Everything about George W Sears totally explained
George Washington Sears (
December 2, 1821 –
May 1, 1890) was a
sportswriter for
Forest and Stream magazine in the
1880s and an early conservationist. His stories, appearing under the pen name, "Nessmuk" popularized self-guided canoe camping tours of the
Adirondack lakes in open, lightweight solo canoes and what is today called ultralight camping.
Canoeing had been popularized by Scottish lawyer
John MacGregor in the
1860s, but the typical canoe trip of the day employed expert guides and heavy canoes. Sears, who was five foot, three inches tall and 103 pounds had a nine foot long, ten and a half pound solo canoe built by J. Henry Rushton of
Canton, New York. He named it the
Sairy Gamp (the name of a
Dickens character) and in it he completed a 266-mile journey through the central Adirondacks. He was 62 years old and in frail health (
tuberculosis and
asthma) at the time.
William Henry Harrison Murray's
Adventures in the Wilderness, published in 1869, had praised the Adirondacks as having a healthy atmosphere for consumptives and
Verplanck Colvin's enthusiastic writing about the Adirondack wilderness had further inspired the trip. The
Sairy Gamp was acquired by the
Smithsonian Institution and is now on loan to the
Adirondack Museum.
He grew up the eldest of ten children in South Oxford (now
Webster), Massachusetts. He took his pen name from an
American Indian who had befriended him in early childhood. He was fascinated by the few books about Indians that his family possessed that left him with an abiding interest in forest life and adventure. A period of factory labor while still a child left him with a fondness for the writing of Charles Dickens. At age twelve he started working in a commercial fishing fleet based on
Cape Cod and at nineteen he signed on for a three-year voyage on a whaler headed for the
South Pacific; it was the same year (
1841) that
Herman Melville shipped out of the same port bound for the same whaling grounds. On his return, his family moved to
Wellsboro, Pennsylvania where he was to live for the rest of his life. However, he continued traveling for adventure, from the upper
Midwest and
Ontario to an
Amazon tributary in
Brazil (in
1867 and again in
1870).
Sears wrote
Woodcraft, a book on
camping, in
1884, that has remained in print ever since. A book of poems,
Forest Runes, appeared in
1887. He died at his home in Pennsylvania seven years later. Mount Nessmuk, in northern Pennsylvania, is named after him.
Sources
- Jerome, Christine Adirondack Passage: Cruise of Canoe Sairy Gamp, HarperCollins, 1994.
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