What can we learn from the Indian Ladder?

The state park that now encompasses the iconic ladder celebrated its centennial this weekend.

The place is dear to the hearts of many who live on or beneath the Helderberg escarpment, yet little is known about the actual ladder. Timothy Albright, who has hiked the land since boyhood and researched its history in manhood, wrote four detailed and thoughtful columns for our newspaper this summer, leading up to the centennial celebration. Albright illustrated his columns with the photographs and etchings he has gathered over the years, and used in co-writing a book on the subject published by Arcadia.

First, Albright profiled the life of John Boyd Thacher — Albany mayor, state senator, manufacturer, writer, and lover of nature — who amassed 350 acres of Helderberg land. After his death, his wife bequeathed them to the state as a park, named for her husband. Albright wrote, too, of the history of the Indian Ladder, far older than the European settlers, who eventually blasted the ancient path into a rough road.

And he wrote of the tourists in Victorian times that flocked to the Indian Ladder, in their long skirts and bowler hats, seeking adventure and a lesson in natural history. Finally, last week, he wrote of the dedicatory ceremony, of the great pomp and pageantry that, a century ago, opened John Boyd Thacher Park.

Among the pictures from the Sept. 14, 1914 ceremony were those of actors playing the parts of Native Americans, with teepees in the background. Teepees, of course, were homes for the Indians of the western plains. The tribes of the Iroquois Nations that lived in the Helderbergs, or lived in the valleys near enough to use the trail with the ladder, would have lived in longhouses.

Our understanding of history is always compromised by our biases and, in the case of cultures that left no discernible written records, our later interpretations are gleaned from the artifacts we find and use to piece together a history.

Albright has many pictures of the replica ladders that were used in the 1800s for visitors to scale the limestone cliffs. Since there is no picture of the real ladder, Albright has commissioned Carol Coogan to create a rendition of how it may have looked. Our readers are familiar with Coogan because her art appears each week on this page. Coogan has worked with Albright from period descriptions to create the illustration you see here. She has shared this sketch now on which the final drawing will be based.

Verplanck Colvin, who put the Helderbergs on the map for 19^th-Century Americans and whose work led to the creation of the Adirondack Park, depicted the escarpment in words and pictures in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1869.  He called the ascent “a savage stairway up the mountain slope, of broken rock fragments and great water-worn boulders,” and continued, “if your heart fail you not — for any place more difficult to climb is impossible — you will ascend for a breathless, dangerous, exciting three or four hours to the foot of the cliffs and the falls — an escalade which will bear comparison with any thing climbable.”

Now, of course, we ascend by cars on roads of smooth macadam. Manicured trails ease our passage. The cliff’s edge affords the same sweeping views where we, protected by fences at the edge, can gaze at a landscape now no longer a wilderness, but largely wrought by the hands of man.

We see cultivated fields and parks, housing developments, an industrial park, a university and city from afar.

In many ways, we have progressed as a society. We live longer with sophisticated medicine to cure many of our ills, easy-to-come-by food to nourish us, and homes built of sturdy manufactured materials to shelter us.  We have lives of ease compared to those Native Americans who first lived here and the European settlers who arrived in the 1600s.

“In 1710, this Helderberg region was a wilderness,” wrote Colvin in 1869. “Nay, all westward of the Hudson River settlements was unknown. Albany was a frontier town, a trading post, a place where annuities were paid, and blankets exchanged with Indians for beaver pelts.... Straight as the wild bee or the crow the wild Indian made his course from the white man’s settlement to his own home in the beauteous Schoharie Valley. The stern cliffs of these hills opposed his progress; his hatchet fells a tree against them, the stumps of the branches which he trimmed away formed the rounds of the Indian ladder....”

Such is the sort of ladder Coogan has depicted. We note the agility of those who climb it — the strength and courage it must take — and we see the nobility and dignity of those in the foreground at its base.

The scene makes us reflect on the human condition. As people, we need wilderness and we need challenges. We note the explosion in recent decades of Americans scaling mountains in their leisure time and we are grateful for the preservation and expansion of Thacher, which now totals 2,400 acres. We’ve written about the new master plan for the park, which will have a welcome visitors’ center to educate people about its ancient geological and more recent human history.

The plan also calls for rock-climbing. We worry about the fragility of the cliffs while recognizing the human need for challenge. Maybe there is a larger challenge each of us should consider.

The Iroquois, who call themselves Haudenosaunee — Builders of the Longhouse — have a belief that no person is entitled to own land. Rather, the creator appointed humans — specifically women in this matrilineal clan society — as stewards of the land.

For all the progress that can be seen from the escarpment’s edge, there are problems, too. We have polluted our Earth, many of us taking the easy path, often without thought, to heat our homes or transport ourselves. In this week’s newspaper, we’ve produced an environmentalist’s how-to guide, interviewing local people who have taken perhaps a more difficult route — say, with an electric car, or solar energy — to fulfill their basic human needs in order to tread more lightly upon our Earth.

Let us, each one, embrace that as our challenge — hewing one step at a time on the path to common good

— Melissa Hale-Spencer