Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Catskill Mountains Summer Resorts: Containing Selected List of Hotels, Boarding Houses and Farm Houses Where Summer Guests Are Entertained
Then, the sixty-nine years being passed, we have to notice an important matter; in fact, nothing less than the formation of a syndicate by certain Dutch and English gentlemen. Their design was to buy outright the Catskill region. There was, without doubt, much negotiation, and finally the poor redskins, for paltry price principally eye-tickling trinkets and the like, of wonderful seeming value to our now extinct friends, but, as a matter of fact, of no intrinsic worth whatever - consented to sell their moun tain domain; and the deed was finally and for mally done on July 8th, 1678, at the Stadt Huis at Albany. Mohak-neminaw and six of his chiefs signed the contract, and one can readily fancy that much tobacco and fire-water marked the business. And, after that, slowly, year by year, the Indians retired farther and farther into the interior, Adirondacks and the like, to make way for the Dutch settlers. So we see a vast wilderness, the heart of it once known only to hunting and warring Indians, gradually settled by thrifty Dutch, and, in the favorable parts, made to grow various farmstuffs and fruitstuffs. Long after, the mountains, in parts, were blasted for the beautiful granite that was in them, and which in our day has found lodgment in many classic buildings in New York and other cities. Such is the emergence of the Catskills; first the home of the Onteoras - Onteora meaning Hill of the Sky; how beautiful, much more so, in fact, than the name Catskill - then espied by Hudson in 1609; next purchased by a syndicate of Dutch and English in 1678. From that year, and say for 150 years thereafter, we have the unruffied Dutch, and later, the more active and polished Colonial life, with farming, with expanding thriving villages and bits of towns coming into being here and there at certain natural gather ing points. It is also certain that, year after year and always in increasing numbers, many a bold spirit penetrated into these wild moun tains for rough sport, for the hunt and in quest of the finny tribe. Thus these Cauterskill Moun tains slowly came to fame as a region rich and rare for fishing and hunting and for dreaming away the summer days. And finally, about fifty years ago, this fame blossomed into world-wide repute and the Catskills stepped into line as a peerless summer resort known to all men.
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