Louie had tried to put a stop to Noah John Rondeau … Old Louie declared … “Sacre bleu! Louie will put an ax to who ever built ’is wigwam in my territory.”
The Hermit and Us – Our Adirondack Adventures with Noah John Rondeau
A Run-In with
Noah John Rondeau
An excerpt from “The Hermit and Us”, Starting on page 231
Ted figured the humble log hovel over the outlet of Blueberry Pond might have belonged to trappers or meat or hide hunters. That region had once been a real wilderness. Without doubt the country had teemed with bear, deer, lynx, fisher, otter, beaver, fox, marten, other fur-bearers and perhaps some moose. That would have been in the glory days of the hide and meat hunters. Lumber companies had their own hunters to supply the camps with wild meat. Hide hunters butchered game merely for the pelts, leaving the carcasses to rot.
Louie had tried to put a stop to Noah when he first moved into the region. Upon finding the traces of a rude camp with a cheap sheet metal stove in what he maintained was HIS province, Old Louie declared to the community of Coreys, “Sacre bleu! Louie will put an ax to who ever built ’is wigwam in my territory.”
It might even have been one of Noah John Rondeau’s early shelters before he settled at the Big Dam camp at the far end of the Cold River Tote Trail. Ted’s repertoire of stories included interesting yet vague recollections of a Lake Placid guide called “Old Tom” who was reported to carry “an overload of booze under his belt;” a Long Lake trapper referred to only as McCarthy who “got up the [Cold] river quite a ways; a lumberman known as Pelcher; an unusual woodsman Tupper Lake folks referred to as Louie, not to be confused with “French” Louis Seymour, who had a “fur nest” staked out in the Seward Mountain territory a safe distance from Rondeau’s range; and Noah, whose territory fanned out from Peek-a-boo Mountain to Blueberry Pond to the central portion of Cold River. I had heard other stories about “Meestaire Pelcher” and Louie. Pelcher was reported to have had a logging camp in the Cold River wilderness. Early trappers had reported they’d seen a rough board nailed on a sapling along a woods road that pointed in heavy pencil marks the direction to “Pelcher’s Camp.”
Louie had tried to put a stop to Noah when he first moved into the region. Upon finding the traces of a rude camp with a cheap sheet metal stove in what he maintained was HIS province, Old Louie declared to the community of Coreys, “Sacre bleu! Louie will put an ax to who ever built ’is wigwam in my territory.” That had been years ago. Since then the men had met, developed a mutual respect, and stayed out of each other’s way.
Courtesy of Neal Burdick,
Adirondack editor and writer
“I saw Noah [John Rondeau] only once, I believe. It was when he was at the North Pole, and I was so dumbstruck I couldn’t think what to say. I had so many things I wanted to ask him about that I got tongue-tied and just stood there, staring at him. I think that annoyed him, so he said something like ‘You don’t want to talk to me,’ and that scared me so I took off. Blotched my only chance, as it turned out.”