The Great Adirondack Pass, today known as Indian Pass, is seen as painted on location by Charles Cromwell Ingham in 1838.

“By a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

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Thanks to this fortunate coincidence, travelers in the worldwide community of Stevenson admirers can enjoy many beautiful places, including Saranac Lake, as far as its location is concerned.

To quote a member of the RLS Club in Edinburgh, Scotland, from one of its newsletters in 1998: “Recently, I visited Saranac Lake, U.S.A. It’s a small town in the midst of the wild Adirondack Mountains of New York State. I had to take a small airplane from New York. I flew into the town in the evening and the view from the plane was wonderful — the endless sea of forests and countless lakes were shining in the setting sunshine; it was a beautiful, dreamlike scene, and when I landed I was impressed by the nice smell of trees filling the air.” Kumiko Koiwa wrote that. The job that pays her the money to globetrot in the footsteps of RLS is in her hometown of Yokohama, Japan, where she is an office manager in the sprawling Yokohama Transit Authority.

The Adirondacks — four syllables — who came up with it? Professor Ebenezer Emmons, ancestor of a proud North Country family, is the one who admirably chose a Native American word to tag this mountain range for the white man. In 1837, Emmons was appointed leader and chief geologist for the first state topographical survey of this long-ignored and mysterious wild domain north of the Erie Canal. What they found was 9,475 square miles of lake country and virgin forest carpeting a very ancient mountain chain. The surveyor’s report was published in 1842 along with lithograph illustrations by the expedition’s artist, Charles Cromwell Ingham. When he needed a name to go with his report, Emmons came up with “The Adirondack Group,” after an Algonquin tribe in the Montreal area.

Those illustrations must have been good. Seemingly overnight, urban Americans in East Coast cities in the Age of Romanticism discovered a brand-new wilderness playground in their own backyard, a perfect place to reconnect with nature according to individual or group tastes (e.g. the Philosopher’s Camp). Whether it was for hunting, fishing, painting pictures, writing, science, starting a religion, hiding from the law or for pure escapism or any number of things, it was all the same to the Native American tribes of the Northeast. For them, this was the worst that could happen. The white man had discovered their sacred hunting ground and was out to despoil it.

There was money to be made doing that. Entrepreneurs found many ways to do it. There were many of them, but only two are mentioned here: Paul Smith, because of his Dr. Trudeau connection, and Col. Milote Baker. Each came into an untamed wilderness and built a hotel in the middle of nowhere, to which patrons actually came and paid good money to enjoy a controlled wilderness experience that included a bed and a bar and an entertaining host.

Milote Baker was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1806. As a young man he went west as far as New York state, where he obtained his military rank in the State Militia, which also landed him his job as head of the Commissary Department of Sing Sing prison. He was passionate in his politics as a “Copperhead” Democrat, and apparently social complications arising out of it persuaded him to resign and do something brand new. Col. Baker decided to cash in on the first wave of tourism into the new Adirondack playground, and he did it by coming “Up the River” from Plattsburgh. That’s what they called this place in those days. Like the hero in “Apocalypse Now,” Col. Baker kept on going up the river till he reached the last tiny settlement represented by Jacob Moody and Capt. Pliny Miller, a War of 1812 veteran. Here Baker stopped at the Pine Street rapids and built his hotel, to be known as Baker’s Tavern, on the east bank of the river, but only after purchasing 600 acres to put it on, including “Baker” Mountain, in 1852.

“The colonel was a man of commanding presence, with a tinge of the aristocrat in his manner and bearing,” according to A.L. Donaldson in his “History of the Adirondacks, Vol. I.” “He came, indeed of old New England stock. … He was a good talker and a genial companion, who paid his way socially, and enjoyed mixing with the distinguished people who lodged underneath his roof. He had, in short, little of the typical pioneer, except a fine physique and prodigious strength,” which he used at times on bad guests.

Col. Baker it was who built the first store in this upriver settlement. He put it on present-day Triangle Park, and inside of it he set up the first post office, in 1854. From then on, this proto-hamlet was no longer called “Up the River” but became known to the world beyond as Saranac Lake, by authority of the U.S. Postal Service. In 1855, Col. Baker built a two-story clapboard cabin on a knoll just a two-minute walk east from his tavern, which was next to the present-day Pine Street bridge. The cabin was for Ebenezer Griffith, one of his employees.

1855 witnessed a grand event for these parts back then. New York state Gov. Horatio Seymour wanted to throw a safari of sorts for his friends by treating them to a pan-Adirondack bushwhacking expedition, starting at Baker’s Tavern and coming out at Speculator in the southern Adirondacks. One of Seymour’s adventurous guests was Lady Amelia Murray, a member of Queen Victoria’s inner circle. She mentioned Baker’s in her journal as “the last house of reception on the Saranac River.” To keep the governor and his friends safe and alive through it all, 20 professional guides were hired. The only son of Milote Baker was one of them, named after Milote’s favorite Democrat — Andrew Jackson Baker.

By 1855, at the age of 14, Andrew Baker was already a seasoned guide and in great demand with his father’s clientele. He was properly schooled and graduated from Fort Edward Institute in February 1863. In 1866 he married Mary Scott from Michigan, in Michigan, in February, and by spring the newlyweds were seen moving into the now-vacant cabin mentioned above and overlooking a bend in the Saranac River. Andrew proceeded to enlarge the structure and make a farm around it, and for many decades to come, this would be his HQ for his successful Adirondack guide business. By 1887, Andrew and Mary had brought five children into being, two of whom had died. One late summer day that year, Andrew went into town. By then the little upriver settlement of 1852 had grown into a community that was more like a transplanted Wild West town than the giant open-air hospital it would soon become. What happened when Andrew got there is part 2 in the story of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage.