Hudson Valley Bookshelf: The Crucial River, A Magical Place
by James Polk

Review of The Hudson: A History, by Tom Lewis.Yale University Press, Hardcover, 352 pages, $30.ISBN 0-300-10424-3.

How would America have evolved without the Hudson River? After all, from the coming of the Dutch in the 17th century to the coming of the railroads in the 19th and beyond it played a pivotal role in first, the settlement and then in the economic development not only of the region but indeed of the entire country.

Crucial to the earliest English and Dutch explorations of the new continent, the Hudson later became central to the strategic thinking of both sides during the Revolution and had British plans succeeded, the struggling nation might not have even been born. After the war, without the river and the Erie Canal, which was connected to it in 1825, the opening of the West would have been a different and wholly more difficult proposition. Without the Hudson, its tricky winds and shifting currents that made sailing under canvas to any sort of schedule a problematic affair, the perfection of the steamboat, the first truly American mechanical invention, might have been seriously delayed.

The creative soul of the nation would be different too. Writers from Washington Irving to T. C. Boyle have drawn inspiration from the river, its history and its mythology while the Hudson River School of landscape painters in the 19th century captured the romantic sublime of nature in the river valley and with it the imagination of both America and Europe. And then, in the 20th, efforts to clean up centuries of pollution provided much of the impetus behind the nationwide environmental movement. Pretty good for a river that, for much of its length, isn't really a river at all, the lower Hudson being actually a tidal estuary or fjord and therefore a branch of the Atlantic Ocean.

All of these issues and many more are explored in Tom Lewis's new book. It opens by tracing the geography of the Hudson from its source in the Adirondacks (the poetically named but aesthetically disappointing Lake Tear of the Clouds, which is hardly more than a lifeless pond) to the Narrows of New York Bay, where it merges with the Atlantic. To this physical sketch, the author adds likenesses of the men and women who, for good or ill, left their mark upon the river and the region until what finally emerges is a full portrait not only of a waterway whose importance far transcends its relatively modest length (the Connecticut River is longer), but of the people and communities that grew up along its banks.

Beginning in the 18th century, a diverse group of mostly amateur but talented naturalists and geographers began to analyze the river, its geology, the plant and animal life of the region and the many species of fish under its surface. Figures such as botanists Peter Kalm and Jane Colden, geologist Amos Eaton and surveyor Verplanck Colvin made the area Hudson their laboratory and opened the river to scientific investigation. But even as they and others were studying the river and its wonders, large-scale tanneries sprang up and began depleting it.

Vast stands of hemlocks were denuded of their bark to be ground into tannin to feed these ever expanding and endlessly voracious operations, their trunks left as kindling for forest fires; huge quantities of river water needed to wash the hides were poisoned with toxins and then discharged directly into the river or its tributaries. The tanneries along the Hudson may have provided the country with plenty of shoes and boots, but they began killing the river.

Lewis traces its further degradation down the years while communities and factories along its banks considered the river a convenient open sewer instead of an invaluable resource. His disheartening account culminates in 1973, when the Niagara Mohawk Power Company removed a small electric generating dam near Fort Edward which had, they felt, outlived its usefulness. Unfortunately, it hadn't. Whatever its original purpose, the dam was then holding back hundreds of tons of highly toxic PCBs dumped from plants further upriver for some 40 years, and their release led to an environmental disaster the consequences of which will continue to be realized for years to come.

But it is not the author's purpose to dwell on the negative. A professor of English at Skidmore College, Lewis brings a flair to his pages that transcends the merely factual. He gives us oddballs, such as the arms dealer Francis Bannerman who constructed an ersatz Scottish castle on an island near Beacon to house his weaponry only to have it blow up on his heirs, the ruins perhaps causing unprepared train passengers riding by to suspect that they have somehow stumbled across a loch in Scotland. Another is the tanner Zadock Pratt, who would beg forgiveness of each hemlock before chopping it down to feed his insatiable industry. Yet there are heroes in these pages, too. Early explorers, traders, and settlers brought the river forever into the American consciousness. DeWitt Clinton and his Erie Canal fulfilled the Hudson's role as an economic engine for the nation. Thomas Cole and his fellow artists brought the Hudson's grandeur to the world, while 20th century environmentalists have done much to preserve that grandeur for the future.

Most of all, though, Lewis gives us the river itself. With its wide variety of scenic splendors and with all the history that has taken place on or near its banks, the river he shows us is a magical place indeed.

James Polk is co-owner of A New Leaf, the bookstore in Pine Plains, and he has contributed to such newspapers as the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.