This is a story about a particular waters, a man that wanted to move over those waters, and a boat that was crafted for his particular use.  This man, George Washington Sears, had a philosophy of how we should move through the unique environment of the lakes and rivers of the Adirondack Mountains.  He drove a master craftsman boat builder, to construct a series of canoes to meet his exacting standards and thereby created a form of watercraft that persists to this day.  His stories of how he and his canoes moved over these waters became part of the narrative that helped create that great gift of the past that we still treasure today, the Adirondack Park.  The story here would be incomplete without all three of these elements, man, boat and environment. 

The motivation to start this blog comes from a series of letters written to Forest and Stream (which later becomes Field and Stream) from 1880 to 1883.  The writer was George Washington Sears, who wrote under the Native American pen name Nessmuk.  The letters were about Sears’ experiences paddling a canoe across the lakes and rivers of the Adirondacks.  The stories and inspiration they have generated have three unique elements, Sears himself, the canoes he paddled and the man who built them for Sears, and the Adirondacks themselves.  It’s how these three come together that creates such an interesting story even today.

George Washington Sears (Nessmuk) lived from 1821 to 1890, and lived an interesting life that seemed more common in the 1800’s.  He wrote one of the earliest books on camping in 1884, Woodcraft, and also published a book of poetry in 1887.  We has by turns a commercial fisherman and sailor, miner, newspaper editor, cowboy and shoemaker.  He camped, hunted, paddled and fished in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida in addition to the Adirondacks, and even explored the Amazon River in Brazil as part of trying to start a rubber business.  In his 40’s he fought in the Civil War (likely as part of the Pennsylvania unit given that is where he lived with wife and children).  Colorful doesn’t even begin to describe him.  He came to the Adirondacks in 1880 in part due to his health, he was suffering from tuberculosis and at the time there was a popular book that recommended the Adirondacks for its restorative environment.  What is fascinating is to see over 4 years of letters, is his dawning awareness of the fragility of the environment and the need for protection.  He has an ethos of how to live in the woods, and how one should move through the unique environment of the Adirondacks.  Up to then, mostly the wealthy went came to these Mountains.  They would hire a guide that would take them and all their gear through the forest.  The guide would row the guest and all the camping gear across lakes, portage everything on trails the connected the lakes and rivers, prepare the camps, cook the food, and work to give the guest an outdoor experience including hunting and fishing.  I was a rich man’s (and sometimes woman’s) experience.  Sears believed that with the right equipment and a little experience and common sense, people of average means could experience the Adirondacks by being their own guides.  To do this however, required a unique set of equipment.  Today we would call Sears and ultralight camper, having the most minimal equipment necessary to survive in the woods.  For Sears this was part belief, but also necessity.  He was ill with TB, 59 at the beginning of his trips, and also just 5 feet tall and 105 pounds.  There was no way he was carrying the classic Adirondack guide boat at 100+ pounds over portages.  So instead he looked for the lightest boat possible, along with his minimalist camping gear.

This is the second element of this story, the canoes Sears paddled, and the master craftsman boat builder that provided them to Sears.  Henry Rushton owned and ran a canoe building company in Clayton, New York, near the Thousand Islands.  At the request of Sears, and over the years based on his ever more stringent demands, Rushton built a series of five canoes that have become the models and benchmarks (particularly solo canoes) up to today.    The first, the Wood Drake, was 10 feet long, 26 inches wide and weighed in under 18 pounds, a second the Susan Nipper (the most likely model for the Wee Lassie, the most famous solo canoe model and on which almost all solo canoes today are directly or indirectly based) was 10 ½ feet, 28 inches beam and weighed in at a mere 16 pounds  The third boat built by Rushton was the Sairy Gamp, named after a Dickens’ character that “took no drink”, was 9 feet long, 26 inches wide and weighed an astonishing 10 ½ pounds, more than a pound of that being the paint and varnish.  At a time before fancy composite materials, glues and fibers, these are truly amazing numbers.  Yet Rushton built these canoes not as delicate objects to carefully protected, but as boats to be paddled, carried and hauled across rivers, lakes and trails in the wilderness.  This they did, and did well months and hundreds of miles each summer. 

The final element are the Adirondacks themselves.  The Adirondacks are an ancient mountain range, once rivaling the Himalayas for height, they have been worn down over the millennia to their current heights.  Peppered liberally with thousands of lakes and ponds, and hundreds of rivers and streams, they are a unique environment.  They were only penetrated very late by roads and rail, even at Sears’ time the only meaningful transit was by boat and portage.  Given the number and relative closeness of the lakes and rivers, it is easily possible to travel hundreds of miles on water connected by short portages, some a few miles and some only a few hundred feet.  Relatively unspoiled due to its remoteness and difficulty to travel within, it was and still remains something unique in America.

The plan is to build a canoe in the Rushton construction technique, using the Wee Lassie as a model.  Then I want to paddle it along the same routes described by Sears in his letters.  I want to see what it means to paddle this kind of boat, and to see what is the same and different from his journeys in the 1880’s. More broadly I want to reflect and write about building the canoe, boat building more generally, Sears, his awakening environmentalism, camping, and the Adirondacks then and now.  So boat building, canoes, camping, woodworking, the environment, history and related threads.  There is a lot here I find interesting and I hope you will too.  Realistically this will take quite a bit of time.  With a busy life and many responsibilities, to have a boat in the water in 2021 may be too ambitious.  That’s ok, I want this to not be something that adds stress because of deadlines but where I enjoy the journey.  Sears was in his 60’s, I am 53 so I have time to bring this together.  So we begin.