An excerpt from Sketchbook Traveler: Southwest. Schiffer Publishing. September 27, 2022. Click on the image below for a look inside the book:

Bachelor Mountain above Creede, Colorado from below Wagon Wheel Gap Journal-painting 3.5 x 10.5 inches. October 17, 2019

North of Del Norte Colorado is the La Garita caldera. Its massive eruption during the Cenozoic era dumped vast quantities of ash and debris across the surrounding terrain. Twenty-five-million years of erosion have created rocky spires and other picturesque formations located within the Wheeler Geological Area managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Similar formations extending to the west include Bachelor Mountain, which rises above the village of Creede, Colorado. During the 1880s, silver mines fueled a booming community. Like many mining-camps Creede became a den of iniquity, infested by organized crime. Silver mining declined in the wake of the Panic of 1893. Ranching continued in the bottomlands south and west of Creede. Mining survived on Lead, Zinc and Copper. Dude ranches and fly-fishing camps along the headwaters of Rio Grande today contribute to the local economy. Driving north from del Norte past South Fork, Colorado Highway 149 ascends the Rio Grande through a deep defile, framing the distant distinctive mass of Bachelor Mountain—an outlier of the Wheeler formations ten miles to the east. Readers wondering why I did not hike to the ridge-line for a better view, the first rule of traveling in wilderness areas is never to do it alone. Leaving the car on a wide shoulder above the river, I located this prospect looking northwest from 37.7592 x -106.7813. Framed by high wooded ridged on both sides, Bachelor Mountain was reminiscent of Titian’s Dolomites, Thomas Moran’s Mount of the Holy Cross and Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Now available: Sketchbook Traveler Southwest. Schiffer Publishing. September 27, 2022

Click on the image below to learn about Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley

November 2020: A new suite of color intaglio etchings.
Printed by Philadelphia Master Printer Cindi Royce Ettinger
Paper: Somerset etching paper
Sheet size: 11 x 14 inches; 27.94 cm. x 35.56 cm.
Image size: 4 x 10 inches; 10.16 x 25.4 cm.
Archival pigment chine-colle printed by Katie Tackman, Philadelphia.
Available from Gerald Peters Gallery. Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Contact: Maria Hajic.

mh****@gp*******.com

Confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Pueblo de Taos. Number one

Confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Pueblo de Taos. Number two

Confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Pueblo de Taos. Number three

Confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Pueblo de Taos. Number four

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number one

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number two

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number three

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number four

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number five

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number Six

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number Seven

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number eight

Tunyo or The Black Mesa. Number Nine

Just released: Sketchbook Traveler: Hudson Valley.
Schiffer Publishing. Own one today. Click here

Richard Hovenden Kern. View of Santa Fe from Fort Marcy. 1849, Notice the emphasis given to distant landmarks.

Looking east beyond the dam lie the Ortiz Mountains, which on Dick Kern’s view of Santa Fe from Fort Marcy are identified as the Placer Mountains. Curious to compare Kern’s rendering of the vista with how it might look today, I climb up to the ruins of the fort and look southward.

View of Santa Fe. March 4, 2019. 10:52 AM. Photo by the author. Notice how minuscule are the topographical elements which in Kern’s drawing are so prominent.

Confirming that I was in the right location was the presence on the right of Bishop’s Lodge Road, known in 1849 as the Old Road to Taos. The rugged cross on the left of Kern’s drawing honors the twenty-one Franciscans killed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. What strikes me about Kern’s drawing are liberties he took in representing various landmarks in scale. The Sandias are instantly identifiable, as is Cerro Tetilla (nipple hill), and east-facing slopes of the Jemez Mountains to the right.

View of Santa Fe. Newspaper engraving. 1879.

A later view of Santa Fe from Fort Marcy is clearly done from a photograph. All the topographical features so visible in Kern’s 1848 rendering have been reduced to a silhouette along the horizon. The broad, open foreground in this engraving is a fiction. The town in fact comes right up to the foot of the bluff. Contemporary realist painters today might praise the verisimilitude of the later view, condemning Kern’s inaccuracies as primitive. They would be missing the point entirely. Apart from being a trained draftsman, Kern was an accomplished topographer who with his brother Ned produced maps for the official reports of the expeditions that employed them. Kern’s view from Fort Marcy blends a picturesque vista with a bird’s eye view of the town in relation to distant landmarks, to help orient the reader.

Bird’s eye view of Santa Fe, looking east. 1882 During the late 19th century these chorographic hybrids were very popular– forerunners of the tear-off map-pads available in so many tourist-information centers around the world. The designer-draftsman of this pictorial map probably never visited Santa Fe. Certain features are prominent, while others are missing. the ruins of Fort Marcy are locted on the hills to the left, just beyond the Old Taos Road.

Bohemian purists might dismiss Kern’s drawing as mere illustration, but as we have seen in the works of serious artists like Church and Bierstadt, the same tactics are used in the production of fine art. Both artists careers spanned the years during which photography became art, holding firmly to the belief that for something to be art, it must improve upon fact—even if that meant playing fast-and-loose with data. The later view of Santa Fe is nothing more than a manual-mechanical reiteration of a photomechanical factoid. Demonstrating perhaps technical skill and optical accuracy, one can learn nothing from it. Bereft of curiosity, intelligence or purpose, it is the product of mindless mimesis; the work of a copyist, not an artist.

Kern’s drawing was dedicated to identifying specific features of terrain beyond the range of optical experience. This same kind of visual jujitsu occurs in Frederic Church’s Cayambe, in which the snowy volcano is portrayed at many times its actual size. Church had done this for visual effect, Kern for calling attention to data.

Frederic Edwin Church. Cayambe. 1858. Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Reproduced under fair use, etc.)

November 27, 2014. Thanksgiving Day. Cayambe seen from the high road between Zuleta and San Pable del Lago.

On a trip to Ecuador I tried to determine Church’s point of view, but found the peak of Cayambe shrouded in clouds. Comparing my sketch to Church’s painting gave me insight into how he might have assembled his composites. Looking back toward Imbabura from Otavallo, Cayambe would have been nothing more than a white speck on the horizon. By bringing it forward, Church lets us experience in the same moment landmarks that in fact are quite distant from one another. Moving us through time, Church takes us on a tour of northern Ecuador in a single vista. This is not plein-air painting. Nor is it realism.

Albert Bierstadt. A Storm in the Rockies. Mount Rosalie. 1866. Brooklyn Museum.

Albert Bierstadt pulls a similar trick in his 1866 painting Storm in the Rockies. Mount Rosalie (Mount Evans), now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. In his painting, the factual summit of the mountain is buried in clouds, into which Bierstadt punches a porthole through which we behold a preposterous snowy peak. The painting is based on sketches he produced in 1863 while traveling with author and explorer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife had become Bierstadt’s mistress. That is another story. I have been to the summit of Mount Evans on several occasions. The ascent requires a hair-raising drive along the edge of a precipice, dodging wild sheep and daredevil cyclists.

Wild Sheep at summit Lake parking area (above) June 18, 2016

Summit of Mount Evans (below) June 18, 2016

The actual summit of Mount Evans-Rosalie is on the left-hand side of this composite photograph. The Chicago lakes are visible to the right. Just below the summit one can walk to the edge of an alpine lake that drains into a declivity on the north face of the mountain, into an escalade of small lakes. Bierstadt’s point of view was near the lowest of these, (31.6191 x 105.6313) near where its outflow forms Chicago Creek. Its waters descend through Idaho Springs, feeding into Clear Creek, which passes Golden en route to its confluence with the South Platte river just north of Denver.

Map of New Mexico Territory. Richard H. Kern. 1851. Collection Huntington Library. San Marino, CA

Below White Rock Canyon the Rio Grande flows below table-lands to the east and a series of cañadas to the west—deep ravines clawed into the southeastern slopes of the Jemez volcano, as if by a giant hand. Through these defiles seasonal creeks dump rainwater and snowmelt into the river. One of these—Rito de los Frijoles descends through Bandelier National Monument. Named for noted archaeologist, ethnologist and preservationist Adolf Bandelier (1840-1914), the National Park Service interprets more than thirty thousand acres ranging in elevation from five to ten thousand feet. Visible evidence of human habitation spanning thousands of years included Tyounyi ruins and other excavated pueblos, along with modern reconstructions, original cliff-dwellings and petroglyphs.

White Rock Canyon

Winding beneath high bluffs, the river widens gradually. Its flow rate decreases as the current enters the upper reaches of Cochiti Lake. An impoundment of nearly forty million gallons on average, this body of water is created by a large dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers between 1965 and 1973. One would presume that in such a dry country the function of the dam would be water-collection for irrigation. Prior to its construction, the combination of heavy snowmelt and a narrow channel would transform the Rio Grande into a raging torrent. Flooding bottomlands dedicated to agriculture, the damage wrought immense hardship on indigenous communities downriver, such as Cochiti and Santo Domingo pueblo, and Spanish settlements Peña Blanca and Algodones. These, and other farming settlements up and down the river depended on a system of acequias, water-bearing ditches shared by the community. New Mexicans are by nature friendly and easy-going. In picking a fight, defaming a mother’s virtue always works. In New Mexico, a disagreement over water-rights will get you there quicker.

Topo map of Cochiti Dam and Lake.

I first visited Cochiti in 1980. The lake was seven years old. Unlike today, the reservation was open to public use. Unpaved roads led north to the ash-fields and cañadas below Valles Caldera, or west to the tent-rocks at Kasha-Katuwe, Keresan for white rocks. In 2001 the area was designated a National Monument. Santa Fe County and Albuquerque have over the past thirty years both doubled in population, leading the Cochiti Pueblo community to close its lands to unauthorized visitors. At the same time, one is greeted today by a modern welcome center, café and gift-shop. One of the few areas open to the public is Cochiti Dam.
Driving toward the hamlet of Cochiti Lake I turn right, passing a cluster of tribal utility buildings. Veering right again, I descend a long incline that terminated at a wide-boat-landing with a short dock to its left. A local man stood in the water, wrestling his boat onto a trailer. To either side of the ramp are short stretches of beach. Parking in the lot to the right, I carried my gear across the boat-ramp, sitting down at one of the concrete picnic-tables behind the beach. I am the only non-indigenous person at the site. A young couple sits at the next table, staring into their cellphones. A fisherman walks by, looks at me and nods. Before long my work absorbs me, not so much that I would be grateful for the absence of curious onlookers. One expects diffidence from Native Americans toward Anglos visiting Indian land. History has given them no reason to trust our kind. I am mindful also that the lake and its shores are under the control of the Army Corps of Engineers, which adds yet another nervous level to the human layer-cake one finds in The Land of Enchantment.

Cochiti Reservoir. March 6, 2019. Southeast from 35.6361204 x 106.3222467

Gazing across the water, the Ortiz-Placer range is minuscule, barely visible. Taking a page out of the Kern-Church playbook, I enlarge the distant mountains in relation to the lake and dam. An hour before dusk, shadows crawl down the hillside and march across the lake. Rosy light wash the faraway peaks. Consumed with my task, I fail to notice that everyone had left. A police SUV idles in the parking-lot. Better to leave without waiting to be asked.

March 6, 2019. Looking  Southeast across Cochiti Lake. Photograph by the author.

Follow James Lancel McElhinney and The Sketchbook Traveler on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.

Peruse previous posts here. Dispatches #1-70. April 1-June 8, 2020.

Coming Soon: Hardcover. $24.95. From Schiffer Publishing. Release date: September 2020.

Northwest from 44.029 x 73.4266. The Ruins of Fort St-Frederic, Crown Point State Historic Site on Lake Champlain.

Journal-painting begun during a field-trial of new live, online outdoor workshop format, of Friday September 18, 2020. The result was that most of the technology cooperated, and that I now have a means of presenting a workshop live, in real time, outdoors and online. Many plein-air workshops focus on technique, getting to a finished product. The approach I promote is to provide people with the motivation to rediscover the outdoors. Journaling enriches activities like hiking, camping, visiting historic sites and natural wonders. This is not about technique. It’s a practice that transforms experience into knowledge.

The peninsula north of Riviere de la Chute, which carries water from Lake George into Lake Champlain was militarily strategic because it commands the portages between the Saint Lawrence watershed, Lake Champlain (Pitawbagok) Lake George (Kandiatarocte) and the Hudson Valley. The eastern corner of Crown Point reaches toward Chimney Point, on the western shoreline of Vermont.  The vehicular bridge that first spanned the narrows in 1929 was replaced in 2011.

Crown Point, New York. 1759. showing the Grand Fort, the ruins of the French citadel, the disposition of British army camps. Chimney Point, Vermont is seen at top right.

Thomas Davies. Captain, Royal Artillery. 1737-1812. Southerly View of Crown Point. 1759. Davies went on to become a Lieutenant-General and noted naturalist artist. The curious craft is a timber-clad gunboat.

Reaching fifty miles northward from South Bay, Lake Champlain seems no wider than a river in some places. Beyond Crown Point the waters broaden into a series of expansive bays. In pre-colonial days the area between the La Chute and Crown Point was no-man’s-land between territories controlled by the Mohawk nation (Kanienkehake) to the south, and the Abenaki to the north and east. In peacetime it served as a meeting-place and trading hub. During periods of hostility, it became a battleground. Having allied themselves with these traditional enemies, the colonial powers of France and Britain found themselves at odds on the same contested ground. Crown Point served a military function again, during the American War of independence when it changed hands several times. Since 1910 the site has been maintained as a park by the State of New York, with picnic areas, a small museum and hiking trails. Champlain Memorial Lighthouse stands on the easternmost tip of the peninsula.

Champlain Bridge (NY Rte 903/ VT Rte 17) Looking north from the ruins of Fort St-Frederic. Crown Point, New York.

Crown Point and much of the Champlain region is undergirded with fossilized Ordovician limestone also known as the Chazy Fossil-Reef that stretches from Tennessee to Newfoundland. Formed half a billion years ago, its most recognizable characteristic is a layer-cake of strata. The brittle dark grey rock shatters easily under a hammer-stroke, to reveal one of the most diverse arrays of fossils on Earth. This stone was quarried by the French for material to construct Fort Carillon, later Ticonderoga. It was also quarried at Crown Point (Pointe de Chevelure) to build Fort St-Frederic. After 1759 the British built Fort Crown Point with masonry salvaged from the French fortress, augmented with freshly cut stones. Unfinished blocks can still be seen lying near borrow-pits along the shoreline. During the nineteenth century masonry from the historic forts was cannibalized to feed new construction in nearby towns and dwellings. New pits carved out of the ground fed the production of lime.

Graffiti on the rocky ledges, Parade-ground at Ft. Crown Point. Photo: September 2020

Looking at the ruins of eighteenth-century Fort Crown Point, one finds the surrounding moat filled with haps of broken spoil from outcroppings dressed to serve as part of the fort’s outer wall. These surfaces were then covered in masonry, some of which is visible today. Rising up from the parade ground within the fort are several large uptilted rafts of grey limestone. One supposes that General Amherst’s fort had covered these with soil. Perhaps they emerged after the centuries or exposure to the elements. Carved into them are the names of visitors dating back to the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine red-coated regulars drilling in close formations on such broken ground. These limestone uplifts appear all over the peninsula—some stretching down to the water in broad layered sheets.

My first visit to Crown Point was in the company of noted author James Howard Kunstler in 1992. I was in the midst of a project that explored Civil War battlefields threatened by commercial development.  Fitting my narrative as a spectacular military ruin I chose to overlook the hundred and two-year gap between its construction, and the sectional conflict that tore the nation apart in 1861. Since shifting my base this year from Manhattan to the Champlain Valley I made several visits to the site. After completing an inspection of Fort Saint-Frederic, and a circuit of the battlements of Fort Crown Point, my focus shifted from military history to the natural setting. Walking down a grassy track to a wooded finger of land pointing northward into the lake, a small green frog leaped across my path. Stepping from the grassy track onto a rocky shelf, I noticed the residue of macadam. To my left at the bottom of this ramp was a large pit carved out of the bank.

Quarry-pit northwest of Fort Crown Point

Undressed stones lay off to the right. Piles of smaller stones the size of brickbats lay scattered about in heaps. Too small for use as masonry, these would have been piled into one of the lime-kilns that once stood nearby. A cluster of large umbrageous trees at the landward end of the jetty reminded me of a Barbizon painting of Fontainebleau forest. Beyond this grove was a wide rocky beach; a broad crescent reaching westward. Crisscrossed with fractures, long diagonal slabs of limestone angled up from the shoreline. Upon one of these was heaped a gathering of small cairns, different from those I had seen a month ago. Beachcombers set them up. Someone, or something knocks them down. They are reassembled, and then toppled again, like the cycles of nature. Dashed against one of these limestone slabs, a large stone shattered. Instead of coherent fossils within the brittle chunk I found a dense, sparkling charcoal-grey mass variegated with organic patterns of slightly lighter material.

Resting on one of these broad rocky shelves was the spine and pelvis of a medium-sized mammal—perhaps a dog or coyote. A tangle of ribs and rotting lake-grass lay beside it. The absence of blood and the presence of vegetal material led me to wonder if the animal had not drowned. Having washed ashore the rotting carcass might have been dragged onto the rocks by ubiquitous turkey-vultures, leaving scraps from their feast for the gulls and raccoons.

Freshwater oyster-shell, Crown Point  New York.

Underfoot I find the shells of freshwater clams and oysters nestled among small rocks. Scaling the grassy slope, I pass the sun-bleached skull and bones of a large bass. A couple makes their way from the end of the rip-rap mole back to shore. The woman waved. The man nodded. Body-language suggested they might have met for a tryst. Following the embankment, a gravel road led into the woods. Passing another couple walking a dog, I was greeted with nods and shy looks. Finding a private residence at the end of the road, I backtracked to a cluster of utility sheds overlooking the green mass of Fort Crown Point to the right, the parking-lot, esplanade and Fort St.-Frederic. Spanning the narrows between New York and Vermont, the Champlain Bridge arced up above a wooded grove beside highway 903.

(Above Ruins of the Barracks at Fort Crown Point. Built ca. 1759. (Below) Aerial view of His Majesty’s Fort at Crown Point.

The large pentagonal star-fort was built expeditiously. The eastern moat was blasted out of the limestone that undergirds the peninsula. The original walls were timber set on stone footings covered with earth. The barracks were gutted by fire in 1773. Occupying the site in 1775, American troops constructed new shelters and warehouses. Benjamin Franklin visited Crown Point en route to secret negotiations in Montreal. Richard Montgomery assembled his forces here for his invasion of Canada. Half the guns Henry Knox brought to Boston in March of 1776 had come from Fort Crown Point, with the rest from Ticonderoga. As a British fleet entered Lake Champlain in the fall of 1776, Continental forces put their base to the torch, withdrawing behind Montcalm’s former defenses at Fort Carillon/Ticonderoga. Having been bested by Burgoyne’s army the following year, their post was abandoned. In 1910 the military ruins at Crown Point were acquired by the State of New York, to be preserved as a park for public use and recreation.

Map of Crown Point State Historic Site. Trail Map LINK

Scanning the site, I was reminded that in June of 1775 one of my ancestors had been here; a thirty-eight-year-old first lieutenant in Griswold’s Fifth Company of Benjamin Hinman’s Fourth Connecticut Regiment. Sixteen years earlier Captain Thomas Davies of the Royal Artillery had produced a detailed watercolor of the facility from a position three hundred yards southeast of where I was standing. From what I could reckon by looking at maps of the period, today’s parking-area had been covered by workshops and warehouses serving the fort. General Amherst and his staff would have been lodged beside a little cove, just beyond the foot of today’s bridge. A picnic area and events-pavilion now stand on the site of an earthen French redoubt. Rangers and indigenous forces were quartered in huts and wigwams near the site of the present-day park-ranger station and maintenance area.

Thomas Davies. 1737-1812. View of Amherst’s army at Crown Point, 1759. Courtesy Wintherthur Museum, Delaware.

Embellished with picturesque touches, Davies’s finished watercolor is far from naïve in its rendering of the site. Twenty-first-century viewers might mistake topographical accuracy for a lack of optical verisimilitude. Davies was keenly aware that whatever artistic aims his painting might achieve, his primary goal was creating a chorographic vista one could read like a map. A hallmark of expeditionary art is the distortion of scale to render more legible certain features of terrain. I noted this on many occasions when my travels gave me the opportunity to compare the optical experience of beholding terrain with historic depictions more focused on conveying data. Richard Hovenden Kern’s 1849 view from Fort Marcy comes to mind. Standing on the hillock above Santa Fe looking south, one can focus the eye on the Ortiz mountains, Sandia mountains and La Tetilla hill, but taking all together in a single glance, each becomes nothing more than a speck on the horizon. Compressing distant features while minimizing the foreground, Kern privileged data over optics. This gave travelers and readers a guide to prominent landmarks in ways no photograph could. Apart from maximizing mobility the benefit of journal-painting is not in reproducing the appearance of things, but to transform the act of looking into knowledge and ideas—the art of seeing

Looking northeast from 44.0308 x 73.4287. On the far shore is Port Henry, New York. In the far distance is Split Rock Mountain.

Follow James Lancel McElhinney and The Sketchbook Traveler on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.

Peruse previous posts here. Dispatches #1-70. April 1-June 8, 2020.

Now Available to Own: Hardcover. $24.95. From Schiffer Publishing. 2020.

The Ruins of Fort St-Frederic, Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Journal-painting begun during a field-trial of new live, online outdoor workshop format, of Friday September 18, 2020.

The peninsula north of Riviere de la Chute, which carries water from Lake George into Lake Champlain was militarily strategic because it commands the portages between the Saint Lawrence watershed, Lake Champlain (Pitawbagok) Lake George (Horicon) and the Hudson Valley. The eastern corner of Crown Point reaches toward Chimney Point, on the western shoreline of Vermont.  The vehicular bridge that first spanned the narrows in 1929 was replaced in 2011.

Crown Point, New York. 1759. showing the Grand Fort, the ruins of the French citadel, the disposition of British army camps. Chimney Point, Vermont is seen at top right.

Thomas Davies. Captain, Royal Artillery. 1737-1812. South View of Crown Point. 1759. Davies went on to become a Lieutenant-General and noted naturalist artist. The curious craft is a timber-clad gunboat.

Reaching fifty miles northward from South Bay, Lake Champlain seems no wider than a river in some places. Beyond Crown Point the waters broaden into a series of expansive bays. In pre-colonial days the area between the La Chute and Crown Point was no-man’s-land between territories controlled by the Mohawk nation (Kanienkehake) to the south, and the Abenaki to the north and east. In peacetime it served as a meeting-place and trading hub. During periods of hostility, it became a battleground. Having allied themselves with these traditional enemies, the colonial powers of France and Britain found themselves at odds on the same contested ground. Crown Point served a military function again, during the American War of independence when it changed hands several times. Since 1910 the site has been maintained as a park by the State of New York, with picnic areas, a small museum and hiking trails. Champlain Memorial Lighthouse stands on the easternmost tip of the peninsula.

Crown Point and much of the Champlain region is undergirded with fossilized Ordovician limestone also known as the Chazy Fossil Reef that stretches from Tennessee to Newfoundland. Formed half a billion years ago, its most recognizable characteristic is a layer-cake of strata. The brittle dark grey rock shatters easily under a hammer-stroke, to reveal one of the most diverse arrays of fossils on Earth. This stone was quarried by the French for material to construct Fort Carillon, later Ticonderoga. It was also quarried at Crown Point (Pointe de Chevelure) to build Fort St-Frederique. After 1759 the British built Fort Crown Point with masonry salvaged from the French fortress, augmented with freshly cut stones. Unfinished blocks can still be seen lying near borrow-pits along the shoreline. During the nineteenth century masonry from the historic forts was cannibalized to feed new construction in nearby towns and dwellings. New pits carved out of the ground fed the production of lime.

Graffitti on the rocky ledges, Parade-ground at Ft. Crown Point. Photo: September 2020

Looking at the ruins of eighteenth-century Fort Crown Point, one finds the surrounding moat filled with haps of broken spoil from outcroppings dressed to serve as part of the fort’s outer wall. These surfaces were then covered in masonry, some of which is visible today. Rising up from the parade ground within the fort are several large uptilted rafts of grey limestone. One supposes that General Amherst’s fort had covered these with soil. Perhaps they emerged after the centuries or exposure to the elements. Carved into them are the names of visitors dating back to the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine red-coated regulars drilling in close formations on such broken ground. These limestone uplifts appear all over the peninsula—some stretching down to the water in broad layered sheets.

My first visit to Crown Point was in the company of noted author James Howard Kunstler in 1992. I was in the midst of a project that explored Civil War battlefields threatened by commercial development.  Fitting my narrative as a spectacular military ruin I chose to overlook the hundred and two-year gap between its construction, and the sectional conflict that tore the nation apart in 1861. Since shifting my base this year from Manhattan to the Champlain Valley I made several visits to the site. After completing an inspection of Fort Saint-Frederique, and a circuit of the battlements of Fort Crown Point, my focus shifted from military history to the natural setting. Walking down a grassy track to a wooded finger of land pointing northward into the lake, a small green frog leaped across my path. Stepping from the grassy track onto a rocky shelf, I noticed the residue of macadam. To my left at the bottom of this ramp was a large pit carved out of the bank.

Quarry-pit northwest of Fort Crown Point

Undressed stones lay off to the right. Piles of smaller stones the size of brickbats lay scattered about in heaps. Too small for use as masonry, these would have been piled into one of the lime-kilns that once stood nearby. A cluster of large umbrageous trees at the landward end of the jetty reminded me of a Barbizon painting of Fontainebleau forest. Beyond this grove was a wide rocky beach; a broad crescent reaching westward. Crisscrossed with fractures, long diagonal slabs of limestone angled up from the shoreline. Upon one of these was heaped a gathering of small cairns, different from those I had seen a month ago. Beachcombers set them up. Someone, or something knocks them down. They are reassembled, and then toppled again, like the cycles of nature. Dashed against one of these limestone slabs, a large stone shattered. Instead of coherent fossils within the brittle chunk I found a dense, sparkling charcoal-grey mass variegated with organic patterns of slightly lighter material.

Resting on one of these broad rocky shelves was the spine and pelvis of a medium-sized mammal—perhaps a dog or coyote. A tangle of ribs and rotting lake-grass lay beside it. The absence of blood and the presence of vegetal material led me to wonder if the animal had not drowned. Having washed ashore the rotting carcass might have been dragged onto the rocks by ubiquitous turkey-vultures, leaving scraps from their feast for the gulls and racoons.

Freshwater oyster-shell, Crown Point  New York.

Underfoot I find the shells of freshwater clams and oysters nestled among small rocks. Scaling the grassy slope, I pass the sun-bleached skull and bones of a large bass. A couple makes their way from the end of the rip-rap mole back to shore. The woman waved. The man nodded. Body-language suggested they might have met for a tryst. Following the embankment, a gravel road led into the woods. Passing another couple walking a dog, I was greeted with nods and shy looks. Finding a private residence at the end of the road, I backtracked to a cluster of utility sheds overlooking the green mass of Fort Crown Point to the right, the parking-lot, esplanade and Fort St.-Frederique. Spanning the narrows between New York and Vermont, the Champlain Bridge arced up above a wooded grove beside highway 903.

Ruins of the Barracks at Fort Crown Point. Built ca. 1759

Scanning the site, I was reminded that in June of 1775 one of my ancestors had been here; a thirty-eight-year-old first lieutenant in Griswold’s company of Benjamin Hinman’s Fourth Connecticut Regiment. Twenty-six years earlier Captain Thomas Davies of the Royal Artillery had produced a detailed watercolor of the facility from a position three hundred yards southeast of where I was standing. From what I could reckon by looking at maps of the period, today’s parking-area had been covered by workshops and warehouses serving the fort. General Amherst and his staff would have been lodged beside a little cove, just beyond the foot of today’s bridge. A picnic area and events-pavilion now stand on the site of an earthen French redoubt. Rangers and indigenous forces were quartered in huts and wigwams near the site of the present-day park-ranger station.

Thomas Davies. 1737-1812. View of Amherst’s army at Crown Point, 1759.

Embellished with picturesque touches, Davie’s finished watercolor is far from naïve in its rendering of the site. Twenty-first-century viewers might mistake topographical accuracy for a lack of optical verisimilitude. Davies was keenly aware that whatever artistic aims his painting might achieve, his primary goal was creating a chorographic vista one could read like a map. A hallmark of expeditionary art is the distortion of scale to render more legible certain features of terrain. I noted this on many occasions when my travels gave me the opportunity to compare the optical experience of beholding terrain with historic depictions more focused on conveying data. Richard Hovenden Kern’s 1849 view from Fort Marcy comes to mind. Standing on the hillock above Santa Fe looking south, one can focus the eye on the Ortiz mountains, Sandia mountains and La Tetilla hill, but taking all together in a single glance, each becomes nothing more than a speck on the horizon. Compressing distant features while minimizing the foreground, Kern privileged data over optics. This gave travelers and readers a guide to prominent landmarks in ways no photograph could. Apart from maximizing mobility the benefit of journal-painting is not in reproducing the appearance of things, but to transform the act of looking into knowledge and ideas—the art of seeing

Looking northeast from 44.0308 x 73.4287. On the far shore is Port Henry, New York. In the far distance is Split Rock Mountain.

Follow James Lancel McElhinney and The Sketchbook Traveler on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram.

Peruse previous posts here. Dispatches #1-70. April 1-June 8, 2020.

Coming Soon: Hardcover. $24.95. From Schiffer Publishing. Release date: September 2020.

James McElhinney at Crown Point, New York

Travelers since the Medieval period have recorded their journeys by keeping journals noting itineraries, incidents and images. Voyages of exploration often had in their company artists like Jacques Le Moyne, John White or William Hodges, who filled sketchbooks with drawings and paintings with exotic destinations, flora, fauna and peoples. This practice was emulated by those following the Grand Tour, and further refined through the inclusion of chorographic drawing in the curriculum of eighteenth and nineteenth-century military academies. Alexander von Humboldt stressed the importance for exploring expeditions to include professional artists and naturalists. Decades before the invention of photography and cinema, works produced by expeditionary artists like Dominique Vivant Denon, Frederick Catherwood, Seth Eastman carried readers and print collectors off to faraway lands. Picturesque itineraries were popularized in America by artists such as William Birch, William Guy Wall, Pavel Svin’in and Jacques-Gerard Milbert. J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studiorumdrew on this traditon, and upon a landscape esthetic codified two centuries earlier by Claude Lorrain.

Looking Northwest from 44.0308 x 73.4287. 16:00. Thursday september 10, 2020. Journal-painting. Aqueous media on paper. 3.5 x 10.5 inches. Crown Point or Pointe Chevreuse isthe tip of a penisula on Lake Champlain marking the historic boundary between the Haudenosaunee and Abenaki, also between Fremnch and British territory prior to 1759, when retreating French forces razed Fort St. Frederique and the British began construction on massive Fort Crown Point.

With the rise in popularity of plein-air painting, Sketchbook Traveler proposes a deeper engament with nature by focusing also on the history and science of any location one might visit. This more immersive approach to drawing and painting outdoors not only develops visual skills. It deepens our awareness of environmental conditions, the world around us, and our place in it.

On Friday, September 18 2020, James McElhinney will present a live ZOOM webinar from the fortified peninsula of Crown Point on Lake Champlain. This will be a pilot program–a trial balloon for future workshops and webinars to be offered on Needlewatcher Marketplace, and in partnership with Frederick Church’s Olana, Greeenwich Art Society and other institutions. To be notified of future events, please send us an email to:


wo*******@ne***********.com

McElhinney_ST_PR101

Lake Cayuga from Sheldrake Point August 29, 2011.

Thick clouds rolled across a rosy sky. Puddles sat in the road. Having crossed the lake, the deluge shed the last of its burden on the rolling plains of Upper Canada.
Going online we discovered major road closures between Sackett’s Harbor and New York City. The hurricane had come straight up the Hudson Valley, flooding creeks and downing trees in the Catskills before plowing into the Adirondacks. Its path had stretched from the Berkshires to the Finger Lakes. Fortified by a hot American breakfast, we decided to return home via a circuitous route through Seneca Falls and Ithaca.

Navy Point and Sacketts Harbor after the passing of Hurricane Irene. August 28, 2011

Following the lakeshore, we reached Oswego. Visiting Fort Ontario, we walked the circuit of its grassy parapet, which afforded wonderful vistas of the lake and city. Our impromptu call was ill-timed for a reunion with Paul Lear—an old friend working as curator at the site.
Dropping down through Hannibal we followed blue highways and rural two-lane blacktop roads through places like Cato. Above Weedsport we reached the Seneca River, in service at that point as a stretch of the Erie Canal. All along the route we noticed a dearth of traffic and a number for trees knocked down by the storm, ripped apart, or deprived of a limb. The rolling terrain offers no barrier to Arctic blasts that mingle with warmer air drifting up from the south to generate heavy deposits of Lake Effect snow.
Crossing the northern end of Lake Cayuga on Highway 20 we arrived at Seneca Falls. Visiting the Women’s Rights National Historic Park—a deconsecrated Methodist church and other buildings where on July 19-20, 1848 the first women’s rights convention was held, resulting in a Declaration of Sentiments. Ninety-nine signers of both genders included Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. The centerpiece of the visitor-center was a cluster of bronze figures conveying the effect of a life-sized Rogers-group.

The First Wave. Sculptor: Lloyd Lillie (1932-2020) Women’s Rights National Historic Park. Seneca Falls, New York

Visiting the region in April 2010, we traveled to Leroy, New York–famed as the birthplace of Jell-O. It had also been the location of Adam Pratt’s dry-goods cash-and-carry store. This would mean nothing, were it not for the fact that his sister Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) had lived there briefly, and returned on several occasions with her husband to give concerts in a local church. Henry Greatorex would provide the accompaniment for Eliza’s sweet contralto renditions of songs they had written together. One of them became a hit. Ironically, despite Eliza and Henry being ardent abolitionists, Love Me! today is found under the heading of Confederate popular music.

Listen: IMG_4307

East of Le Roy, between Rochester and Canandaigua is a reconstruction of Ganondagan, once a major political center for the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse), where it is believed the Great Law of Peace was proclaimed in either the mid fifteenth or late twelfth century. The so-called Iroquois Constitution spelled out how the original five tribal nations would interact and cooperate, in order to preserve social stability and a sustainable economy. A sixth nation—the Tuscarora were brought into the confederacy in 1722. The oral document was encoded on symbolic beaded belts known as Wampum. It is said to have influenced the composition of the U.S. Constitution. The powers it gave to women did help spark the Women’s Movement of the mid-19th century and inspire the organizers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Western New York State by 1825 had been traversed by the Erie Canal. It produced a number of charismatic religious leaders, including Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and the creation of new Christian sects such as the Millerites, aka Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Known as The Burned-over District for its religious fervor, it was also a hotbed of political progressivism. Out of the Second Great Awakening came notable figures such as Sojourner Truth, Brigham Young, and Frederick Douglass. Utopian communities were formed. Schools practiced racial integration. A seventy-two-year campaign for universal suffrage was launched, forty miles from Ganondagan.

Reconstructed longhouse. Ganondagan State Park. April 19, 2010

We visited the site in 2009, when Governor David Patterson was threatening to close state parks as a cost-savings measure. The site supervisor and his wife were both members of the Seneca Nation. I asked what they would do it the state shut them down. On the 135th anniversary of rthe battloes of Lexington & Concord, I liked their reply.
“We’ll wait a day or two, cut off the padlock and raise the Seneca flag, take back the land.”

After lunch we drove from Seneca Falls to Sheldrake Point, on the western shore of Lake Cayuga. Accommodations were not plentiful, but we found a comfortable roost at the Driftwood Inn, run by a woman named Tammy and her husband Jim. The great-grand-daughter of the couple who built the inn in 1912, Tammy was petite, fit and pretty—like an Olympic gymnast, with the efficient bearing of a sergeant-major. One of their sons worked at a nearby restaurant. Wrapping around the house was a veranda, with a sweeping north-facing view of the lake beyond. A small beach met the water at the far edge of the lawn. Road closures continued to be reported between Ithaca and Binghamton, as well as points further south. As we had been made to feel so welcome, and found our lodgings agreeable, we decided to stay another night.

Lake Cayuga from Sheldrake Point. August 29, 2011.

The following day we determined to return to Manhattan by whatever route was open, regardless of how circuitous it might be. Following the lakeshore road (County Road 153) to Highway 89 we headed south toward Ithaca through pastoral countryside. Crossing Trumansburg Creek, we noticed a sign for Taughannock Falls. My maternal grandfather had gone to Cornell (Class of 1916). He always spoke fondly of his time there, and of the various gorges in and around Ithaca. A story he told about his college days involved a fraternity hazing ceremony demanding trust-fall. The new pledge would be led blindfolded to the edge of a gorge and told by his brothers to jump. The victim would be unaware that he had been turned to face the landward side of the path, and thus in no danger. On one occasion a mistrustful pledge went in the opposite direction, leaping to his death at the foot of a cliff. Reluctant to let facts stand in the way of a ripping yarn, my grandfather never verified the tale.

Like many well-groomed natural wonders, Taughannock Falls Overlook offers plenty of parking and masonry escalade leading down to the belvedere. The creek drops 215 feet into a rocky wooded glen, rimmed by Devonian limestone. The falls are twenty-five feet higher than Niagara. I was reminded of Kaaterskill Falls, which descends across the mouth of a cavern. Taughannock’s waters lick the cliff-face rising above the pool. As I stood drawing, a steady stream of visitors arrived. Snapping one or two shots of the falls, and perhaps a selfie or two, they climbed back up the steps to their cars. I calculated that most of the sightseers spent no more than thirty seconds, a minute at most beholding the scene.

Taughannock Falls, Trumansburg New York. August 29, 2011

We could have weathered Irene in Manhattan but the storm had set us in motion. It had driven us to explore new places, and to discover things previously unknown to us. I could drive for days and be happy. Perhaps this wanderlust can be traced back to my New Bedford ancestors, hunting oil-rich Leviathans in the Pacific, or to Kathie’s seafaring Lusitanian roots. We Americans retain an immigrant gene—that restless impulse to get beyond the horizon, to risk it all on an uncertain future in unknown lands. Hearing third-generation nativists describe newcomers as invaders, I am tempted to chasten them furiously with my Mayflower pedigree. But that is nothing, compared to the dozens of millennia indigenous people had made homes in this land. Their names and words are written on modern maps; Taughannock, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, Oswego, Owasco, Otsego, Adirondack, Ticonderoga, Taconic and Manhattan. Over the years I have come to identify with all of these places as a guest. Material possessions beyond one’s knowledge are illusions, when we all must travel one day to an undiscovered country. The only way to own something is to honor it with our attention. The only way to encounter new things is to set oneself in motion. As Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad: The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869)

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness”

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