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Copyright by Jesse Harrison Ritner 2019 The Report Committee Jesse Harrison Ritner Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: A More Perfect Nature: The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, 15,000BP - present APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Erika Bsumek, Supervisor Robert Olwell A More Perfect Nature: The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, 15,000BP - present by Jesse Harrison Ritner Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May, 2019 Acknowledgements I would be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Erika Bsumek for the academic and emotional support she has so kindly offered me throughout the past two years. I would also like to thank Dr. Robert Olwell for serving on my committee. iv Abstract A More Perfect Nature: The Making of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, 15,000BP - present Jesse Harrison Ritner, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2019 Supervisor: Erika Bsumek This report explores the history of the Minisink Valley and the stories told about it. I examine how stories about the place influenced how people understood the past, and how these pasts were used to imagine potential futures. I pay special attention to discourses about nature as well as settler-colonial discourses. Lastly, I contemplate what this study may add to current discussions around the Anthropocene. v Table of Contents List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................ vii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Finding a Beginning ...........................................................................................................11 Forming and Populating the Valley ---------------------------------------------------------- 14 River People ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 Colonial Discourses and Archival Silences .......................................................................23 Interlude: Rivers, Floods, Rafts, and Canals ------------------------------------------------ 29 Nineteenth Century Tourism ..............................................................................................36 Creating Dual Origin Stories ------------------------------------------------------------------ 38 Urban Disconnect: Canoes and Trains ------------------------------------------------------- 43 Species Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 50 Tocks Island Dam: Anthropocentric Nature ......................................................................54 Interlude: Cars, Camps, and Floods ---------------------------------------------------------- 54 New York’s Clean Water ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 55 The Army Corps of Engineers ---------------------------------------------------------------- 56 An Anthropogenic Wilderness ---------------------------------------------------------------- 59 Still Present Pasts ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 62 Epilogue .............................................................................................................................68 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................73 vi List of Illustrations Figure 1: A map of settlements during the colonial period. ------------------------------------- 13 Figure 2:A topographical map of the Appalachian Mountain Range. -------------------------- 16 Figure 3: This postcard demonstrates the large size of the hotels at the Water Gap. --------- 52 Figure 4: Map of Interstates going to the region. -------------------------------------------------- 57 vii We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor talks of ruin tell us to think about collaborative survival. Not that this will save us – but it might open our imaginations. -Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World Introduction We awoke and drove east. The bus crossed the river, rattling over the Roebling Aqueduct at Berryville, and followed the river north towards Hancock. It was still an hour before sunrise, when we arrived in Long Eddy. Our canoes unloaded and filled, we paddled down the Delaware. The fog was thick. Only one canoe in front and behind were visible through it. Together our six boats made a chain linkeD by vision like children holding hands. Then we felt the first rays of warmth. The fog did not dissipate; rather, it lifted. Like a veil, it rose into the sky, minute by minute, until it cleared the ridgelines of the Shawangunk’s to our left and the Pocono Plateau to our right. For the first time I watched the Delaware River emerge in front of me. There were still 90 odd miles left on our trip down the river to the Water Gap, and the access point at the Park Service’s southern welcome center. It was 2008 and I was fourteen. In 1969, Winifred Luten in the New York Times wrote that the Delaware’s “landscape alternates between a rugged wilderness of forested mountains and steep cliffs, and pastoral fields and towns.” Shallow, rocky, and often wadable, the river hiding on the fringes of New York City’s and Philadelphia’s ever spreading metropolitan areas, still felt free from the “ravages of civilization.”1 Eighty-three years earlier, Ralph K. Wing in Forest and Stream wrote that “the most notable thing about the Delaware is the limpid purity of its waters… we were able to find a spring at any time… [and] discover a basin 1 New York Times, April 27, 1969. 1 of water sweeter and more refreshing than anything city people could imagine.”2 And over one-hundred years before him, Sven Roseen described the messages he received through God’s grace, as he walkeD slowly through the Minisink Valley, preaching to believers and non-believers alike. All four of these are variations of a place-stories which celebrate the uniqueness of the Minisink Valley. They are neither true nor false. But the cultural and environmental history of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DEWA) was built around them. They are by no means the only place-stories about the Delaware River. Philadelphia, the first truly cosmopolitan city in the United States, sprung up along its banks. Washington crossed it. The river floated some of the first timber in America’s early logging boom. And, despite failing to qualify as one of the nation’s twenty largest rivers, the Delaware and its tributaries supply water to approximately thirty-million people, between 5% and 10% of the U.S. population.3 Its water cools some of the most important power generators in the country, and its water is heating up faster than any other river in the country.4 But, those are stories for another time, often based on a preference for large cities and wide rivers. These stories are peripheral, rather than central to the history of DEWA and the Minisink Valley in which it sits. 2 Forest & Stream, “PaDDle anD Current,” Nov. 18, 1886. 3 RicharD Albert estimates the number at 10% of the population, while Susan Beecher anD Will Price estimate the portion of the population at 5%. Richard C. Albert, Damming the Delaware: The Rise and Fall of Tocks Island Dam, 1; Will Price and Susan Beecher, “Climate Change Effects on Forests, Water Resources, anD Communities of the Delaware River Basin,” in Forest Conservation in the Anthropocene: Science, Policy, and Practice, 195–208. 4 https://www.nps.gov/dewa/index.htm; Price anD Beecher, “Climate Change Effects on Forests, Water Resources, anD Communities of the Delaware River Basin,” 381. 2 Understanding the history of the valley and the reasons the National Park was built, requires a study of how people thought about the place. Keith Basso writes, “understanding of external realities are fashioned from local materials… knowing little or nothing of the latter, one’s ability to make sense of “what is” and “what occurs” in another’s environment is bound to be deficient.”5 The inverse is also true. Understanding the history of “external realities” in a specific local requires an understanding of what people think and thought “occurred,” and what they think “was.” Coll Thrush, wrote that “place-stories are the easy way out, allowing us to avoid doing our homework. In other words, they make appealing fiction but bad history.”6 The propagation of place-stories through antiquarian and pop-culture literature suffuse myths of Indigenous disappearance, pristine wilderness, and agrarian societies with “legitimacy.” The trend is exaggerated in places like DEWA were local historians and journalist supply the vast majority of literature on the river and its past. Journalist Frank Dale, in Bridges over the Delaware: A History of Crossings, and Delaware Diary: Episodes in the Life of a River, offers anecdotal and sporadic accounts of the “history” – which for him starts with colonization – of the Delaware. Others, such as Mary A. Shafer, in Devastation on the Delaware: Stories and Images of the Deadly Flood