Not much is known about the two hermits who lived along the upper Beaver River in the decades before the Civil War. They were by far the first year-round residents, predating those who later settled the area by thirty years or more. Their lives were lonely and difficult. Their stories provide some interesting glimpses into what it must have been like to live deep in the Adirondack wilderness during those days.
David Smith: ~1825 until ~1845
A man named David Smith was the earliest year-round inhabitant of the upper Beaver River valley above the rapids. He is presumed to have arrived in the mid-1820s and reportedly first lived for a few years in a shanty near the confluence of the Beaver River and Twitchell Creek. Smith preferred the life of a hermit and did not welcome visitors. To avoid having his solitude interrupted by the infrequent hunter or trapper, sometime around 1830 Smith moved farther upstream where he cleared a few acres and built a cabin on the bank of the beautiful lake at the headwaters of the Beaver River. Before long that lake (now known as Lake Lila) was being called Smith’s Lake. In 1845 the new Carthage to Lake Champlain Road made the upper Beaver River more accessible and sporting tourism began to increase. This was apparently not to Smith’s liking. Shortly thereafter, he disappeared.
Everything we know about Smith comes from stories handed down by local hunters, trappers and guides who may or may not have met him. The earliest published account of Smith’s life appears in Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester’s Historical Sketches of Northern New York and the Adirondack Wilderness (1877). Sylvester reported that Smith lived by hunting and trapping and that he had an excellent collection of taxidermy specimens that he exhibited on his infrequent trips to Lowville. Sylvester also described an incident where Smith supposedly walked forty miles to the pioneer settlement of Number Four in the dead of winter to get help because he was choking on a piece of moose meat.
At least some of what Sylvester knew about Smith was probably told to him by a Beaver River guide named Asa Puffer. We know that Puffer had at least met Smith. For much of the summer of 1841 Puffer worked as an axe-man for the surveyor Nelson Beach who was laying out the course of the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road. David Smith worked for a few days guiding that survey team through the upper Beaver River area, so Puffer would necessarily have made Smith’s acquaintance.
We know that Puffer told the “choking on moose meat” story because the artist Jervis McEntee recorded it in his journal in the summer of 1851 during the time Puffer worked as his guide. It seems likely that Puffer recounted the story frequently, including to Sylvester.
McEntee’s 1851 journal also includes other speculations about Smith, some from Puffer and others based on his own observations. During a two-week stay at Smith’s Lake, McEntee visited what remained of Smith’s cabin. He found Smith’s garden growing up in trees. As McEntee so poetically put it, “The spot which he cleared had grown up with a thrifty growth of wild cherry trees from ten to twenty feet in height, among which we found one solitary apple tree, a fitting type among this dissolution of him who planted it there. The trailing vine matted in wild luxuriance overran his fields and trees were growing where his spade had turned up the dark, rich mold.”
Puffer had evidently told McEntee that Smith moved to the lake twenty years earlier, i.e., 1831, and had lived there for fifteen years until 1846. Smith’s cabin was still intact but in bad repair. The cabin was built of logs covered with long hand-split shingles. McEntee presumed that Smith left to seek a more solitary home in the far west because, “About that time [five years earlier] fishing parties began to visit the lake quite frequently, which I suppose was an annoyance to him who had come so far in the forest and borne away so many discomforts for the sake of being alone.”
Sylvester, ordinarily a careful chronicler of local history, seemed a bit doubtful about the truth of the stories he had been told about Smith’s life. He openly wondered what Smith’s real life might have been if it “could be written.” Since Sylvester moved to Lowville in 1848 to work as an attorney, he could not have met David Smith. Sylvester did visit the upper Beaver River on many occasions and probably heard stories about David Smith not only from Puffer but from other guides and local residents, so he decided to write Smith’s story, whether all the details were true or not.
Most later writers who bother to mention David Smith simply repeat some version of Sylvester’s account. One notable exception is the meticulously researched account of another attorney, Charles E. Snyder, who gave a lecture on the history of John Brown’s Tract to the Herkimer County Historical Society on December 8, 1896. When discussing David Smith, Snyder explicitly noted that Smith was the subject of much speculation among local residents.
"The mystery of his life, no one so far as I have learned, has ever discovered. Some claim that he went to the woods on account of the death of his fiancée, others maintain that he sought refuge there because his wife made it too interesting for him at home, while still others insist that he was a political refugee from a foreign country, hiding here in the midst of the forest. All accounts of him agree that he was not a hunter and trapper. The deer, it is said, used to come about his place without fear."
We will probably never know whether Sylvester’s taxidermist or Snyder’s deer-loving vegetarian was the real David Smith.
James “Jimmy” O’Kane: ~1845 until 1858
In 1844 when the workers cutting a path through the forest to create the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road reached the confluence of the Beaver River with Twitchell Creek at Stillwater, they built a small log cabin on the high ground to serve as temporary living quarters since building a long log bridge from the materials at hand took a lot of time. The next summer after the road builders had left, a man named James O’Kane moved into the abandoned cabin. He lived there as a squatter until his death in January 1858.
The artist Jervis McEntee and his friend Joseph Tubby spent the first night of their 1851 sketching trip in O’Kane’s cabin. They had heard rumors that O’Kane may have died, but found him very much alive at his shanty on the edge of a tract of burned trees quite close by the log road bridge. McEntee described the cabin like this:
"Here is a specimen of what the seeker after the beautiful has to partake of by the way of accommodations. The cabin was built of logs having a bark roof and one window and door. It also possessed the luxury of a floor, a comfort that we shall not often meet, I fear, and last of all a large cooking stove."
O’Kane himself did not make a favorable impression on the two young painters.
"He was tall, very tall, being six foot three inches, and although he stooped considerably, this was the first thing we remarked about him. He had long black hair and the unmistakable features of an Irishman and though we might have doubted from whence he came, these doubts were put to flight at the sound of his voice. Taking him altogether with his huge frame, his sunblossomed [sic] face, his old gray cravat and unctuous woolen shirt, he was decidedly an unpleasant-looking chap to sleep with in a log cabin."
McEntee admited that O’Kane tried to make them welcome, but stories told them by Puffer their guide led them to hide their liquor jug to keep O’Kane from using it too liberally. After an evening spent hunting, they all tried to get some sleep in the close, foul-smelling cabin. The young artists remained uneasy and did not sleep well.
"We turned in, however, and making pillows of our knapsacks and rolling ourselves in our blankets, sought sleep. The driver and Puffer were soon unconscious, but with Jimmie’s soliloquies over the mice and chipmunks that ate his beans and the fears that if we all slept he might appropriate some of our small articles, kept Joe and I awake. However, after we had ceased answering his questions, for some time he laid down three or four old bags of straw, black with grease and dirt, and wrapped himself in an old blue military overcoat and amid mutterings and growls among which we could distinguish “Montreal and Quebec” he slid off into the quiet land."
We also have first-person accounts from Nathaniel B. Sylvester, who visited O’Kane on several occasions during the 1850s. Sylvester wrote that O’Kane grew his own vegetables to supplement what he could hunt or catch. Passing sportsmen contributed liberally to O’Kane’s larder. Apparently, O’Kane kept a barrel of salted small animals in his cabin to eat in an emergency.
O’Kane was also known by the Constable family who travelled along the Carthage-to-Lake Champlain Road several times during the early 1850s on their way to and from their camp at Raquette Lake. They described him as “a miserable specimen of humanity, who, according to his own account, has been living at this spot for the past seven years, in a wretched shanty, with no companion but a dog.”
A group including the editor of the New York Daily Times, Henry Jarvis Raymond, stopped for their midday meal at O’Kane’s shanty in the summer of 1855. Raymond called the shanty “Jimmysville.” He characterized it as a “small, low wrenched hut.” He noted that O’Kane was tall, unshaven and covered by dirty rags that had once been pants and jacket, as “savage, wrenched and repulsive appearance as can be imagined.”
When Sylvester visited O'Kane in May of 1857, he found him feeble and ill noting, “It was the first day of the spring in which he had been able to crawl out to the bridge across the creek and set his poles for fishing.” O’Kane died alone at his shanty the following January. He was buried at Stillwater, supposedly at his favorite spot on the high bank of Twitchell Creek overlooking the great Beaver River marsh.
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