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I am immersed in NY State history as part of the film I am working on
that includes segments dealing with:
1. The extinction of the mountain lions that gave the Catskills their
name (Kaaters + Kill = Catskill; Dutch words for cats and river). When
Henry Hudson's crew walked around in the mountains near Bard College,
they saw cougars everywhere. Hence the name of the mountains. By 1900,
they were extinct.
2. The Munsees and the Mohawks, indigenous people driven from their land
first by the Dutch and then by the American colonists. After the Munsees
"sold" Manhattan to the Dutch, the Dutch systematically drove them off
their land and out of NY State entirely. Because the Mohawks fought
alongside the British, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan
to burn their villages and kill men, women and children. My village was
in Woodridge, NY on land that likely was the site of a Munsee
settlement. Woodridge was in Sullivan County, named after this murdering
colonist General.
3. Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. He was a British
artist who came to America because he hated what the industrial
revolution was doing to his country. One of his most famous paintings
was the typical landscape with a railroad train toward the margins. It
was a symbol of the "civilization" that had already exterminated the
mountain lion and drove the Mohawk into Canada. The work is titled
"River in the Catskills". The train is directly above the man in the red
coat. You can see the smoke coming from the locomotive.
https://mfas3.s3.amazonaws.com/objects/SC94180.jpg
One of his other paintings was "Last of the Mohicans" that was inspired
by James Fenimore Cooper's novel--the one that ends:
In the midst of the awful stillness with which such a burst of feeling,
coming as it did, from the two most renowned warriors of that region,
was received, Tamenund lifted his voice to disperse the multitude.
“It is enough,” he said. “Go, children of the Lenape [the Munsees and
the Mohicans were part of Lenape society], the anger of the Manitou is
not done. Why should Tamenund stay? The pale faces are masters of the
earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again. My day has
been too long. In the morning I saw the sons of Unamis happy and strong;
and yet, before the night has come, have I lived to see the last warrior
of the wise race of the Mohicans.”
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