey across the mountains?” Stager asked at the ARC conference. “Moreover, tradition holds that the women made the pottery. So this was not something left behind by a couple of hunting buddies. The site where the pot was found was a family seat.”
Where ceramics, stone tools, projectile points and other traces of human presence are scarce, inductive proxies for habitation may be identified. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Stager and Fadden write.
As the authors note, the writings of 19th century visitors to the Adirondacks, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to W.H.H.H. Murray, popularized the notion that the region “was a howling wilderness devoid of people.”
According to Phil Terrie’s 2025 book, “Wild Forest Lands: Finding History and Meaning in the Adirondacks,” founders of the wilderness preservation movement, such as Robert Marshall, erased the presence of indigenous peoples from the Adirondacks and other sparsely settled regions to satisfy “a fixation with the idea” of pristine, unpeopled wilderness.
Today, that “idea” informs – implicitly and explicitly – federal and state land use management classifications, policies and regulations. One can’t help but suspect that the bureaucratic usage of the term “wilderness,” freighted as it is with emotional and literary associations, perpetuates the myth of uninhabited – and uninhabitable – landscapes. Small wonder, then, that environmentalists from the New England states who hope to replicate the Adirondack experiment of permanently protecting land from development, prefer the term “wildlands” to “wilderness.” Whatever their present use or lack thereof, and to whatever degree natural processes are allowed to unfold there, these lands bear witness to the lives of multiple generations of peoples. From time immemorial. As do the Adirondacks.
