Steven M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver. The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America. New York: Knopf, 2015. Print.

One thing immediately striking is this book’s subtitle. I always thought the Catskills was plural—the Catskill Mountains, just like the Rockies for the Rocky Mountains. Catskill Mountain (or “the Mountain”) is just one of a number of peaks in this mountain range south of Albany, north of New York City, and between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.

The Catskills pretty much follows a historical timeline beginning with explorer Henry Hudson. The first two figures to visit the mountains and write seriously about them were truly the first two significant literary figures in American letters: Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Among other things we read how Rip Van Winkle brought the Catskills to the attention of a wider public and how the novels of Cooper would romanticize their wildness.

The authors make an interesting case that in spite of Mark Twain’s ostensible disdain for Cooper in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Twain represents Cooper’s view of the West in his best works. When Huck Finn says near the end of his tale, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territories ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I just can’t stand it,” (53) he is sounding just like Natty Bumppo.

The chapter on the Hudson River School—the first American artists to achieve an international reputation—inspires us not only about the Catskills but about nature in all “her various languages.” The authors detail the lives of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church, showing their romantic view of nature. Even Cole’s illustration of a tribal meeting from The Last of the Mohicans, the hundred or so human figures are not much more than dots compared to the mountains and forest surrounding them.

A fascinating chapter in The Catskills tells how naturalist John Burroughs and robber baron Jay Gould were best friends and classmates growing up in the village of Roxbury. Burroughs remained attached to the Catskills and their/its natural environment, writing thirty books on North American natural history. Gould became a New Yorker and one of the richest men in the country. Even though they lost touch as adults, the book tells us that at his death Gould’s library contained every one of Burroughs’ books, all “well thumbed.”

Interestingly, later in his life, Burroughs became friends with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone. Once when the notorious anti-Semite Ford complained about Gould being a Jew and “a Shylock,” Burroughs corrected him: “All Jay’s people Presbyterians.” (175) Burroughs’ funeral was attended by Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, the former President at the time. At one point the Victrola record player stopped in the middle of Brahms’ “Lullaby.” One of the congregants went up and tinkered with the phonograph to get it to finish the song. It was Edison himself.

The chapter on Sojourner Truth focuses on her early life in Kingston. The family she was born into she called the Ardinburghs in her Narrative. They were the Hardenburghs, the Dutch family that was given the original land patent that covered much of the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley. We are reminded that for the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century, slavery was legal in the Northern states as well.

The chapter on the Catskill Rent Wars is perhaps the most important from a historical perspective. Much of the land in the Catskills and adjacent areas were owned by a handful of families like the Hardenburghs thanks to those seventeenth-century land patents. Even if farmers or tradesmen built their own houses and raised their own livestock, they were renters, not land owners. They could still be subject to forfeiture and complete dispossession even of their moveable property.

We often teach that the American Civil War put an end to the feudal system in North America. It was the rent strikes of the 1840s that put an end to such fiefdoms in New York State.

Nearly half the book is devoted to the Catskills as a vacation land for people from New York City. The Catskills describes in detail the various hotels and resorts erected from Ante-Bellum times until the 1950s. The authors call the period between the Civil War and World War I the Silver Age of the Catskills, as they catered to wealthy urbanites, most Protestant.

The Golden Age would be the period form the 1920s to the 1970s when the resorts became the summering grounds for New York Jews. Thanks to Vaudeville and Hollywood, they became famous as the breeding grounds for entertainers and impresarios from Moss Hart in the twenties to Jerry Seinfeld in the seventies.

One Catskill joke went, “At Grossingers, I walked out on Sammy Davis, Jr.”

The other guy would say, “Me? Harry Belafonte.”

There are chapters on the twentieth century artist colonies, the Woodstock music festival, and gangsters from the Prohibition era. We learn, for example, that Dutch Schultz’s birth name was Arthur Flegenheimer. He preferred his street handle because “It was small enough to fit in the headlines.” (265)

We are told that both Schultz and Legs Diamond (né Jack Moran) were protégés of Arnold Rothstein, the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Schultz was gunned down in 1935, and, as he was dying in the hospital, he was deliriously rambling saying such things as, “[W]e better get those Liberty bonds out of the box and cash ’em…sure it was Danny’s mistake to buy ’em, and I think they can be traced.” (269)

That tidbit may also suggest the subject of the phone call from Detroit meant for Jay Gatsby that Nick Carraway takes after Gatsby has been shot. The man thinks he is talking to Gatsby and expresses worries about some bonds whose serial numbers have been traced. Historically, Rothstein was always suspected of having a part in what was called the Great Bond Robbery of some five million dollars of Liberty Bonds after the First World War. Schultz’s ramblings suggest he likely knew something about those bonds as well. (For more on this, see our review of Rothstein.)

As The Catskills was published in 2015, it includes some of the recent controversy over fracking, along with tales of Father Divine, ski areas, and towns which now have voting majorities from ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects.

Strangely to this reviewer, The Catskills does not even mention two of the largest tourist draws in the region: the Catskill Game Farm and its little brother Carson City. The Game Farm survived for seventy years as at least three generations of families drove to this outdoor zoo where kids could feed most of the animals and watch circus-like animal shows. Nearby was the “wild west” re-enactment park Carson City, where costumed cowboys would stage mini-rodeos and gunfights every hour.

Families that did not stay at the resorts or mountaintop hotels would still come to the Game Farm and often attend Carson City while they were at it. Just as John Burroughs wrote a lot more about the wildlife of the Catskills, perhaps some writer will some day share the story of the Game Farm.