The Great Oxbow
In a recent column, it was noted that when Charles McBride returned from the
Civil War in 1865, he purchased a piece of land and cabin from pioneer settler
Cort Moody at the foot of Tupper Lake. Cort (Cortez) was a well-known guide,
6 feet, 6 inches in stature. My photos show him to be as lean as a fence post,
a characteristic, it would seem, of the Moody family even today.
Cort’s father, Jacob, was the first settler in Saranac Lake (1819), when the nearest neighbor, a man named Mose Hamilton, was five miles away toward Lake Placid. Of historical interest is the fact that Cort was the first white baby born in this region (1822). Jacob Moody had seven children. Eliza, the only girl, died young, and Franklin, one of the six boys, also died young. The remaining five Moody boys all lived to become famous hunters, guides and trappers.
Donaldson, the historian, notes, “They were known far and wide in the early days, and their names are of constant occurrence in all Adirondack books.”
Cort did most of his guiding from Deer Island on Upper Saranac Lake across from the original Wawbeek Club. However, like his brothers, he soon discovered Tupper Lake, Piercefield Falls and the Bog River. If you had a client and wanted to ensure him success, the undiscovered Tupper Lake area was a sure bet.
The Moody boys felt that the finest place for night hunting deer (jacking with a light was then legal) was the large marsh near the east bay in Lake Simond – they called it Simon’s Slew – where today a cutoff leads through that marsh to the Racquette River. They had found a hunting and fishing paradise and they knew it. This discovery enhanced their reputations as guides. They could be counted on to produce game, and they made the most of it.
In the 1850s, the Moody boys guided Alfred A. Street, the New York State Librarian, and some of his friends on a leisurely hunting and fishing trip through the Saranacs and the Racquette River to Long Lake, with a return downstream to Tupper Lake.
Here is how Mr. Street, in his book that followed that trip, Woods and Waters, described the Oxbow as they approached Tupper Lake on the Racquette River: “Down the river we went, checking our course at the mouth of two or three spring brooks for the speckled prey. Passing a shingle weaver’s camp and threading the rapids were a dozen rocks of differing sizes in the channel [that] caused various currents and eddies, we came to the Great Oxbow.” (Note: Those rapids later became known as the Underhill Rapids, a name now seldom used.)
Today those rapids may be recognized by the many navigation buoys as the river parallels River Road beyond its intersection with Dugal Road. Supporting cribwork for a much later bridge, which crossed the river at the upper end of the rapids to transport lumber, can still be seen as you descend the river.
Street continues: “This Oxbow is a two-mile sweep of the river around a long point. Across its base, however, if you know where to look, is a portage, scarcely more than a score of paces.” Note: Shortly after Street’s visit, the New York State Legislature passed a law making the Racquette River a public highway for the use of Potsdam lumbermen and their mills downstream from Tupper. Authority was given to spend $10,000 on improving the river channel to make it easier to float large quantities of logs down the river to Potsdam. Many twists and turns of the river were straightened out, and that short portage known to the Moodys to save rowing the two-mile loop, or bow of the Oxbow, was dynamited to make a straight run.
This spot is located just below the Wild Center observation deck in front of the Klueck summer cottage, the former Dechene camp. This, of course, made the Oxbow an island.
Walt Zurawski has told me that the McCarthy brothers at one time had a slaughterhouse above the Oxbow and used the island to house a large number of pigs, which were thus contained because of their intense dislike for water.
Street notes, “Having tugged their guide boats and gear across the narrow strip of land before launching, crushing the lush wood plants into an emerald paste, we regaled ourselves on the whortle berries, whose misty eyes glanced at us in every direction.”
Harvey Moody, oldest brother and chief guide for the Street trip, seated himself at the foot of a birch, a position Street followed, and listened as Harvey recounted: “But about old Ramrod, as I was tellin’ on ye, he made a good deal o’ this place; he camped here for some years, and in his young days, he had lived here in a sort o’ cave, or rather a holler, in a big pine tree, the biggest, ‘cordin’ to his tell, I ever seen in these woods. You switched a thick cedar bush a one side, and crawled inter a shelvin’ place ‘twixt the roots like a woodchuck’s hole, and there was a place in the body of the tree big enough to stand up in and walk a leetle about and lay down too, curled up, though, as a hound sleeps. Old Ramrod made two or three knot holes in the tree bigger to give ‘im air and light. They made good places to shoot from too; and the St. Regis Injuns, bein’ about the Racket in them days, these ‘ere loopholes, as ‘twere, stood him a good turn sometimes.
“He was a great Injun fighter, was Ramrod, for he had an idee the Injuns had no business comin’ on the Racket to hunt and fish, as they had their own waters all around the Upper S’nac. ‘Twas treadin’ on his toes, so he was done on ‘em, and got up a fight whenever he could, ‘tickelly when there wasn’t more ‘n two or three agin ‘im. He popped over all he could, and finally at last the Injuns didn’t never go on the Racket without expectin’ a row with Old Ramrod, or the Quick Wind, as they nicknamed ‘im, ‘caze he’d pounce so dreffle sudden on ‘em with his rifle.
“Old Ramrod had been up to Folin’sby’s Pond and had fell agin a rock, so as to break the lock of his rifle. Well, he started torts hum, and just as he rounded the lefthand p’int o’ the brook [outlet] down inter the Racket, what did he see but an Injun canoe hauled up on the bank. He got at the same time a squint o’ two Injuns crouched up like a couple o’ mud turtles, or like a couple o’ black squirrels, we’ll say, crackin’ hickory nuts. The Injuns, though, was a smokin’ through them queer kind o’ things o’ theirn – hatchets hollered out in the handle with a bowl in the head.
“There they was, with their backs torts him. Well, he’d got fairly inter the Racket, and he was in hopes they wouldn’t see ‘im ‘t all, as two to one with rifles was too much odds for the old feller, farse as he was, when he hadn’t got no rifle, or what was next to ‘t, one that was broke. But jest as he was turnin’ a bush, didn’t they screech! Did you ever hear a war whoop, Mr. Smith? It’s so [clapping his mouth and playing it with a rapid motion]: Hoo-oo-oooooee, hoo! And as they sung out, they started for their canoe in sich a hurry that they didn’t never think o’ their rifles. Old Ramrod see the whull consarn, and he put to ‘t. Didn’t he make his dugout spin! I tell you! But he unly got clear by the skin of his teeth, that is, by rushin’ his canoe up and dashin’ crost with it to t’ other side here, for the Injuns didn’t know this place and kept straight on, an lickety splittin’ it down’ards to Simon’s Slew, where he hid a whull day in the bushes.”
Afterward
The Racquette River has remained a priceless resource. My friend, Mark
Bowie, says it best: “It is a river that is in places wild, places
recreational, yet a working river . . . . It is at once tamed and civilized,
pristine and remote, tranquil and tumultuous.”