River of Dreams: The Hudson Valley in Historic Postcards

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 The Valley of History Born of mountain springs located high on the face of Mt. Marcy, at 5,344 feet the tallest peak in New York State, the Hudson River flows from a small lake called Tear of the Clouds that is strangely without fish. Half of the entire length of the river consists of a slow meander through the timbered Adirondack Mountains north of Albany, and at the capital it widens and plunges southward to the Atlantic Ocean. During its run to the sea, the river passes forests and farmland, villages and vast estates, towns and cities, the state capital and the enormous metropolis that many consider the capital of the world. Its present course is the result of millions of years of evolution, time in which successive ice ages and the slow erosive power of water created its path. Today’s Hudson River was carved by receding ice as the Wisconsin Ice Age ended some thirty thousand years ago. The most common representations of the Hudson often feature the magnificent Palisades, the contours of the Catskill Mountains, and the solid masses of Anthony’s Nose or Bear Mountain. But in reality, the course of the river is remarkably flat. The bed of the Hudson is below the level of the sea as far inland as the city of Newburgh , and the river is barely three feet above sea level until it reaches Albany . The Hudson is in fact a drowned river, an estuary where the influence of ocean tides are apparent even 153 miles upriver at Troy and where salt water reaches as far north as Poughkeepsie. Indeed, the Hudson is a fjord whose three-mile-per-hour tidal flow north is constantly at odds with fresh water streaming south; so even is the The Valley of History 1 contest that it can take a free-floating log 125 days to complete the trip from Troy into New York Harbor. The beautiful Hudson is also a murky stream, full of the sediment it drains from an area of more than thirteen thousand square miles. The Mohawk River is the Hudson’s main tributary stream, entering above Albany, but the river valley also welcomes the flow of the Wallkill , Hoosic, Scandaga, and Croton rivers as well as waters from Sparkill, Esopus, Popolopen, Kinderhook, and Pocantico Creeks. Its depth varies from 216 feet near West Point to only twenty feet in the three-mile reach of Haverstraw Bay. Sunlight rarely finds its way to the bottom even in shallow parts of the notoriously opaque river. Dirt collects quickly in the river, and constant dredging operations are required to keep Albany an active seaport. Moreover, hidden rocks and reefs beneath its difficult currents make the Hudson a dangerous river to navigate. Its special geology allows the river to host a world of unusual marine life, and Native American fishermen were the first to reap the river’s abundance . Recognizing the extraordinary nature of the river’s estuarine flow, they called it Muhheakantuck, “the river that runs two ways,” a source of wonder as well as the nurturer of their communal life. Their ancestors, members of several Paleolithic cultures, first peopled the Hudson’s banks. They were displaced about 5000 BC by Archaic and Woodland peoples. In the twelfth century the Iroquois and Algonquin took command of the river valley, introducing maize cultivation and developing methods of fishing still in use. Indian runners opened trading routes that later became corridors for rails and autos. As many as ten thousand Native Americans lived in the Hudson Valley into the seventeenth century, but European diseases and civilization would take a deadly toll on their cultures. The Indian presence is today primarily obvious only in place names such as Esopus, Nyack, Ossining, Poughkeepsie, Pocantico, Tappan, and Weehawken. The Age of Exploration In 1524, the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano became the first European to enter the great harbor that the Hudson creates before it enters the Atlantic Ocean. He sailed far enough to see a “River of the Steep Hills,” the Palisades and the Lower Hudson. Then in January 1526 a Portuguese explorer sailing 2 River of Dreams for Spain, Esteban Gómez, seems to have sighted a stream he named after San Antonio, but he claimed neither land nor river for his employer. On September 4, 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch East India Company...