William H. H. Murray

Do you know who invented camping?
You do now!

The man who invented camping
Aug 02, 2009 04:30 AM

Feature Writer
New York State's Adirondack Mountains and the boggy lands surrounding them are
a spare, beautiful and occasionally foreboding landscape. Today, they are a 2.5 million
hectare protected forest, the largest park in the continental United States.
In the mid-19th century, the region extended north from Albany to the Canadian
border, more than 270 kilometres.
Throughout most of history, the rough terrain has been given over almost entirely
to wildlife. But in the summer of 1869, the woods were overrun. For the first time,
middle-class urbanites decided that a few weeks spent in the clutches of Nature
might be survivable. In fact, they had been convinced it would be fun.
For the great majority, it wasn't. In the aftermath, they turned on the man who'd
lured them there. Author, preacher and sportsman William H. H. (Adirondack) Murray
never apologized. Rather, he spent the next several years justifying his pioneering
call to the wildest parts of North America. Today, we call it camping.
While Murray remains obscure, the pastime he helped shape is ubiquitous.
According to a recent Harris-Decima poll, nearly 12 million Canadians will camp this
year. Maybe you're one of them. Maybe you're sitting on a soggy log right now,
absently swatting at the air, cursing the weather and wondering why the tent
smells that way.
If so, blame Murray.
"Before him, campers were sportsmen or Romantics," says Massachusetts-based
Murray scholar Alisa Iannucci. "They didn't take their families. Murray advocated
for camping as an activity anybody could – and should – do."
By all accounts, Murray was a strapping, Type-A personality. He was born into poverty,
but his ambition drove him into the pulpit of Boston's landmark Park Street Church.
His speaking ability earned him a small fortune on the lecture circuit. This rich living
allowed Murray to indulge his outdoor passions. Prime among them was the
opportunity to admire God's creatures from up-close, just before he killed them.
"Few have brought to Earth a greater variety of North American game animals, or shot
them in regions more widely separated," one contemporary biographer gushed.
Murray was also a talented writer. In 1869, at the age of 29, he completed a
picturesque look at his favourite hunting ground. He called the book Adventures
in the Wilderness; or, Camp Life in the Adirondacks.
It combined the practical detail of a travel guide with the romantic allure of the
fish-tale. More importantly, it was written by a Congregationalist minister, thus
obliterating a series of moral taboos.
In the 1860s, civilized people considered any wooded area a godless wasteland
drawing the unwary into sin. Hadn't Jesus been tempted in the wilderness? Murray
countered that active pursuits made a man healthy in mind, body and soul.
He also swatted aside the Puritan notion that leisure was self-indulgent. Murray
contended that working people couldn't be productive without a restorative period
of fruitful idleness. It is no exaggeration to say that Murray helped invent the
modern notion of the vacation.
Murray was also pleasingly specific. He told people where to go, how to get there
and how much it would cost. He made camping seem physically safe, morally
positive and actually possible.
The result was a low-level stampede. Nobody counted, but current estimates
range between 2,500 and 5,000 visitors to the Adirondacks that summer,
principally from Boston and New York. It doesn't sound like much, but it was 10 times
what the area could accommodate.
The first problem was the weather. The summer of 1869 bore a depressing
resemblance to the summer of 2009 – cold, rainy and buggy. That was only
the stage-dressing. The full tragedy wouldn't be revealed until the cast arrived.
Unaccustomed as they were to vacationing, the aspirational urbanites heeding
Murray's call made three serious mistakes. They over-packed; they overdressed;
and they under-prepared.
Pouring off the trains in hoop skirts and three-piece suits, loaded down with
luggage they didn't need and couldn't carry, most were confronted by a handful
of dilapidated hotels in the town of Whitehall, on the New York-Vermont border.
More importantly, they found dilapidated and completely full hotels. Most hadn't
bothered to write ahead for reservations.
At this point, the rookie campers had only reached the entry point to the promised
Eden. The goal required two more legs of travel that could take another two days.
First, there was carriage ride over rutted trails too primitive to call roads. Then,
there were hours more in low-slung dinghies along waterways that were the only
path into the mountains.
There weren't enough carriages or boats to transport them all. The few that existed
were booked. Nor could they find guides to tell them how to get to the spots Murray
had recommended.
Undaunted, many of the visitors hunkered down at this chokepoint. After a week
battling black flies, most gave up. This process was repeated for months.
When they returned home, tired, poorer and none the wiser about Murray's vision
of the good life, they were upset. Many blamed the author. Some went so far as
to deny there was a storybook wilderness out there at all, since they hadn't seen
it. One critic called Murray's guide a "monstrous hoax."
It got worse.
One of Murray's claims was that the bracing Adirondack air was not only restorative,
but also curative. His book includes the tale of a consumptive relieved of illness by
mountain air. That brought a flock of tuberculosis sufferers into the great unknown
that summer. Several reportedly died there (though one tuberculosis victim who
visited, Dr. Edward Livingstone Trudeau, would pioneer successful treatments for TB
in the Adirondacks).
The fashionable amateurs who'd made the trek were lampooned as "Murray's Fools."
Murray hit back in print and through a series of lectures.
But he needn't have bothered. The craze he had started was already spreading
beyond New York and New England. It happened so quickly that, by the mid-1870s,
camping was ingrained in continental consciousness.
Terence Young, a California professor, is writing a history of camping entitled
Heading Out. He suggests that North Americans camp with a fervour that isn't so
much about reaching the wild as fleeing home. He also believes our emphasis on
primitivism is unique.
"Most North Americans still don't like urban life. They find it unnerving, unsettling,"
says Young. "And we don't really want to be here, not all year long at least. Camping
is a way to go back, to re-enact what the pioneers did."
Today, 1 in 5 Americans camp. The ratio is higher in Canada – more than 1 in 3.
Murray didn't fare as well as his creation. He was eventually forced from his church,
for suggesting that the patrician congregation make a greater effort at including the
city's underclass. They'd put up with his gunnery obsession. But tolerating the Irish
was taking it too far.
He embarked on a series of failed business ventures. In the winter of 1883-84, he
ran a restaurant in Montreal called The Snowshoe. Typically, he did everything himself.
Eventually, he returned to his family spread in rural Connecticut. He continued to travel
widely into the wilderness. At age 64, he died in the same room in which he'd been born.
Though his name does not ring out like Emerson's or Thoreau's, he is rightly regarded
as the father of camping.
"He is the seminal figure," says Young. "There is a before and after Murray."
Is it an irony that he died indoors? Probably not to anyone who has gone camping this
summer. Right now, it just sounds smart.

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"The monkeys are throwing stuff at me again."
-Survivorman in Costa Rica

Great history info on " Camping " Cool

Thats cool, 1 in 3 Canadians camp !.....lol, not a shock really.

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A Knifeless Man is a Lifeless Man
Canadian To The Core
Carry Less by Knowing More
Knowledge Weighs Nothing

Of course, it depends on how you define "camping". Murray wasn't the first guy to sleep in a tent, but there's a serious argument that he started the North American movement to go camping on one's vacation simply to enjoy nature.
Imagine getting around as much as he did, and to end up dying in the exact spot where you had been born.

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"The monkeys are throwing stuff at me again."
-Survivorman in Costa Rica

great artical I didn't know someone invented camping Shocked

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Great article Bushrat......Thanks Cool