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"HONOR CONVICTS" BUILDING ROADS IN COLORADO See editorial pages for description of the Colorado honor system

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THE NEW ADIRONDACKS

BY RAYMOND S. SPEARS

MOMENTOUS change has come over the great playground which a tumble of mountains and laggard administrations have reserved, after a fashion, for the public in northern New York.

The

Adirondack Mountains are taking a new hold on the imagination of a swift-footed people. What was formerly the place where lover went with much toil to tryst with nature is now the picnic ground of the lover and all his family, including the baby swinging in a hammock under the balsams.

There are four thousand square miles of this Adirondack playground. Perhaps threefourths of it is open to the public, and all of it is available in case of pressing need. There are thousands of miles of trails, hundreds of miles of highways, scores of miles of railways, which cover this rough wooded land with a system for wandering around. Every lake and pond is reached by at least a blazed trail, and there are few mountains up which a "best way" has not been traced.

In the old days-back in the '80s, for example here and there was an eruption of "summer boarder" business. Much of this summer boarder business was a kind of hangover from the Civil War. In Civil War times many a little cabin deep in the green timber wilderness held some citizens who were not there for their health. They were there to escape the draft. One of the most noted of Adirondack resorts began when a young guide living in a shanty beside a lake far from "anywhere" established himself with fugitives from National duty by boarding them and telling them where to fish and hunt.

Wolves ranged the deep woods till the '70s; venison was openly peddled in the outlying villages; skin-hunters slew deer by the hundred every summer and autumn; a million acres of the heart of the mountains was sold every five years or so for "back taxes," and the bidders who speculated in these lands would sometimes find return of their money by logging operations.

Fulton Chain, Saranac Lakes, Keene Valley, and two or three other places were the center of Adirondack summer resort interests. These places were visited by men who calculated that the meat they carried out green or jerked would pay the expenses of their outings.

Dr. Merriam, sitting on deer runways along Beaver River, made the notes for his Mammals of the Adirondacks" from observations of the foxes and mink and squirrels and mice that ran down to look at his motionless but questionable-from their view-point-figure. The woodsmen were real guides, needed by the casual visitor to pilot him into Smith's Lake or Summer Pond or Raquette Lake. Hundreds of people in the inner villages had never seen a railway train or even a steam-engine of any kind.

About 1890, however, a railway was driven from Remsen straight through the heart of the Adirondack wilderness. Lands which the State had been accumulating for scores of years because no one else could afford to own them mysteriously slipped out of the public possession, and over a winter the darkest balsam swamps, the loneliest lakes, the most remote hardwood ridges, were turned into playgrounds for dilettanteish people who built huge mansions and called them "camps," who graveled walks through the woods and called them "trails," and who put gorgeous little open yachts on the lakes and called them "skiffs."

Hotels were built along the "new road " which were fifty miles or so from a highway. Towns dependent entirely upon the railway for ingress and exit were established in the woods' depths for the profits accruing from keeping summer boarders and utilizing woods products. Localities which formerly hardly. a dozen living men had visited were now ornamented with cottages and with people who used bobs on their lines in fishing for brook trout.

The immediate effect of the railway was to "kill" places which were off the railway. Men who wanted to go deer hunting would rather ride on the cars to the very edge of the hunting-grounds than to ride fifty miles in a lumber wagon or buckboard to the end of a carry or a foot trail of five or ten miles' length, or even more. The number of deer along the new railway was immense. Passengers saw as many as forty or fifty in a few miles. Many of these deer were now forbidden deer, however, for they were on private preserves, and trespassers were thrown off or fined.

The private preserve question became one

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of very great importance within a short time. In the old days the woods were open to every one. No one dreamed of their ever being closed to the public. By rearrangement of boundaries, by new surveys, by various land-office hocus-pocus, two or three hundred thousand acres of land which the public believed was owned by the State were lost to the hunters and fishers. No one seemed to know just what had happened, but through a murder which remains to this day a mystery there came a readjustment. A man of the name of Dexter, a late-comer to the Adirondack private preserve game, undertook to establish a little private preserve of his own. Preserves of a hundred thousand acres-one even claimed two hundred thousand acres-had been established. Dexter gathered in a mere ten thousand acres or so up in Franklin County. He fell foul of some people in that neighborhood. Perhaps it was rigorous enforcement of the trespass laws, perhaps it was because he was a little too careful to exact his day in court from his neighbors who were trying to retain lands with legally defective titles.

One day Dexter was riding along a woods road behind a good horse in a light road wagon. A bullet sped from a bushwhacker's ir, went through the back of the wagon-seat,

went through Dexter's body, and lodged in the ham of his spirited horse. The horse galloped out to the post-office; and men who returned to the scene of the shooting found Dexter dead where he had fallen from the seat.

News of this murder swept through the Adirondacks. It created the greatest sensation that any woodsman recalls. The makers of private preserves, almost to the last man and last woman, fled from the woods. There was hardly standing-room in the trains that ran out into civilization, so great was the outpouring for two or three days. The wardens guarding the preserves carried their rifles and watched over their shoulders, and on some of the largest preserves, where there had been attempts to keep the public off of lands which had formerly been public and which had never brought a dollar into the public treasury, the camps were barricaded as though from attack by woodsmen bent on murder and pillage.

For two or three years most of the members of the clubs and owners of the great preserves kept out of the woods. They toured in Europe or went to the seashore. That feeling in the woods was still bitter was shown by the fact that in the very dry spells many fires were set in the back corners of

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