Murray's Response

We recently noticed a Facebook post on the Adirondack Mountain News page.
"William H. H. Murray wrote his celebrated book in the spring of 1869 to introduce city dwellers to the rewards of camping in the wilderness. Thousands of tourists streamed to the Adirondacks that summer in what was known as "Murray's Rush." Unfortunately, most had not read the book carefully, and that summer was unusually wet and cold. The result was an enormous outcry against Murray and his "lies," to which he responded with vigor in an article published in the New-York Daily Tribune on October 23, 1869. "

One of the pages followers asked if they knew what Murray's response was. We didn't see anything posted there yet... but we know what it was!

Murray's Response:
Six months after the book's publication and following his return from vacation in the Adirondacks that summer, W.H.H. (“Adirondack”) Murray replied publicly to his detractors in a published letter  “The Adirondacks: Murray on Murray’s Fools; Reply to His Calumniators.” In his response, Murray defended the Adirondacks and his book, forecasting that one day “hotels will multiply, cottages will be built along the shores of its lakes, white tents will gleam amid the pines which cover its islands and hundreds of weary and over-worked men will penetrate the Wilderness to its inner-most recesses. And find amid its solitude health and repose.” Murray did not hesitate to go after the wealthy sportsmen who, finding “their wilderness” the subject of great public interest due to Murray’s book, stood behind many of the criticisms cast at Murray and Adventures in the Wilderness. In that same October 1869 article, Murray wrote: “I have no sympathy at all with those two or three hundred gentlemen who would selfishly monopolize the Adirondack Wilderness for their own exclusive amusement and benefit. Indeed I do not look at the Wilderness as belonging to sportsmen or any class; it belongs to the country at large….It is, and is to be regarded in the future, a place to which not only the artist, and the lover of nature in her grandest aspects, but the business man and the professional man, weary and jaded by months and years of over-work can go and find in its recesses rest and recuperation for body and mind… This, as it seems to me, is the true use of the wilderness, and its value to the country at large.”