Nessmuk Canoe

[Bob Hurley]

Interesting. Where is your evidence for this? Can you give me specific examples where Nessmuk has made claims about himself that are unsupported by the facts?

Can I support whether or not I doubt he was the master woodsman he styled himself? No, I can't prove he was or he wasn't, and couldn't if he was standing here beside me. I can't even support my opinion of him without quoting most of the text of the Andirondack Letters. If you read them carefully, you'll notice that his wilderness trips are frequently punctuated with stops at tourist lodges, camps of friends, and even camps of strangers.

For instance, from "Canoeing the Adirondacks with Nessmuk":
"At the landing on the Eighth I met a young man, one of a party of two engaged on the Adirondack Survey, who very considerately invited me to his camp for dinner. It was well. Like Falstaff when he took a foot command, I was 'heinously unprovided,'..."
This type 'hospitality' is noted over and over; in fact, in one instance he is displeased when a camp owner won't divulge to him the location of the camp key, and proceeds to scrounge for it anyway while the owner is away.

But in "Woodcraft and Camping", he states:
"My own load, including canoe, extra clothing, blanket-bag, two days' rations, pocket-axe, rod and knapsack, never exceeded 26 pounds; and I went prepared to camp out any and every night".
This statement does not agree with his record of stops and meals at other camps, and the occasional point he makes about being low on rations. If you have to rely on strangers feeding you, then you aren't prepared to camp "any and every night", are you?

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Nessmuk, but he tends to paint himself with a very favorable brush. His ten-day solo trip through the wilderness was quite a feat for the times, but much of the rest of his writings are obviously embellished to fit his self-image.

 

[Hoodoo]

Bob, those were written at different times. I don't see how you can say he misrepresents himself when it's he that you cite. He's telling you exactly what he did and when. How is that a misrepresentation? Other people who want to make more or less of what he did is another issue altogether. But the quotes you cite were written at different times so I don't see how they are comparable.

The other fact is that those two books only contain a small portion of Nessmuks travels over his life (discussed by the editor in the Adirondack Letters). For instance, he traveled to Michigan seven times. Nor do they account for his years at sea, his trips to Minnesota, Wisconsin, not to mention Brazil, where he made the same journey up the tributaries of the Amazon as Lousi Aggassiz. To classify him as a mooch based on some trips he wrote about in the Adirondaks during a period when he was suffering severe bouts of tuberculosis is a pretty narrow interpretation of the man's life imo. As I recall he supplied meat and fish for many a camp. No he wasn't David Thompson but then, he never claimed to be a great wilderness explorer either.