A Catskill Catalog by Bill Birns

For a while I’ve wanted to write a column about the native people who inhabited our mountains 400 years ago when Henry Hudson’s Half Moon first opened our region to European ways. The problem is that the very idea of “The Native People of the Catskill Mountains” is framed in a particularly non-native way of thinking.

One summer in the mid '70s, I had a job teaching English to Japanese kids at Camp Forusato in Fleischmanns. In the '70s, the Japanese economy was cooking, globalism was in its infancy, and many Japanese people were living and working in the New York metropolitan area.

A Catskill Catalog: history, geography, day-trips, arts and culture in and around our Catskill Mountains. Pretty comprehensive. Covers about everything I might be interested in writing about, or so I thought until I visited my old friend Joe Hewitt.

The winters are long in the mountains. About February and March, a day of blue sky and sunshine seems as necessary and valuable as nourishment. So, on a beautiful, clear, cold Saturday afternoon, a pair of friends and I took a ride north on Route 30 to explore Vroman’s Nose.

Harmonus DuMond has his own website. At least, someone in the 21st century maintains a website dedicated to the 18th-century Margaretville pioneer. DuMond headed one of the first four families to settle on the East Branch of the Upper Delaware River, back in 1763. Do a Google search on Harmonus DuMond.