1. “Adirondack,” New York Times, 9 August 1964, 4Google Scholar. A short paragraph on page 5 of the same issue noted that the summer’s weather had been “exceedingly hot and oppressive.”

2. “Blackberry Syrup for the Soldiers,” New York Times, 9 August 1864, 4Google Scholar.

3. Although the evidence is circumstantial, some suspect that the unnamed author was Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890), a Methodist minister best known for his work with the Children’s Aid Society of New York and his role in the development of “orphan trains” that transported poor urban children to new homes in the rural Midwest. Indeed, this editorial has been attributed to him by a number of scholars through the years, all of whom note Brace’s intimate knowledge of the Adirondack region and his frequent and unattributed columns in the Times. In preparing a biography of Brace, his daughter also felt that those facts “and the internal evidence of the editorial in question point strongly to the probability of his having written it.” See Brace, Emma, ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Loring Brace (New York, 1894)Google Scholar; Donaldson, Alfred L., A History of the Adirondacks, vol. 1 (New York, 1921): 350Google Scholar; Graham, Frank Jr., The Adirondack Park: A Political History (New York, 1978): 68Google Scholar; Terrie, Philip G., Contested Terrain: A New History of Nature and People in the Adirondacks (Syracuse, 1997), 88Google Scholar.

4. Population figures are drawn from federal census records for New York County, which show 312,710 inhabitants in 1840, 515,547 in 1850, and 813,660 in 1860. See University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. United States Historical Census Data Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/Google Scholar.

5. Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’ Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the City (New York, 1865)Google Scholar.

6. Goldman, Joanne Abel, Building New York’s Sewers: The Evolution of Mechanisms of Urban Management (Purdue, Ill., 1997)Google Scholar.

7. Roosevelt, Theodore, New York (New York, 1906), chap. 14Google Scholar.

8. “Adirondack,” 4.

9. Ibid.

10. Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, J. P. (New York, 1969), part 3, chap. 17Google Scholar.

11. Cronon, William, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” Sunday New York Times Magazine (13 August 1995): 42–43Google Scholar. See also Nash, Roderick Frasier, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, 2001)Google Scholar.

12. Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. See also Popper, Deborah Epstein, Lang, Robert E., and Popper, Frank J., “From Maps to Myths: The Census, Turner, and the Idea of the Frontier,” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 23 (2002): 91–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Nash, , Wilderness and the American Mind, 44Google Scholar.

14. The most influential of the early Adirondack travel guides were Headley’s, Joel T.the Adirondack; or, Life in the Woods (1849)Google Scholar and Hammond’s, Samuel H.Wild Northern Scenes; or Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and Rod (1857)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Neither, however, was as popular as the Reverend Murray’s, William H. H.Adventures in the Wilderness (1869)Google Scholar, widely blamed at the time for encouraging excessive throngs of tourists to visit the region.

15. “The Adirondack Vandals: Nature’s Treasures Despoiled by the Relentless Axe, the Destruction Continues Notwithstanding the Efforts the are Being Made to Check It,” New York Times, 21 August 1890, 8Google Scholar; “Pirates of the Forest,” New York Times, 25 September 1889, 9Google Scholar.

16. “Adirondack,” 4.

17. Kinkead, Eugene, Central Park, 1857–1995: The Birth, Decline, and Renewal of a National Treasure (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

18. In emphasizing the Times’s contribution to the history of the Adirondack Park, I do not mean to suggest that the paper was the first to propose protecting the region. Samuel H. Hammond, an Albany journalist and avid sportsman, had published this statement in Wild Northern Scene; or Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and Rod in 1857: “Had I my way I would mark out a circle of a hundred miles in diameter, and throw around it the protecting aegis of the constitution. I would make it a forest forever. It should be a misdemeanor to chop down a tree, and a felony to clear an acre within its boundaries. The old woods should stand here always as God made them, growing on until the earthworm ate away their roots, and the strong winds hurled them to the ground, and the new woods should be permitted to supply the place of the old so long as the earth remained. There is room enough for civilization in regions better fitted for it.” The Times editorial, however, was the first to use the word “park,” and it was likely the more widely read.

19. Catlin’s essay is reprinted in National Park Foundation, Mirror of America: Literacy Encounters with the National Parks (Boulder, 1989): 106–11Google Scholar.

20. Kinkead, , Central Park, 33–37Google Scholar.

21. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” New York Times, 10 June 1871, 4Google Scholar. For another use of the “island” metaphor, see “The New-York Hunting Ground,” New York Times, 2 September 1857, 4Google Scholar.

22. At the time, precedent for such an idea was limited; the success of it even more so. In the summer of 1864, Congress had taken an important step by ceding land in the Yosemite Valley to the state of California, along with a nearby grove of giant sequoia trees (known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove), not with the intent of creating a forest preserve, but rather an area “for public use, resort and recreation.” But that designation apparently meant little. The grazing of livestock and the harvesting of timber continued unabated, as did the crass commercialism of those who ran private concessions. Likewise, when Yellowstone National Park was created in 1872, the primary goal was to prevent the area’s geysers, hot springs, and waterfalls from falling into the hands of unscrupulous businessmen, and to protect them from tourists who took to vandalizing rocks and to throwing boots and small trees into geysers simply for the novelty of watching them fly into the air on a plume of water. See, for example, Dyan Zaslowdky and the Wilderness Society, these American Lands: Parks, Wilderness, and the Public Lands (New York, 1986), 16Google Scholar. According to Nash, preserving raw wilderness in both cases was a side effect of other utilitarian goals, largely overlooked and almost entirely unintentional (Nash, , Wilderness and the American Mind, 108)Google Scholar.

23. Turner, Frederick Jackson, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., 1894)Google Scholar.

24. “The Forestry Amendment,” New York Times, 9 September 1894, 8Google Scholar.

25. Nash, , Wilderness and the American Mind, 120–21Google Scholar.

26. “The Amendments,” New York Times, 5 November 1894, 4Google Scholar.

27. For more on this “political mythology,” see Hays, Samuel, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Pittsburgh, 1999), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. The publication of W. H. H. Murray’s book influenced many to travel to the Adirondacks, but as David Strauss argues, the increase in tourism many attribute to Murray would have been inevitable in any event once transportation and accommodations were provided, given the region’s close proximity to the urban centers of New York City and Boston. See Strauss, David, “Toward a Consumer Culture: ‘Adirondack Murray’ and the Wilderness Vacation,” American Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1987): 270–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. Nash, Roderick, “The American Invention of National Parks,” American Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1970): 726CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. In 1916, Theodore Roosevelt said that public parks and preserves “by their very existence afford a certain measure of the extent to which democratic government can justify itself.” In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt said there was “nothing so American as our national parks. The fundamental idea behind parks is native. It is, in brief, that a country belongs to the people.” In 1989, in a speech to the members of the Family Motor Coach Association in Richmond, Virginia, President George H. W. Bush said that “the national parks are America’s unique contribution to the democratic ideal.”

See Roosevelt, Theodore, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (New York, 1916): chap. 11Google Scholar; Roosevelt, Franklin D., “Radio Address Delivered at Two Medicine Chalet,” Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt: The People Approve, Roseman, Samuel I., compiler (New York, 1934): 359Google Scholar; George Bush’s remarks were made to members of the Family Motor Coach Association in Richmond, Virginia, 21 June 1989, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=17185.

31. Schneider, Keith, “Failed Land Deal Preserves Park’s Integrity: A Democratic Ideal Upheld,” Michigan Land Use Institute (16 August 1996), http://www.mlui.org/print.asp?fileid=4581Google Scholar.

32. Krouse, Jack, “Sparks in the Parks: Managing the Balance Between Conservation and Enjoyment of America’s Resources,” Harvard Political Review (8 June 2003)Google Scholar.

33. Wallace Stegner as quoted by President Bill Clinton in his remarks at a reception commemorating National Park Week, 23 May 1994. See Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, 30 (30 May 1994): 1154–56Google Scholar.

34. What Nash provides, of course, is the counterfactual of the democracy thesis. Without democratic ideology (and the other factors he cites), “national parks could not have arisen in the United States in the form they did.” In other words, democracy was one of several variables instrumental in the creation of the parks. See Nash, “The American Invention of National Parks,” 726.

35. Nash, , Wilderness and the American Mind, 105Google Scholar.

36. Kaplan, Richard, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

37. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (London, 1888), 272Google Scholar.

38. Speed, John Gilmer, “Do Newspapers Now Give the News?” Forum (August 1893): 705–11Google Scholar.

39. Wilcox, Delos Franklin, The American Newspaper: A Study in Social Psychology. Philadelphia, 1900Google Scholar; Fenton, Frances, “The Influence of Newspaper Presentations upon the Growth of Crime and Other Anti-Society Activity” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1911)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Allport, Gordon W. and Faden, Janet M., “The Psychology of Newspapers: Five Tentative Laws,” Public Opinion Quarterly 4 (1940): 687CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the early use of content analysis to study newspaper editorials, see Downing, John, McQuail, Denis, Wartella, Ellen, and Schlesinger, Philip, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Media Studies (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Bryce, , The American Commonwealth, 271–72Google Scholar; Oskamp, Stuart and Schultz, P. Wesley, Attitudes and Opinions (New York, 2005): 330CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. Graham, , The Adirondack Park: A Political History, 79–87Google Scholar.

42. Kaplan, , Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920Google Scholar; Lerner, Daniel, Pool, Ithiel, and Lasswell, Harold D., “Comparative Analysis of Political Ideologies: A Preliminary Statement,” Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (1951–52): 715–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Lerner, Pool, and Lasswell, “Comparative Analysis of Political Ideologies,” 720.

44. See, for instance, Lasswell, Harold D., Lerner, Daniel, and Pool, Ithiel de Sola, The Comparative Study of Symbols (Stanford, 1952)Google Scholar; Lasswell, Harold D., Leites, Nathan, and associates, Language of Politics: Studies in Quantitative Semantics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1949)Google Scholar; Pool, Ithiel de Sola, ed., Trends in Content Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Foster, H. Schulyer Jr., “How America Became Belligerent: A Quantitative Study of War News, 1914–17,” American Journal of Sociology 40 (1935): 464–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Segal, Jeffrey A. and Spaeth, Harold J., The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar. For a more detailed list of studies that use content analysis to study mass communication, see Riffe, Daniel, Lacy, Stephen, and Fico, Frederick, Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research (New York, 2005), 1–2Google Scholar.

45. Smythe, Ted Curtis, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, Conn., 2003)Google Scholar.

46. Davis, Elmer Holmes, History of the New York Times, 1851–1921 (New York, 1921), 46Google Scholar.

47. For example, in chapter 3 of Language of Politics, Lasswell et al. put great effort into explaining and defending sampling methods. For more on the hazards of sampling text, see Glynn, Carroll J., Herbst, Susan, O’Keefe, Garrett J., Shapiro, Robert Y., and Lindeman, Mark, Public Opinion, 2nd ed. (New York, 2004): 112–13Google Scholar; and Weber, Robert Philip, Basic Content Analysis (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1990), 42–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. For instance, it was chosen as a “prestige paper” in the extensive studies done by Lerner et al. and by Lasswell et al. See Lerner, Pool, and Lasswell, “Comparative Analysis of Political Ideologies,” and Lasswell, Leites, and associates, Language of Politics.

49. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” 4.

50. “Adirondack,” 4.

51. Terrie, , Contested Terrain, 88–89Google Scholar.

52. Sax, Joseph L., Mountains Without Handrails: Reflections on the National Parks (Ann Arbor, 1980): 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Ibid., 8 [emphasis in original].

54. Articles were identified by using ProQuest’s full-text database of the New York Times (1851–2006). Search dates were restricted to the period between 1864 and 1894, while search terms included this combination: Adirondack* OR North Woods. An asterisk was used as a wild card to capture both singular and plural forms. In total, the search produced 4,928 matches, which included articles of all kinds and style (e.g., news items, correspondence, social notices, and real estate listings). By examining the content and placement of each article, I was able to pare that list to thirty editorials.

55. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” 4.

56. “The Adirondacks,” New York Times, 3 September 1874, 4Google Scholar.

57. “The New Forestry Bill,” New York Times, 11 May 1885, 4Google Scholar; and “The Forestry Commission,” New York Times, 11 September 1885, 8Google Scholar.

58. “Lake George Park,” New York Times, 15 July 1889, 4Google Scholar.

59. Sax, , Mountains Without Handrails, 9Google Scholar.

60. According to Runte, such arguments filled “an important intellectual need.” Pride in natural wonders could “comfort people still living under the shadow of Milton, Shakespeare, and the Sistine Chapel. See Runte, Alfred, National Parks: The American Experience, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, 1987): 22Google Scholar; see also Zaslowsky, , These American Lands, 12Google Scholar.

61. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” 4.

62. “The People’s Hunting-Ground,” New York Times, 6 September 1873, 4Google Scholar.

63. “The Impending Doom of Yosemite,” New York Times, 13 February 1872, 4Google Scholar.

64. “The People’s Park in the Adirondacks,” New York Times, 21 August 1889, 4Google Scholar.

65. Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, vol. 2 (London, 1888), 233Google Scholar; see also Herbst, Susan, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago, 1993), 59Google Scholar.

66. “The New Forestry Bill,” 4.

67. “The Adirondacks,” New York Times, 29 December 1894, 4Google Scholar.

68. Heinz Brandenburg and Marcel van Egmond, “The Opinionated British Press and Their Influence on Political Attitudes During the 2005 UK Election Campaign,” paper presented at the Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties Annual Conference, Manchester, 12–14 September 2008, 2.

69. For more on “observable implications,” see King, Gary, Keohane, Robert O., and Verba, Sidney, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, 1894), 28–29Google Scholar.

70. In Man and Nature, first published in 1864, Marsh warned about the interconnections of nature. He believed that current forestry practices were a “violation of the harmonies of inanimate nature.” See Marsh, George Perkins, Man and Nature, ed. Lowenthal, David (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Colvin said much the same in 1871 in his report to the New York State Museum. For more, see Graham, Frank Jr., The Adirondack Park: A Political History (New York, 1978), 70–71Google Scholar.

71. “Preservation of Forests,” New York Times, 5 July 1873, 3Google Scholar.

72. “Save the Forests,” New York Times, 25 December 1883, 4Google Scholar.

73. “The North Woods,” New York Times, 1 September 1883 4Google Scholar; see also “A State Park,” New York Times, 9 February 1874, 4Google Scholar.

74. “Preservation of Forests,” 3.

75. Ibid.

76. In 1889, the state’s mortality schedules recorded 104,233 deaths, of which 13,833 (13.3 percent) were attributed to “acute respiratory disease,” 12,390 to consumption (11.9 percent), and 3,834 (3.7 percent) to accidents and violence combined. See “What People Die Of,” New York Times, 8 February 1890, 8Google Scholar.

77. “The Adirondacks and Health,” New York Times, 21 July 1890, 4Google Scholar; “Kushaqua in the Adirondacks,” New York Times, 17 June 1894, 2Google Scholar.

78. “The Adirondacks and Health,” New York Times, 21 July 1890, 4Google Scholar.

79. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau came to Saranac Lake as a consumptive patient in 1876. After crediting the climate with his recovery, he set out to prove through laboratory experiments that the “infection could be arrested, even reversed, by a regimen of rest, good food, sunlight and fresh air.” See Collins, Frank M., “Mycobacterial Pathogenesis: A Historical Perspective,” Frontiers in Bioscience 3 (1998): 123–32CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; see also Trudeau, Edward Livingston, “Environment in Its Relation to the Progress of Bacterial Invasion in Tuberculosis,” American Journal of Medical Science 94 (1887): 118–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80. “The Sanitarium of Northern New-York,” New York Times, 14 July 1879, 4Google Scholar.

81. Murray, W. H. H., Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks (Boston, 1869), 25–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82. The statistic of 30,000 visitors is drawn from “The Impending Doom of Yosemite,” New York Times, 13 February 1872, 4Google Scholar; “Murray’s Fools” is quoted from Donaldson, A History of the Adirondacks, 194Google Scholar.

83. “The Adirondack Invasion,” New York Times, 28 May 1891, 4Google Scholar.

84. Edelman argues that political arguments often have an instrumental (or utilitarian) dimension that measures actual effects, along with a more expressive, symbolic dimension. See Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana, 1964)Google Scholar.

85. “Preservation of Forests,” 3.

86. Graham, , The Adirondack Park, 87Google Scholar.

87. Nash, , Wilderness and the American Mind, 120Google Scholar.

88. “The Impending Doom of Yosemite,” 4.

89. “The Wilderness,” New York Times, 3 August 1872, 4Google Scholar.

90. “The Adirondack Remedy,” New York Times, 19 September 1881, 4Google Scholar.

91. “The Wilderness,” 4.

92. “The Adirondack Invasion,” 4.

93. For example, one editorial complained of seeing “a lady attempt a mountain climb with a train half a yard long, or enter a canoe with hoops which are a constant foot-snare to her guide, or thread a forest with the inevitable blacksilk catching on every root and thicket.” It is, they said, “a spectacle not edifying or agreeable. The building of a first-class hotel on one of the lakes has brought into this silent region the noise of fashion, and the trains and toilets of regular hotel dressing. They look utterly out of place, and by no means becoming.” After a long discussion of how the traveling public invades the wilderness, they nevertheless ended the column by asking: “When will this lovely region, so fitted for the enjoyment of the people, be preserved as a ‘People’s Park’ for the whole nation?” See “The Adirondacks,” 4.

94. As Machan notes: “there is no such unitary will, only the highly disparate individual choices and values of all of the individual members of a society.” See Machan, Tibor R., “The Democratic Ideal,” in Liberty and Democracy, ed. Machan, Tibor R. (Stanford, 2002)Google Scholar.

95. According to Richard Darnton, orators often seek legitimacy by “claiming to speak with the public’s voice.” See Darnton, “Public Opinion and Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” http://www.indiana.edu/~ahr/darnton/pocn/.

96. “Among the Adirondacks,” New York Times, 30 August 1868, 5Google Scholar; “The Forestry Commission,” 8.

97. All the monetary figures cited in the text are drawn from the 1890 federal census. See University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. United States Historical Census Data Browser, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/.

98. “Pirates of the Forest,” New York Times, 25 September 1889, 9Google Scholar; “Railroads in the Adirondacks,” New York Times, 19 May 1891): 4Google Scholar; and “The Adirondack Forests,” New York Times, 11 April 1894, 4Google Scholar.

99. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” 4. The Times was not alone in its belief that the Adirondacks held little promise for agriculture. The Albany Evening Journal noted in 1885 that “farming in this region is generally entirely unremunerative.” See “Preserve the Forests,” Albany Evening Journal, 10 March 1885, 2Google Scholar.

100. The author is identified as a newspaperman because of his listed occupation in the 1880 federal census for Malone, New York. His comments in the Times were published as a letter to the editor. See Seaver, Fred J., “The Adirondack Park Question,” New York Times, 25 December 1883, 6Google Scholar.

101. “The Adirondack Invasion,” 4.

102. “The People’s Park in the Adirondacks,” 4.

103. Thorpe, T. B., “The Abuses of the Backwoods,” Appleton’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art (18 December 1869): 565Google Scholar.

104. “A People’s Hunting-Ground,” 4; “Lake George Park,” 4.

105. Bryce, , The American Commonwealth, 234Google Scholar.

106. The phrase “changing vocabulary” comes from Lerner, Pool, and Lasswell’s work in using content analysis to discern patterns in the symbols used in newspaper editorials. See “Comparative Analysis of Political Ideologies,” 721. For more on the conflicts that continue to rage on the symbolic meaning of the parks, see Sax, , Mountains with Handrails, 12–15Google Scholar.

107. “The Forestry Commission,” 8.

108. Ibid., 8; “The Adirondack Forests,” New York Times, 2 May 1888, 4Google Scholar.

109. For many years, Adirondack residents opposed the creation of a park out of fear that it would shift assessable property into the public domain and out of the reach of local taxation. See Seaver, “The Adirondack Park Question,” 6.

110. For more on the same point, but applied to broader circumstances, see Hays, , Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 175Google Scholar, where he argues that “conservation in practice meant vastly different things to different people.”