Adirondack Life – September 2019

68 ADIRONDACK LIFE September + October 2019

ness was not neutral. It was regressive.

It imperiled the good and growth of the

community. The fellow who trashed his

farm would do the same thing in the

woods—defy fish-and-game laws, tres-

pass, vandalize and set fires.

Nothing especially Adirondackish

about these fears. In the South, they were

an old refrain. After the Civil War, white

supremacists opined long and confi-

dently about freedpeople’s incapacity for

self-betterment and independent living;

their innately shiftless nature and unre-

sourceful ways would keep them poor

forever, and that went for the “white

trash,” too, whose feeble bloodlines

doomed them to a “sedimentary” fate.

The northern version of this, famously,

was a New York sociologist’s 1877 report

on the doomed Jukes clan, an upstate

Dutch-descended family of 700-some

New Yorkers whose criminals, broth-

el-keepers, prostitutes, relief recipients

and hard cases of “feeble-mindedness”

were reported to have cost taxpayers

over a million dollars. In the next decade,

Adirondack editors would regale readers

with many variants of the Jukes, like “The

Florida Cracker,” “a gaunt, pale, clay-col-

ored creature, [whose] shifting slouch-

ing manner [suggested] a sort of dead-

alive mummy,” and the “Clay Eaters” of

North Carolina, a “peculiarly cadaverous,

lank, half-alive class of people,” and the

“semi-barbarous denizens” of Kentucky

[who] “marry and intermarry with each

other,” resulting in a “country crowded

with idiots [where] law is unknown and

justice is a farce.”

Accounts of Adirondack poverty were

never quite this lurid, but they could

be very cold. Foreign work crews in the

employ of the railroads, lumber barons

and the mines were assailed in Adiron-

dack papers for their presumed indif-

ference to the rule of law and custom,

and native, self-employed “pot” hunters

and fishermen roused suspicion, too.

“Belonging to a careless, shiftless class,”

said state forestry superintendent Wil-

liam F. Fox of Adirondack woodsmen in

1904, “they straggle aimlessly through

the forests, camping out wherever night

overtakes them.... [T]hey generally leave

their campfires burning.” The 1903 mur-

der, never solved,

A POOR VIEW

| Continued on page 72

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