Adirondack French Louie

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Folklore
Review: Adirondack French Louie is once again in print -- available in paperback through North Country Books, Inc. 311 Turner St, Utica, NY 13501. I have bushwhacked old Louie's traplines, slept in his cave and scoured his backcountry - the Moose River Plains. the West Canadas and the North Lake region. Any true outdoors woman or man will find this well written book an enjoyable read. I also highly recommend you read LIFE WITH NOAH. The story is about another Adirondack hermit. It is topnotch.

Rating:
Summary: Less a biography than glib folklore
Review: Presumably, readers buy this book because it's the only readily found work that chronicles the life of Louis Seymour, the famed trapper/hermit that is forever connected with the West Canada Lakes region. That's too bad, because by the time one completes the book, any hope of understanding French Louie is buried under an avalanche of rambling, outdated prose.

One can't expect much from the author, who is doing pretty good hook-and-bullet history for his time (the 1950s). In fact, readers might well wonder how that generation, with its glib acceptance of the exploitative rich and its dismissive racism and sexism, ever got to be "the greatest generation" in the first place. Dunham declines to assemble a biography from the fact patterns available to him (first-hand informants, now all dead). Instead, he strings along a series of sentimental vignettes complete with Louie's interior monolgue and fictional scenarios, presumably contrived to put us into the woods with Louie at the time.

A sense develops that French Louie really represents unspoiled nature in the park, and his savior is the bratty but affable sportsmen whose legacy is the vast tracts of estate land that still checkerboard the park. One can hope that this book added positive momentum to the mid-century struggles to define the park, but now its mawkish tone washes out any relevant history that might be woven through its pages.