condescending censure when she over-
stepped her bounds with too crass a
show of need. Indeed, literary accounts
of visits to Brown’s shrine are full of com-
ical encounters when the solemn pilgrim
at the martyr’s grave was plagued by the
concerns of some wheedling, unenlight-
ened caretaker (like Hamlet’s gravedig-
gers, their dull banter made a nice foil for
the Prince of Denmark’s wit).
The imaging got less amusing with the
emergence of the conservation discourse
in the last third of the 1800s. Would the
very poor get on board with the new
regime? Refrain from poaching? Respect
the common good? The defenders of the
woods and waters worried. Could the
poor be trusted with the wilderness?
Hunters, trappers and subsistence home-
steaders who once inspired admiration
now provoked suspicion. This was the
Progressive Era. So why weren’t these
folks progressing? Why did the poor
have to stay so poor? Why, wondered
the regional historian Nathaniel Sylves-
ter, did some Adirondack hunters not
improve their land and turn their cabins
into farms? Too deep and prolonged a
wilderness immersion, Sylvester feared,
could make “an adopted child of nature”
beyond the reach of Christian law, “hard-
ly to be distinguished from a wild animal
himself.”
Invoking theories of scientific racism
and race betterment, some conservation-
ists saw the failure of the rural poor to
embrace the values of Progressivism and
get on with it as proof of their incapac-
ity. Poor rural folk stayed poor because
that’s how they were wired. The “root-
stock” was degraded, the “germ plasm”
tuckered out. Offered the influential Cen-
tury magazine in 1894: “The [Adirondack]
present population is a sort of immovable
sediment, a weedy sort of folk attached
to the soil in a blind way. [They] seem to
strive only to solve the problem of how
to exist with the least amount of bodily
exertion.” Hailed in the days of Reverend
Todd for pluck and resilience, poor coun-
try folk now stood for stasis. The messy
cabin, the “binder dismantled and alone
in the fence corner of a stubble field ...
the wagon out in the sun and rain ...,” all
this spoke of shiftlessness, warned the
Elizabethtown Post in 1891. And shiftless-A POOR VIEWSeptember + October 2019 ADIRONDACK LIFE 67