DOC Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee; C.S.A. by Edward Longacre in History

Description

The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch); America’s original frontier; northwest of New York City; with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware; Greene; Sullivan; Ulster; Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes; the skies; waterfalls; pastures; cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters; tycoons and politicians; preachers and outlaws; musicians and spiritualists; outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention; resulting in New York’s own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution; causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s; with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests “one-hundred percent restricted” accommodations (“Hebrews will knock vainly for admission”); a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients; sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . . Here are the gangsters (Jack “Legs” Diamond and Dutch Schultz; among them) who sought refuge in the Catskill Mountains; and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families; giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s; the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord; Brown’s Hotel; Kutsher’s Hotel; and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps; with their headliners from movies and radio (Phil Silvers; Eddie Cantor; Milton Berle; et al.); and others who learned their trade there; among them Moss Hart (who got his start organizing summer theatricals); Sid Caesar; Lenny Bruce; Mel Brooks; Woody Allen; and Joan Rivers. Here is a nineteenth-century America turning away from England for its literary and artistic inspiration; finding it instead in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and his childhood recollections (set in the Catskills) . . . in James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure-romances; which provided a pastoral history; describing the shift from a colonial to a nationalist mentality . . . and in the canvases of Thomas Cole; Asher B. Durand; Frederick Church; and others that caught the grandeur of the wilderness and that gave texture; color; and form to Irving’s and Cooper’s imaginings. Here are the entrepreneurs and financiers who saw the Catskills as a way to strike it rich; plundering the resources that had been likened to “creation;” the Catskills’ tanneries that supplied the boots and saddles for Union troops in the Civil War . . . and the bluestone quarries whose excavated rock became the curbs and streets of the fast-growing Eastern Seaboard. Here are the Catskills brought fully to life in all of their intensity; beauty; vastness; and lunacy.