Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and Fitz Greene Hallock at Little Rapids

While looking through the photo collection of my friend Tim Mayers a few years back, I was struck by a series of photos that show the family of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau gathered at the Little Rapids flag stop on the Adirondack Division of the New York Central Railroad. Until that day, I had no idea that Dr. Trudeau, the tuberculosis treatment pioneer of Saranac Lake, had any connection with the Beaver River country.

Little Rapids was and is the name of a series of shallow rapids on the Beaver River that lie between what is now the eastern end of the Stillwater Reservoir and Nehasane Lake. The rapids are not navigable, so early travelers skirted them on a well-established carry trail along the south bank. Sometime in the later 1870s, Andrew J. Muncey built a modest sportsmen’s hotel next to that carry trail. In 1891, Dr. William Seward Webb bought all the property in that area as part of his grand plan to build the railroad and establish his own great camp at Lake Lila. He closed off the carry trail, posted No Trespassing signs and had Muncey’s Hotel demolished. In its place he built a hunting lodge for the use of his guests during the fall deer hunting season. The Little Rapids lodge was used by some of Webb’s game protectors during the rest of the year.

 

As I explored the connection between Dr. Trudeau and Little Rapids, I learned of Dr. Trudeau’s unique relationship with his favorite outdoor guide, Fitz Greene Hallock. Most sporting tourists of that era were necessarily casually friendly with their guides, but the relationship was usually short-term and remained primarily an economic one. In contrast, the friendship that developed between Hallock and Trudeau lasted almost forty years and involved more than just hunting and fishing.

 

The basic facts of Dr. Trudeau’s story are well-known. He was born in New York City on October 5, 1848. He received his medical training at Columbia College, graduating in 1871. That same year he married Charlotte “Lottie” Beare [1824 – 1923], moved to Long Island and opened a medical practice. He was diagnosed with tuberculous in 1873. His doctors advised him to find a place out of the city where he could rest and get plenty of clean, fresh air. Accordingly, he traveled to Paul Smith’s Hotel in the Adirondacks. Dr. Trudeau enjoyed the outdoors and believed that time spent out in the woods would improve his spirits, if not his health. After a few months at Paul Smith’s his health improved markedly. Consequentially, in 1876 he relocated his family and his medical practice to the village of Saranac Lake.

 

Dr. Trudeau first met Fitz Greene Hallock in the mid-1870s while staying at Paul Smith’s where Hallock worked as a guide. When not guiding, Hallock lived in the village of Saranac Lake with his wife Mary Albin Thoop [1838 – 1900]. He had grown up in the north country and, like many guides, was a Civil War veteran. Fitz Greene Hallock was a bit older than Dr. Trudeau having been born in 1839 or 1840. It is likely that he was named after the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck [1790-1867], a popular romantic poet of the time. Shortly after Dr. Trudeau moved to Saranac Lake, Hallock began to guide for him year-round.

 

Over many years of hunting and fishing together Hallock and Trudeau became good and trusted friends. Dr. Trudeau believed that he owed his own reasonably good health to the natural environment of Saranac Lake and the exercise he got when out in the woods with his friend Fitz. They fished in the spring and summer, hunted deer in the fall and went out daily all winter to hunt rabbits and foxes.

 

When Dr. Trudeau learned of the success European doctors had in treating TB with a strict regimen of exposure to fresh air, a good diet and plentiful exercise, he decided to attempt the same cure in Saranac Lake. To this end he founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in 1889. The enterprise was funded by a group of Trudeau’s wealthy friends, but among the eighteen incorporators was his trusted guide, Fitz Greene Hallock. Indeed, a group of Saranac Lake guides led by Hallock purchased sixteen acres on Mt. Pisgah at the edge of the village and gave it to Dr. Trudeau for the site of his sanitarium.

 

Hallock was highly respected by his fellow guides. By the beginning of the 1890s there was a wide-spread feeling among professional guides that some of the men hiring out as guides were doing the profession a disservice by their dishonesty, lack of basic skills, undependability and heavy drinking. In 1891, along with other established guides, Fitz Greene Hallock founded the Adirondack Guides’ Association. Fitz was elected its first president.

 

His prominence as a guide attracted the attention of Dr. William Seward Webb, who soon hired Hallock as the superintendent, forester and special fish and game protector for Nehasane Park. A substantial crew of two dozen or more local guides worked for Dr. Webb under Fitz’s supervision. A reporter from the New York Times visited Nehasane and published a story on April 8, 1894, that included a colorful description of Fitz complete with this likeness.

 

In 1896, Hallock told Dr. Trudeau that he was tiring of his work for Dr. Webb and wanted nothing more than to find a secluded spot in the woods where he could live life more on his own terms. Hallock apparently also discussed the matter with Dr. Webb because later that year Webb offered to sell him about 1100 acres at the southwest edge of Nehasane on the Beaver River at Little Rapids. There were no roads or trails to this parcel, but the Adirondack Division Railroad passed by only a stone’s throw away from the clearing where the Little Rapids hunting lodge was located.

 

Webb’s asking price for this parcel including the hunting lodge, but not including the timber rights, was $10,000. Hallock could not afford to buy it, so his friend, Dr. Trudeau, raised the money and took title to the property in November 1896. He shared the expense with two of his friends, William Hall Penfold and J. W. Van Woert. Fitz Greene Hallock was given charge of the place with the understanding that he could stay there whenever he pleased. A small train platform built close to the lodge at Little Rapids became a flag stop on the Adirondack Division Railroad. This allowed Hallock and the Trudeau family easy access to the property by train from their homes in Saranac Lake.

 

Dr. Trudeau dearly loved Little Rapids. In his Autobiography he wrote [p. 292]:

 

“I am afraid to describe Little Rapids, because my description might seem extravagant; but it is just an ideal little hunting lodge, and the most beautiful aggregation of stream, lake and forest, peaceful in its lonely and wild beauty, and accessible, yet remote, from the busy world. I think some of the happiest days of my life have been spent there with my wife, my sons, who loved the place as much as I did, and our friends and my old friend Fitz Hallock, in the quiet stillness and beauty of the great forest.”

In the early years of the twentieth century Dr. Trudeau’s tuberculosis reemerged. Gradually his strength faded and his ability to walk long distances in the woods grew less and less. Fitz did his best to find ways to accommodate his friend’s limitations. Dr. Trudeau deeply appreciated these efforts as noted in these excerpts from his Autobiography [pp. 293-94]:

 

“The first time I became aware that he had noticed my walking powers were rapidly getting limited was when I found he had cut little paths all through the old hunting grounds, removing the brush and logs, and making it easier for me to walk. I questioned him about this, but he merely said that we could walk with less noise on these little paths than through the brush heaps and shrubs.”

 

“The next fall when I came down for my hunt it was late, and the forest floor as usual was covered with dry and crackling leaves, which as a rule made it almost impossible to get up to a deer without alarming him. As I followed Fitz steathily I noticed there were no leaves on the little paths he took me on so we made no noise; and when I asked him how this happened, he said that during the week before I came down, he had brushed away all the dead leaves from the paths where he was going to take me so we could walk quietly and have a better chance for a shot.” 

 

“When I could walk no more at all, he made a chair in which I could be carried everywhere to the old runways in the woods, and we had some good hunts and killed some deer in spite of our handicap, until I became too ill to go to Little Rapids anymore.”

 

Dr. Trudeau sold the property and lodge at Little Rapids in 1914. He died in November 15, 1915. Fitz Greene Hallock died four years later on October 13, 1919.

 

The love of the Adirondacks, so deep in the hearts of these two friends, has carried down through the generations. Fitz Greene Hallock is the great-great-great uncle of Neal Burdick, author of many fine books on the Adirondacks and long-time editor of Adirondac magazine. Neal wrote me recently that one of his most treasured possessions is Fitz Greene Hallock’s gold pocket watch, a gift from Dr. Webb, with the Nehasane logo engraved on the back. The famous Doonesbury cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, who has created the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival Button for many years, is the great-grandson of Dr. Edward L. Trudeau.

 

Sources:

Trudeau family photography albums, courtesy of the Saranac Lake Free Library.

Photography collection of Timothy Mayers.

“A day in the Adirondacks,” The New York Times, April 8, 1894.

Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, An Autobiography, pp. 291 – 294 (1916).

Obituary, “Fitz Greene Hallock, Splendid Type of Adirondack Guide, Takes the Long, Long Trail,” The Malone Farmer, October 22, 1919.

Neal Burdick, “Uncle Fitz,” Adirondack Life, pp. 22 – 26, Sept. – Oct. 2021.