I admit, I was wary of reviewing Erik Schlimmer’s 2023 doorstop diptych “With an Ax and a Rifle: Settler and Onomastic History of the Adirondacks.” For one, the word “onomastic” — which pertains to the history and origin of proper names — is grandiose. For another, I knew that it came in two volumes totaling 946 pages (including a hefty bibliography and index). This would be no ordinary stab at Adirondack history.

Amplitude aside, I was mainly interested in Schlimmer’s treatment of his titular tools. Axes, rifles and place-names have all had their part in reshaping the homelands of Abenaki and Iroquoian people into what we now know as the Adirondack Park. Settlers chopped trees; they shot animals, Indigenous people and one another; they divided a contiguous ecosystem into towns by naming things after themselves, their loved ones and their places of origin.

Opening to the epigraph (“for all the underdogs”), I hoped that Schlimmer would recognize pre-existing realities erased and replaced by his “settlers” and their metallic accouterments. He does not. Schlimmer’s bias may stem from a reliance on previous historians, but he routinely glorifies the tools and techniques of colonization rather than interrogating them. From Schlimmer’s own introduction:

“‘With an Ax and a Rifle’ tells the early histories of Adirondack towns as they should be told. That is, this all inclusive book honors the brave folks who tamed the wilderness … they penetrated a freeing but hostile, nameless but beautiful land. They spat on their palms, felled the trees, burned out the stumps, seeded the clearings, raised the cabins, built the mills and named the hills …”

Destiny, rape innuendo and blanket reverence for the “courageous” men who “mastered” the land is never far below the surface of Schlimmer’s prose. He conceptualizes history as a grand sweep authored by strong (white) men. As well-researched and exhaustive as his revue might be, its staging is both willfully blind and philosophically retrograde.

Schlimmer’s own voice is deeply stamped in the prose, with frequent personal assessments (“James Jr. and his men lived in the middle of nowhere”) and quirky diction (“They cleared three acres, planted wheat and happily watched Phebe recover from her illness by guzzling spring water”). The style is conversational, occasionally bordering on engaging. Sentence by sentence, Schlimmer refuses the temptation toward lists of dates and numbers. He sticks to satisfying, indicative clauses. His own voice harmonizes frequently with poems and songs from the historical record, block quotes from primary and secondary sources, and stretches into theatrical, contemporary apostrophes.

The two volumes are organized alphabetically by town, and both volumes are cored by black-and-white plates (maps in the first, pictures of buildings in the second). Each town gets a chapter, headed with a set of what Schlimmer styles “vitals” — its county, date of settlement, oldest grave marker, date of “formation,” whether it lies entirely within the current Adirondack Park, and a recent population count, land area and population density. The chapters, which average about 10 pages, proceed through whimsical collages of narrative detail, confounding specificity and authorial asides. If one is looking for this sort of thing, it reads rather smoothly.

The question remains: Who is looking for this sort of thing? Schlimmer’s project is simultaneously too sprawling and too specific for most casual readers. The tone is too informal for scholarly research. Future historians will reference it only cringingly, hoping their bibliographers skip over page 412, for example, in which Schlimmer argues against revising racially and culturally offensive toponyms. This effort belongs, I think, to the category of books which, despite inimitable feats of attention, poorly address the preferences of any imaginable audience. “With an Ax and a Rifle” is something you might check out from the library for a long-standing question. It is something you might gift to an in-law who populates their Zoom background with fat-looking books. It is also a practically infinite source of medium-weight firestarter, which is how I intend to use my copy.

Despite foundational inconsistencies, these books do contain valuable information. If you’ve read Schlimmer’s previous works (all but a coffee-table photo book published by his own imprint, Beechwood Books) and found them enjoyable and/or inoffensive, perhaps you are his reader. “With an Ax and a Rifle” was produced, as the back copy states, “with the assistance of more than 50 historians.” If you’ve ever wondered about why the hill behind your house is called what it is, this book probably has your answer. And yet, taken as a whole, Schlimmer’s onomastic history verges on the onanistic. For an author who came too late to shoot “seven mountain lions, 12 wolves, 150 bears, 2,000 deer, and 3,000 foxes,” this tome is a sad monument to his own ability to “make” history. Despite the impressive research, “With an Ax and a Rifle” is a primary document in every sense of the word. Reading Schlimmer’s history is reading his history: Its benefits are first and foremost historiographic.

If you’re inclined to read “With an Ax and a Rifle,” please consider other sources (publications available through the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center, www.6nicc.com, are a good starting point) as essential supplements.

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Editor’s note: This review is part of the biweekly “Read in the Blue Line” book review column by members of the Adirondack Center for Writing, typically printed on Wednesdays. This review was inadvertently not printed in its usual spot this week.