Canal barges, a sloop and two schooners figure in this quiet summer morning scene as the Mary Powell comes steaming out of the Hudson Highlands 0 11 her way t0Ne1v York City . Painting by William C. Muller, available asa print from Mystic Seaport Museum Stores , Mystic CT06355
THE LORDLY HUDSON: "But the Rhine has no Mary Powell!" by Peter Stanford "The lordl y Hudson"-that's what that grand old man Ray Baldwin , much beloved former governor of Connecticut, called the river that large ly built and today defines , with its tributaries and cana l-connected waterways , the State of New York . And with hi s fine ear for Americana , Governor Baldwin was merely enunciating a concept of the river that is widely shared-a persona , as it were, for the 320-mile river, which in its lower reaches is truly a fjord or sa ltwater branch of the sea. From the sea it marches inland , embracing New York , th e New World's greatest city, flanked on the west by the rising splendor of the Pali sades-which begin across the way from the many-towered c ity, and fade away as th e waterway broadens out into the inland seas of Tappan Zee and Haverstraw Bay-then fo llows a narrow , twisting path through the precipitous Hudson Highlands , and then a long fairly straight run to A lbany, 145 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean , and thence , past the dam at Troy , where there is still a four-foot ri se and fall in the tide, to its so urce in Lake Tear of the Clouds in the wi ld country of the Adirondack Mountains. This Hudson River was from the earliest days an avenue of trade and line of advance for raiders and encroaching armies , Indian , French, British and finall y, SEA HI STORY , AUTUMN 1985
American-and from its pastoral beginnings it became a power base for the industrial and commercial growth which supported, on its smoky , clanging processes, the glories and refinements and sheer exuberance of America 's Gilded Age-an age surely represented at its best in th e river steamboats which bore patricians and ordinary families to and fro upon its broad , shining, ever-shifting bosom. Of the steamboats, the Mary Powell , which had a remarkable run (with frequent rebuildings) from the Civil War period past the era of World War I, was the paragon and paddlewheeler par excellence of all the rest. But it was not just the boat , excellent and long-lived , fast and elegant as she was , that led a sophisticated traveler, Ja ckaline Ring's Claddagh sails by the Hudson House, waterfro111 hotel in Cold Spring. Captain Ja ckie's dinn ers afloat are famous.
noting that the Hudson was often compared to Germany' s mountain-penetrating Rhine River, to exclaim: " But the Rhine has no Mary Powell!" No , it was not the boat alone , but all that brought her into being and supported her, the civi li zation that conceived her and prized her , all that went into her building and steaming, and even what we see in her today-for the say ing remains true long after the boat herself is gone, her keel embedded in the mud of Rondout Creek.
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The Indians camped for millenia on its banks , eating the rep uted foot-long oysters nurtured in its brackish waters and catching the abundant fish , and to a degree we haven ' t fully learned yet, they apparently used it as a conduit for canoeborne trade. The first settlers in the valley were , as the chances of European politics and the opening of the Atlantic world would have it , Dutch merchants who built trading posts that soon developed into cities on the island of Manhattan at its mouth , and at Albany, where the Mohawk River flow s in from the broad uplands to the west to provide another natural avenue of trade. The Mohawk was also the thoroughfare through which the inland nations of the Iroqui s confederation pushed eastward , bullying the Mahicans and several other New York tribes of rather peaceful bent into leaving 9