If you like water and canoes, check this site. It’s a dim echo from the glorious last decades of the 19th Century when Americans had both wilderness and innocence, and a writer who called himself Nessmuk exulted in the open air on the lakes and rivers of the Adirondacks.
http://robroy.dyndns.info/books/gws/N1A.HTM
This letter to Forest and Stream magazine, published Aug. 12, 1880, is from Canoeing the Adirondacks With Nessmuk: The Adirondack Letters of George Washington Sears. A collection of these letters is provided full-text on this scholarly but attractive and well-designed website. An excerpt:
” What the mule or mustang is to the plainsman, the boat or canoe is to guide, hunter or tourist who proposes a sojourn in the Adirondacks. And this is why I propose to mention at some length this matter of canoeing and boating. Being a light weight and a good canoeman, having the summer before me, designing to haunt the nameless lakes and streams not down on the maps, and not caring to hire a guide, it stands to reason that my canoe should be of the lightest, and she is. Perhaps she is the lightest cedar-built canoe in the United States, or anywhere else.”
Nessmuk served as inspiration for a later writer, Horace Kephart (1863-1931), who dedicated his own classic of the outdoors, Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness, “To the Spirit of Nessmuk in the Happy Hunting Ground.” Kephart’s book enjoys the distinction of having been, from one account, continuously in print from its initial publication in 1906.
