The Hudson

America's River

Frances Dunwell, Frances F. Dunwell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780231509961
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: History

Frances F. Dunwell presents a rich portrait of the Hudson and of the visionary people whose deep relationship with the river inspires changes in American history and culture. Lavishly illustrated with color plates of Hudson River School paintings, period engravings, and glass plate photography, The Hudson captures the spirit of the river through the eyes of its many admirers. It shows the crucial role of the Hudson in the shaping of Manhattan, the rise of the Empire State, and the trajectory of world trade and global politics, as well as the river's influence on art and architecture, engineering, and conservation.

P. Lodet, “The Highlands.” 1806 drawing from the Hudson River Sketchbook.
Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY

World’s End, World Trade, World River	1
Henry Hudson’s Failed Quest, Adriaen Van der Donck’s Utopian Vision, and the Legend of the Storm Ship

AT THE NORTHERN tip of Manhattan Island, where the Harlem River narrows to join the Hudson, is a spot shown on maps as Spuyten Duyvil, from the Dutch name meaning Spitting Devil or Devil’s Spout. Both rivers are tidal here—the Harlem is actually a tidal strait—and this spot swirls and boils with the ebb and flow of colliding currents. The name serves as a warning of dangerous conditions.

It also serves as a jumping-off point for folklore. It was here at Spuyten Duyvil that Washington Irving’s fictional character, a certain Antony Van Corlaer, drowned after foolishly swearing he would cross the Harlem River “in spite of the devil!” The devil, Irving tells us, in the shape of a huge fish—a moss bunker—dragged him beneath the waves.¹ Irving, who avidly studied the old Dutch records of the New Netherlands colony, liked to tell stories that mixed fact with fantasy. The tale of Antony Van Corlaer is a caricature of real Dutch colonists, and historically, many people drowned at Spuyten Duyvil, but the moss bunker—a menhaden—is a small, harmless fish. Like many of Irving’s stories, it was told in jest and created a new legend to explain the name of a place along the Hudson—while keeping alive the memory of the Dutch colony, which predated the thirteen British colonies, and a folk tradition that gave the Hudson more lore than any other American river.

Spuyten Duyvil is just one example of the dual nature of the Hudson River. It flows to its own beat, apart from human wishes and desires, yet it also dwells in hearts and memory. These two rivers are so braided together, it can be hard to figure out where one starts and the other ends. On the Hudson, nature mixes with human imagining to create new ideas, new meanings, and new traditions. The river is inhabited by the ghosts of people like Van Corlaer, and Irving himself. Their voices echo from the past.

Long before the Hudson was a haunted river, it was a life-giving river, supporting the needs of thousands of Native Americans who lived on its shores before the Dutch traders arrived in 1609. Native villages could be found up and down the valley. The area from the river mouth to roughly present-day Red Hook was the territory of the Lenape people, also known as the Munsee Delaware. Sapohaniken Point on Manhattan Island, where Greenwich Village now stands, was one of their many settlements noted in early colonial records. To the north, from Cruger’s Island in Red Hook extending as far north on the river as Fort Edward and beyond to Lake Champlain, were the Mohican people, relatives of the Lenape, all people of the Algonkian lineage.² To the west, along the Mohawk River, the largest tributary of the Hudson, were the Haudenosaunee, known to themselves as the People of the Longhouse and to the French as the Iroquois, a federation of five and later six independent Indian nations who provided mutual aid. “Iroquois” is a Basque translation of an Algonkian word meaning man killer, and indicates the historic animosity between the Haudenosaunee and their Mohican neighbors.

For these diverse native people, life revolved around the river and its feeder streams. Its fish provided them with food throughout the seasons, and the surrounding forest abounded in wild game—turkeys, grouse, deer, and quail. The river valley offered a long growing season for raising the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—and on the lower estuary, where the river is brackish, large beds of oysters crusted the bottom of the river.

For the River Indians, as the Algonkians were known, their location was particularly advantageous. In April, as the shadbush, or serviceberry bloomed, the American shad and other ocean fish would enter the tidal river in large numbers and swim upstream to spawn, providing a reliable source of protein after the hardship of winter. The north-south route of the Hudson also put it directly in the flyway of ducks and other migratory waterfowl, which would land in river marshes and vegetated flats to rest and feed. Passenger pigeons, so plentiful that they blocked out the sun, also migrated north over the Hudson, an easy target for hungry hunters.

Villages served as home bases from which the valley’s original residents would move in seasonal rounds to temporary camps, following the fish and game in spring and fall, tending gardens on the river lowlands in summer, and moving off the river to more sheltered areas as cold weather approached. Winter stores of dried meat, fish, berries, and nut meats would last until spring arrived and people moved to the river again.

Native presence on the Hudson dates back as far as 11,300 years, and the remains of settlements have been found dating to about 500 A.D., although villagers tended to move every 10 to 12 years. At the time of contact with European colonists, Native people cultivated cornfields hundred of acres in extent on floodplains that, in many cases, are still planted in corn by farmers today. They roamed large territories, which generally conformed to the boundaries of a watershed or stream drainage basin. Water, used as a dividing line for property by many European settlers, was a uniting feature for native people of the Hudson Valley.

Like the colonial people who followed, Native Americans found the Hudson endowed with unique conditions that allowed many uses. It provided a long water highway for their canoes, enabling the exchange of goods between the Atlantic coast and the interior of the country. The river and its valley also served as a home, a warpath, a sanctuary, and a place to escape from disease. As one colonist observed in 1653, “sickness does not prevail much . . . the Indians with roots, bulbs, leaves, &c. cure dangerous wounds and old sores, of which we have seen many instances.” ³

Little is known of the sacred culture of River Indians; it was not studied by the Dutch. There is no evidence of particular sacred spots on the river, or ceremonial places, except that Schodack Island is known to be where the Mohican held their council fire, and a point above Newburgh still known as Danskammer—so-called by the Dutch because the Lenape people danced there—may have been a place where the late summer Green Corn ceremony was celebrated, as was the case with many flats along the river. However, all Native Americans viewed rivers as members of their extended family, deserving of reverence, like all bodies of water and all parts of the universe. Like the rocks, the trees, and the animals, the Hudson River was animated with a life of its own, part of the spirit world in which all of nature was seen as having a soul, called manito.

The Mohican people called the Hudson Muhheahkunnuk, or Mohicanituck, meaning “great waters or sea, which are constantly in motion, either flowing or ebbing,” according to the Mohican tribal historian Hendrick Aupaumut.⁴ The name of the original Mohican people is derived from the same term, Mohicaniuk, or People of the Ever-Flowing Waters. The river and the people were as one.⁵

The river meant something entirely different to Englishman Henry Hudson, who explored it in 1609 in the employ of the Dutch. Hudson hoped to discover a new sea route to China, and the river would be his path to fame and glory. If he succeeded, he would also fulfill the hopes of the Dutch corporation that sent him there, the East India Company, which sought to expand its economic empire to the far side of the globe, bringing the riches of Asia—silks, spices, and dyes—back to Amsterdam. The river was to be the stage on which he would play a heroic role as the man who found the shortcut to the Orient.

For Henry Hudson, the waterway he called the “Great River of the Mountaynes” turned out to be a place of dashed hopes and thwarted dreams. He would not find the elusive Northwest Passage, and within just a few weeks of his arrival he would leave it forever. Even so, he could sense the possibilities of this place, how the river might be useful in other ways. Here was a different kind of business opportunity for his sponsors:

It is as pleasant a land as one need tread upon; very abundant in all kinds of timber suitable for ship-building, and for making large casks or vats. The people had copper tobacco pipes, from which I inferred that copper might naturally exist there; and iron likewise according to the testimony of the natives, who, however, do not understand preparing it for use. . . . The land is the finest for cultivation that I have ever set foot upon, and it also abounds in trees of every description.⁶

Detail of the Jansson-Visscher map of New Netherland (Nieuw Nederlandt), depicting the Hudson River (groote Rivier), circa 1651–53 and likely published between 1655 and 1677. The map shows the territory of many Native people, including Mohicans and the related Munsee-Delaware—Wappingers, Tappans, and Manhattans—along the Hudson River, and Haudenosaunee (Mohawks shown as Mackwaas) along the Mohawk River, as well as Dutch settlements such as Rensselaerswyck and Long Island (Longe Eylandt).
Courtesy of Penn Prints

Hudson and the crew of his small ship, the Half Moon, also found Native people willing to trade with him, bringing beaver pelts, otter skins, and tobacco, all valuable products in the European economy. The river spoke to Hudson in its own language, and he listened with seventeenth-century ears. He understood that he had found a great place for international commerce, a place with colonial potential, a place to make money.

Hudson was not the first European to explore this river. However, he was the first to present its advantages for European trade, the first to imagine how its valley might be shaped to meet a market opportunity. In this, he was one of many people to come who would read the signs of nature—rocks, ores, trees, fishes, animals—and interpret them in a new way. In so doing, he transformed the meaning of the river and sparked the interest of a new audience: the ambitious merchants and traders of the Netherlands. Though he stayed only a few days, he would enter the river’s pantheon of ghosts, becoming part of the collective memory that haunts the Hudson still. He would also set the river on a course to becoming the most important waterway in American history.

The Half Moon, showing Henry Hudson’s ship in 1609. Hudson–Fulton Celebration, 1909.
Author’s collection

Henry Hudson made four voyages to find a passage to the Orient. With this exception, he explored for England. However, his 1609 voyage gave control of the river to the Netherlands. This twist of fate would have important consequences for the river and the nation by allowing Dutch culture to take root, which provided a context for the bounty of nature to be used and understood in ways unlike those derived from our country’s English heritage. The mix of nature and culture that developed on the Hudson after 1609 would provide a uniquely supportive environment for visionary people to make changes that reverberated into the future.

Dutch merchants read the explorer’s account and dreamed of wealth and power. Reports that the natives offered beaver pelts and otter skins in trade for beads, knives, hatchets, and other “trifles” particularly caught their eye. They imagined the river in a different way, as the place to get rich and to challenge the French in Canada for control of the fur trade. They also noted descriptions of a sheltered harbor and a long, tidal water route upstream.

For the seafaring Dutch, waterways were what mattered. They staked their claim to “New Netherlands,” a territory that extended from the Delaware River, which they called the “South River,” to the Connecticut River (the “Fresh River”), including all the lands and waters in between. The Hudson, at the center of New Netherlands, became the backbone of their new colony. Over the next fifty-four years, they would give it many names, but North River is the one that stuck—a name still found on maps today. It would not be called the Hudson until later.

During the decades that the Dutch claimed the river as the central waterway of their colony (1609–1664), they emerged as the world’s leading sea power, developing coastal trading posts in the Caribbean, South America, Japan, India, and Indonesia. The Dutch controlled trade in dozens of high-value products, including coffee, sugar, cotton, silk, indigo, copper, black pepper, and spices. Amsterdam became the world’s busiest port.⁷ They also fought for and won independence from Spain (1648), developing military capability that protected their commerce. Though we tend to think of England as the naval power of this era, the British did not begin to challenge Dutch supremacy on the seas until 1652, and it would take years for them to gain the upper hand.

New Netherlands was just one of many Dutch trading ports, and it was a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things. The income from the river’s fur trade paled in comparison to that of the sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean and along the coast of Brazil. However, the river gained importance as a key North Atlantic hub in a web of Dutch commerce spanning the globe. From their trading posts on the Hudson at Fort Orange (now Albany) and New Amsterdam (now Manhattan), the Dutch developed a circle of commerce that shipped out beaver pelts, timber, wheat, and tobacco in exchange for sugar and salt from the Caribbean; manufactured goods from Europe, such as pottery, clothing, and metal implements; and spices from Indonesia. Reprehensibly, Dut...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Prologue: River of Imagining, People of Passion and Dreams
• Acknowledgments
• 1. World’s End, World Trade, World River: Henry Hudson’s Failed Quest, Adriaen Van der Donck’s Utopian Vision, and the Legend of the Storm Ship
• 2. The River That Unites, the River That Divides: King George and George Washington Vie for the Hudson
• 3. America’s River of Empire: Robert Fulton’s Folly, Robert Livingston’s Venture Capital, and DeWitt Clinton’s Ditch Spark the Rise of New York Port
• 4. First Stop on the American Tour: Europe Discovers Sylvanus Thayer’s West Point, a Catskills Sunrise, and a River That Defines the American Character
• 5. America’s First Artists and Writers: The Sacred River of Thomas Cole, the Mythic River of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper
• 6. The Industrialized River: Gouverneur Kemble’s Weapon Works, Henry Burden’s Iron Foundries, and Colonel Stevens’s Engine Factory
• 7. Going up the River for Health and Fun: New York City Journalist N. P. Willis Survives TB and Discovers an Idle Wild
• 8. Design with Nature: The Landscape Gardens of A. J. Downing, the Architecture of A. J. Davis, and the Inspiration for Central Park and Riverside Drive
• 9. Gateway to America, Escape Route to Canada: Immigrants Greet a Beacon of Liberty, John Jervis Creates a New River Route, and a Railroad Goes Underground
• 10. Millionaires’ Row: The River Castles of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Frederic Church, and the Floating Palaces of Manhattan’s West Side
• 11. A Forest to Protect a Commercial River: Land Surveyor Verplanck Colvin, Photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard, and the New York Board of Trade Campaign to Safeguard the Hudson in the Adirondacks
• 12. An Interstate Park for the Palisades and the Highlands and a New Progressive Vision: Elizabeth Vermilye’s Women’s Clubs, Edward and Mary Harriman’s Park, Mrs. Olmsted’s Fresh Air Camp, and Margaret Sage’s Charity
• 13. Over, Under, Across, and Through: Civil Engineers Triumph Over Nature, Except in New York Harbor
• 14. Surviving the Depression, Connecting with Nature: FDR’s River of Dignity, Robert Moses’s Riverside Drive, and John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Parkway
• 15. The 1960s: Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, Clearwater, and The Nature Conservancy Campaign to Save a Mountain and Revive a “Dead” River
• Epilogue: A River of Power, and the Power of Passion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright