The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

5. With Press and Paddle: William H. H. Murray’s “Adirondack” Lectures and the Making of a Wilderness Guide

113 5 With Press and Paddle William H. H. Murray’s “Adirondack” Lectures and the Making of a Wilderness Guide Virginia Garnett On May 10, 1870, standing before a thousand of Boston’s curiosity seekers , learned men, and armchair travelers, renowned pastor, gamesman , writer, and soon-to-be popular lecturer William Henry Harrison Murray offered himself as a guide to the Adirondacks, a wild mountainous region still foreign to many but only a day trip away. His lecture drew from his sporting experiences on and around Raquette Lake and included practical advice regarding when and how to travel as well as Emersonian descriptions of the woods.1 The wilderness should be open to all, regardless of class, he argued, for it offered spiritual fulfillment and wisdom to those who traveled there. Black flies, the swarming, biting antagonists of campers, were but a small price to pay for a “Sabbath in the Woods.” For over an hour, Murray entranced listeners with descriptions of “autumnal scenery” and stories of “careening down a flight of rapids” and asked them to forsake “the brain smiting sound of flinty streets” for the “silence of profound solitude.”2 All accounts of Murray’s lecture were favorable, and journalists noted that audiences remained engaged, laughing and applauding throughout. Murray’s Adirondack lectures appealed to an increasingly cosmopolitanminded audience who had the means to travel. The antebellum lyceum fostered an appreciation of exotic locales through its promotion of such travel lecturers as Bayard Taylor, who offered regular talks on his trips to Africa, Japan, and Moscow.3 These lectures allowed audience members to live e f 114 Virginia Garnett vicariously through the speaker’s “oral renditions of first-hand experience.”4 Murray’s lectures on the Adirondacks tapped into this growing interest in the exotic and benefited especially from the region’s close proximity to his audience’s home. A steadily expanding railroad and the resulting cheapening of railway tickets in postbellum America allowed Murray’s Boston audience easy access to the Adirondacks. For $9, travelers could take the Rutland, Ogdensburg, and Montreal Railway from Boston to Plattsburgh, New York.5 For another $2 they could continue on to Ausable River Station, where they would be met by stagecoaches that could transport them to the various lodges and “other forest resorts.”6 Murray depicted a region vastly different from his listeners’ urban setting , and his lectures offered a primer for Americans seeking to explore the foreign as mediated by a knowledgeable kinsman. Staring up at the man who, the previous year, had “launched a thousand guide boats” with the publication of his Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-life in the Adirondacks , audience members could feel part of a larger world, essentially living and learning vicariously through his experience.7 For the next five years Murray lectured for the Redpath Lyceum Bureau while continuing his ministerial duties at Park Street Church. According to his friend and biographer Harry V. Radford, Murray delivered at least one of his Adirondack lectures to over 500 different audiences: “At thirty [Murray] was considered one of the intellectual giants of America; and within the next few years was receiving a salary and perquisites of $15,000 to $20,000, besides earning $10,000 additional annually upon the lecture platform.”8 On the platform as on the page, Murray sought to initiate the uninitiated , to open the wilderness to those who desired rest, recreation, and a little adventure. He accomplished this goal by shrewdly using print and oral technologies, relying on his written work to create a market for his lectures and for himself as a wilderness guide. Murray’s books, manuscript lectures, correspondence, reviews, and other printed ephemera assert the limitations of book learning and encourage readers to view his lectures as supplements, if not substitutes, for their own experience. Books like Adventures in the Wilderness served to whet the reader’s appetite but would, as Murray argued, inevitably fall short of offering a true guiding experience . Murray’s public lectures could then fill the void left by the book while also promoting that very written work. For those who could not attend, newspapers published transcripts of his lectures and reviews of varying lengths that served as advertisements for Murray’s upcoming talks and published texts.9 115 With Press and Paddle Murray’s career helps us understand the nineteenth-century platform as a site where Americans worked through ideas of...