by Charles Herr
PART TWO
All of the traditions that have been described thus far are plausible and may have occurred, except for one: “Thomas C. Durant.”
Charles Snyder was a prominent Herkimer attorney whose clients were Webb, Huntington and Dix. But he could not have been able to use Thomas C. Durant as Dix’s front man in 1897. He had been dead since 1885.
Dix needed to use a front for this purchase without deCamp knowing the fund source.
After deCamp was forced after court battles in 1891 and 1892 with Webb to provide right-of-way through his lands, Webb could not be a visible party either.
In 1894, Dix’s lumber company signed an 8-year lumbering contract with Webb who required the wood to be milled at McKeever.
Dix’s lumber was being moved from Rondaxe Lake down the north branch Moose River through deCamps’ lands until the deCamps stopped the logs around Minnehaha with a boom with armed guards.
Mrs. deCamp filed an injunction in November that year to stop the floating.
The case was finally decided in 1899, but after her death in July, 1895.
The deCamps did not want to charge tolls; they did not want their river property used at all for trafficking lumber.
The only toll ever charged to Dix was by court order in April 1897 for damages caused by the logs already stopped at their boom.
Obviously, Snyder and Dix did not want deCamp to know Dix was a party.
In a series of transactions described in another article, I learned of a three way deal that resulted in deCamp acquiring land, Charles W. Durant Jr. acquiring a railroad right of way from deCamp and this Durant transferring the right of way to John Dix.
DeCamp would obviously know how Dix acquired the right of way and from whom.
My addition to existing traditions is a story published in The Malone Farmer on April 9, 1913 shortly after J. P. Morgan’s (owner of Camp Uncas since 1896) death.
According to the article, “Mr. Morgan reached Camp Uncas by long drives: some times from Big Moose, and other times from Eagle Bay or Old Forge, but in either direction it was a drive of upwards of 20 miles…When he got into the springboard at Big Moose Station or at Eagle Bay, he wanted to get to camp, and he usually made the journey at not less than eight or ten miles an hour.
“There was one instance, when he was hastily summoned from Camp Uncas, that he made the sixteen miles to Eagle Bay behind a pair of sorrel horses in 53 minutes.
“At Eagle Bay he caught the steamer for Old Forge, connected at Old Forge with the train and was in New York in time for a most important conference before the opening of the banks and the Stock Exchange in the morning.
“That ride shook Morgan up so that he and the late Collis P. Huntington (who died in 1900 at Pine Knot), who had a camp on Raquette Lake, built the railroad from Clearwater to Raquette Lake.”