A History of the Adirondacks - v. 1 Author:Alfred Lee Donaldson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III TWO CENTURIES OF SURMISE FOR nearly two hundred years after the foregoing incident the Adirondacks remained virtually unrealized and impenetrated... more » by the white man. Along Lake Champlain, along the St. Lawrence and the Black River, along the Mohawk and the Hudson, the militant march of colonization went steadily and at times rapidly forward, but within this circle of increasing population lay a vast, mysterious, undiscovered territory. Stanley had found Dr. Livingstone and familiarized the world with the depths of Africa before the average New Yorker knew anything definite abcfut the wonderful wilderness lying almost at his back door. Considering its location, its natural resources, and its unique scenic beauties, the tardy subjugation of the Adirondack region to the uses and pleasures of man is somewhat of an anomaly. The earliest map to show the region at all is one published in 1570, by Abraham Ortelius, later geographer to Philip II of Spain, and next to Mercator the greatest geographer of his age. In his "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum," the "first modern atlas" of fifty-three maps, there is one of New France, and in the divisions of territory which it shows, the name "Ava- cal" covers what is now northern New York. In 1616, on a map of the New Netherlands in the royal archives at The Hague, the name "Irocoisen" appears, as applied to the country on each side of Lake Champlain. As "Iroquoisia" the name persists through later maps, and means, of course, "the land of the Iroquois." From Beauchamp's "Aboriginal Place Names of New York" I quote the following: In 1609 the Indians told Champlain that the Vermont shore and mountains belonged to the Iroquois. Ytes and Moulton cite a map of 1671 in which the lake was called Lacus Irocoisi; a description in 1662 in whic...« less