America’s Original Travel Influencer Drew Up a Revolutionary Itinerary 200 Years Ago. There’s Still Plenty to See Along the Way

Follow along as we retrace the route one journalist laid out in “The Fashionable Tour,” from New York City to Niagara Falls, when memories of the fight for independence were still fresh

Summer 2026

The view from Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York. Lauren Petracca

Last summer, I made a pilgrimage to the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan. Taking a seat at a polished wood table in the austerely silent, windowless chamber, I requested several near-forgotten texts—original surviving copies of The Fashionable Tour, which qualify as the earliest practical travel guidebooks to the independent United States. The first edition, published in 1822, was a pocket-size volume with a battered brown leather cover and stained, brittle pages. A more detailed second edition in 1825 had trimmed pages and a secure binding, and later editions included alluring illustrations of America’s natural and historic attractions.

The publication timing is what attracted me. On July 4, 1826, a year after the second edition appeared, Americans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with parades, banquets and fireworks. (By coincidence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died that day.) But patriotic travelers who wanted to mark the country’s coming-of-age that summer knew where to go thanks in part to The Fashionable Tour. By the time it was circulating, an incipient American tourist trail had been established north from Manhattan through the Hudson Valley to the spa town Saratoga Springs, then west to Buffalo and the country’s most renowned natural wonder, Niagara Falls.

This American Grand Tour, which took shape during a period of national unity that a Bostonian newspaperman dubbed the “Era of Good Feelings,” was deeply appealing to the first generation to grow up in the independent United States. After their victory over Britain in the War of 1812, Americans were finally becoming confident that their democratic experiment, which many observers feared might fragment, would survive and even thrive. By the 1820s, the Industrial Revolution was gaining pace, creating a budding urban middle class with disposable income, time to travel and a desire for locally grown attractions and artistic creations rather than European imports with their fusty Old World air.

map of revolutionary war spots in New York — Retracing part of Gideon Miner Davison’s “Fashionable Tour,” from Manhattan to Niagara Falls, our correspondent visited battlefields, historic sites, a spa town and wonders of nature. Map by Joe Lemonnier

“It was a historic convergence,” said Jonathan Palmer, the historian for Greene County in the Catskill Mountains, when I met him in an archive in the Hudson River port town of Kingston. “The invention of the steamship transformed our relationship with the natural world. Travel used to be prohibitively expensive or time-consuming for most Americans. Now, for the first time in history, humans could go faster than horses could carry them or wind move them. It was a technological leap as dramatic as the invention of the first passenger jets.” Then, in 1825, the completion of the Erie Canal opened a new and comfortable route west of Albany to magical Niagara.

The Fashionable Tour offered advice each step of the way. It was written, appropriately enough, by a self-made entrepreneur who was part of the pioneer tourist class to whom he was appealing. The journalist Gideon Miner Davison was born in Vermont and worked with a publisher in Manhattan before settling around 1818 in Saratoga Springs, which was emerging as the epicenter of the fledgling New World travel industry. There he founded the Saratoga Sentinel and had a sideline printing Bibles; eventually he made a fortune in real estate.

Hardly a household name today, Davison is one of the country’s great unsung travel innovators, according to historian Richard H. Gassan in The Birth of American Tourism. For the 1822 edition, Gassan writes, the 31-year-old Davison organized his entries geographically, and he “pulled the reader along a very specific route” by using “an omniscient, even commanding, tone: Go here, then see that.” For the first time, Gassan adds, practical travel tips—schedules, prices, hotel recommendations—were combined with edifying stories from American history, particularly the Revolutionary War.

The first edition was cheap, disposable and sold only in the reading room Davison had founded in Saratoga Springs. But his 1825 edition made it to bookstores in New York City, and later editions—at least six over 15 years—spread beyond that. Soon, luxury steamers were plying the Hudson, new hotels were sprouting in the Catskills and Niagara, copycat guidebooks flourished, and aristocrats were complaining of the hoi polloi flooding upstate enclaves like Hyde Park. By the 1830s, scenes from the trail were printed on Staffordshire china for American homes.

Key takeaways: The first American tourists

Gideon Davison Miner’s 1822 guidebook blended a fixed route, travel tips and Revolutionary history. That same year, America’s population surpassed 10 million, explaining how a growing middle class enabled a travel market at scale.

In 1824, the painter Thomas Cole took his first Hudson River steamboat trip, and his subsequent landscape paintings helped transform Upstate New York into a travel destination. The Erie Canal opened the next year, providing pleasant and scenic travel from the Hudson to Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes.

By the 1930s, Hudson River luxury steamers proliferated, resorts in the Catskills and Saratoga Springs were major destinations, and copycat guidebooks were in wide circulation.

America’s Original Travel Influencer Drew Up a Revolutionary Itinerary 200 Years Ago. There’s Still Plenty to See Along the Way — Hudson River steamboat tourists could glimpse “summits, crowned with forests” and “beautiful and extensive lawns,” Davison wrote in his 1822 guidebook. Lauren Petracca

In the library’s windowless room last summer, with the 250th anniversary of 1776 approaching, I pored over The Fashionable Tour and yearned to escape the air-conditioned archives and recreate the journey a traveler might have taken for the 50th Jubilee in 1826. Apart from a few short seasonal tourist jaunts, commercial passenger boats no longer service long-distance routes along the Hudson River or the Erie Canal. But you can follow Davison’s classic trail by car on back roads through upstate New York. I also dropped messages to members of New York’s maritime community, including shipbuilders in Buffalo I’d heard had handmade a replica Erie Canal boat from 1825. Along the way, I planned to explore the forests, mountains, lakes and waterfalls that bewitched the first travelers in the 1820s, and to visit the inspiring Revolutionary battlefields and memorials. The excitement of that era, I hoped, could be recaptured today. For travelers in 1826, the itinerary inspired adventurous wanderlust, so 200 years later I set out with anticipation to see how Davison’s directions have held up.

My Grand Tour started in downtown Manhattan, and several of the era’s attractions survive among the glass skyscrapers of the Financial District. I strolled from City Hall (“one of the most beautiful edifices in America,” according to Davison’s guidebook) to Trinity Cemetery, where the marble plinth of Alexander Hamilton still receives attention from tourists, thanks to the hit musical Hamilton. From there I navigated the jumbled 17th-century streets to Battery Park, where New Yorkers gathered in 1776 to hear the first reading of the Declaration of Independence. But for travelers in the 1820s, the goal was the Cortlandt Street wharf, the berth for steamships running up the Hudson River, where they would dodge pushy touts and purchase a $3 passage (equivalent to about $100 today) to Albany, including meals. Recalling the hubbub now is an act of imagination: The wharf closed in the 1930s, and in the 1960s and ’70s it was buried under landfill for the World Trade Center. But a few steps north of the site, a moored vintage schooner is now a sun-soaked bar and oyster restaurant called Grand Banks; taking a seat by the rippling waters, I watched local ferries shuttle back and forth across New York Harbor.

The next day, I was ready to start my own Revolutionary expedition. To maximize daylight hours for sightseeing, The Fashionable Tour recommended a 6 a.m. steamship departure, so I chose the same time to head north in my rental car. Navigating up the West Side Highway, I squinted to imagine the 1820s experience. Back then, cigar-shaped Manhattan island was still settled only as far north as today’s Greenwich Village, leaving the rest green and lush, the scenery becoming more majestic as travelers steamed past the cliffs of New Jersey’s Palisades, on the Hudson’s western bank, toward forests teeming with bird life.

By midmorning, travelers approached one of the first great Revolutionary sites at the river narrows of West Point, where a military academy had sprung up in 1802 around Fort Putnam—“a mouldering ruin,” Davison told his readers, though it was only half a century old. It was here, Davison explained, that General Benedict Arnold plotted to betray the Continental Army in 1780 by passing its defensive layout plan to the British agent Major John André, before André was captured by a trio of American rebels downriver in Tarrytown, exposed, tried and hanged as a spy. Today, daily tours of West Point are conducted in small buses by guides who likewise recount the dramatic saga of “Benny,” as he’s known at the academy—or at least as he’s known to my guide, Glenn Goldman, who liked to take an irreverent tone.

A replica cannon at Fort Putnam, now housed in the West Point military academy. “It was here,” Davison wrote, “that Arnold”—as in Benedict—“ conceived the horrid purpose of bartering his country for gold.” Lauren Petracca

Passing a field where the Continental Army garrison camped out (the fort itself was too small to house all the troops), we disembarked at a headland with a spectacular view of the river. “This was the most important piece of dirt in the entire northeast during the Revolutionary War,” said Goldman, a West Point graduate. “George Washington called the Hudson River ‘the key to the continent,’ and West Point commands its most strategic stretch, with its narrowest passage and a squirreling current.” Goldman indicated a statue of General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a brilliant Polish engineer who organized the fort’s defense, including the deployment of an enormous chain laid on rafts across the river to block British shipping. As for the fate of the British agent André, Goldman took an ironic view of his “heroic” apprehension by patriots: “Three drunk New York militia-men basically mugged him, and they found the West Point plans when they were stealing his boots.”

The scenic portion of an 1826 river trip began in earnest by late afternoon, when the steamship pulled into the river port of Catskill, a tidy town where many old farmers still spoke Dutch. After a night at a local inn, travelers would take a stagecoach for $1 up into the Catskill Mountains. The winding 12-mile road could induce “an unwelcome degree of terror,” Davison warned. On steeper stretches, passengers might be forced to get out and walk.

The effort was rewarded when they arrived at the edge of a 200-foot-high cliff to lay eyes on the Catskill Mountain House, America’s first rural luxury resort, which opened in 1824. Built in Greek Revival style, the grandiose hotel had a whitewashed exterior and a panoramic porch with 13 Corinthian columns, one for each of the original states, though when it opened, the flag flapping over the hotel had 24 stars, a consequence of the nation’s expansion. Inside were glittering chandeliers, piano music and the happy chatter of more than 200 guests, who dined at tables that groaned with lobsters, fish and meats ferried by liveried waiters. Brandy was served at a busy bar. “The Mountain House was the crown jewel of the Hudson Valley,” Palmer told me. “Americans had never seen anything like it. You could go up to a remote cliffside and have a five-course meal and enjoy sumptuous accommodations.”

Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine Summer 2026 issue

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Near the Catskill Mountain House, America’s first rural luxury resort, visitors, including a resident musical act called Smith’s Cornet Band, engraved graffiti onto a cliffside rock ledge. Lauren Petracca

It also provided unprecedented access to nature. Every morning, staff knocked on doors to wake guests for sunrise, which Davison assured them was “more enchantment than reality.” Mist filled the valleys, creating a dawn gloaming, then burned off to reveal, as one anonymous 1826 visitor raved in the Boston Recorder and Telegraph, “a distant Eden flooded with light.” The same visitor marveled at the sheer scale of the vista: “An area wide enough for the territory of a nation lies beneath you like a picture, with the Hudson winding through like an inlaid vein of silver.” Guests hiked through gnarled forests to the “novel and romantic” Kaaterskill Falls, where a viewing platform had been installed to observe the 260-foot cascades.

To reach the site of the Mountain House today, I parked by a lakeside trailhead in Catskill State Park and hiked up the same steep switchbacks used by the old stagecoaches. Passing through the stone remains of the once-grand entry gate, I emerged onto a clifftop plateau with views that are still jaw-dropping, although the beloved hotel has now vanished. The wooden structure fell into decay in the 1950s, when local kids would break in and throw its antique porcelain plates like Frisbees, and in 1963 rangers burned it down because it was a safety hazard. Still, a note on a notice board reminds visitors that “the view before you was for many years the most famous in America,” while a nostalgic plaque boasts that Presidents Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt were guests at the hotel.

Arguably the earliest influential guests, however, were the novelist James Fenimore Cooper and the English-born aspiring artist Thomas Cole, later the founder of the Hudson River School of painters. Their work would secure the Hudson Valley’s reputation as the quintessential American landscape. “It was a one-two punch, combining art and literature,” Palmer said. “In novels like The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper told ‘historical’ tales about specific Hudson Valley locations. Then Cole came along with his paintings. It was like an accidental marketing campaign for upstate travel.”

Beginning in 1833, art-loving travelers could even pay a visit to Cole himself while down in Catskill; the artist moved there full-time as a tenant on the property of a Federal-style manor called Cedar Grove. Three years later, he married his landlord’s daughter, Maria Bartow, and graduated to residing in the Cedar Grove mansion itself, turning it into upstate New York’s first private art gallery, with his wife managing sales and his sisters giving tours.

Today, the Cedar Grove house is preserved as a charming museum on the grounds of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, displaying original landscapes and an audio-visual presentation using the artist’s words. “Cole grew up in Lancashire at the time of the Luddites, the anti-industrial movement,” Jordan Shook, a staff member, told me as we wandered from the blue-painted entrance hall to the upstairs family bedrooms. “Here in America, he was awe-struck by the Hudson Valley landscape, but he saw the dangers of what he called ‘the ravages of the ax’ and became a pioneer preservationist.” “We are still in Eden” was one of his typical declarations, she added. “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it?”

The “Four Corners,” where Crown Street meets John Street in Kingston, are bordered by buildings that predate the Revolution. Lauren Petracca

Rough Draft, a bar and bookstore in a pre-Revolutionary building in the Hudson River port of Kingston. The town, New York State’s first capital, was burned by the British in 1777, but was quickly rebuilt. Lauren Petracca

Cole’s timing was impeccable. After his first steamboat trip up the Hudson in 1824, the self-taught artist placed three oil landscapes in the window of a friend’s gallery in Manhattan and was surprised to find that they were immediately snapped up, followed by a rave review in the New-York Evening Post titled “Another American Genius.” “When Cole showed his first Hudson paintings in New York, everyone lost their minds,” Palmer said. “Here was an American landscape that embodied the full checklist of European romanticism.” This local vision of what Davison and other aesthetes called the “sublime” showed the hand of God at work in nature, inspiring later devotees of the Hudson River School. Cole soon met the best-selling novelist Cooper on a visit to Manhattan, and the two became fast friends and collaborators. By 1826, travelers could see Cole’s painting of a scene from The Last of the Mohicans in the dining room of the upscale steamship Albany.

Whether offering luxury and art or budget cabins, Hudson steamships ended their routes in the state capital, Albany. But few travelers dallied in the city. Some made excursions to the nearby Shaker community to admire the “order, neatness and cleanliness” of their unworldly, celibate community, or to the imposing mansion of the last Dutch “patroon,” a semifeudal landowner, that loomed at Rensselaerswyck. History buffs would call in at the riverfront Watervliet Arsenal’s “handsome brick and stone buildings,” built in 1812 and functioning as an informal Revolutionary War museum, with “muskets, bayonets, swords and pistols ... arranged with great taste and kept in fine order,” Davison wrote. Visitors could admire captured British cannons and French rifles donated by Louis XVI, whose ornamental brass shafts were engraved with Latin mottos.

But the majority quickly climbed aboard one of the daily stage-coaches (9 a.m. and 2 p.m., fare $2) that whisked them from the dock in Albany some 35 miles north to Saratoga Springs. Thanks to its healthful mineral water springs, the town had become the most popular tourist destination in the U.S., the answer to refined European spa resorts like Baden-Baden, in Germany. Checking into splendid hotels such as the Pavilion and Congress Hall, which each charged a hefty $8 a week for bed and board, the voyagers swapped their traveling clothes for the elegant formal outfits stashed in their trunks to attend balls, piano concerts, art shows and the theater. In a self--promotional flourish, Davison also recommended visiting his newspaper office for its “large and airy” reading room with 100 newspapers and maps and a second-floor mineralogy museum.

Revolutionary War re-enactors in Schuylerville commemorate the area’s Revolutionary past. The Battles of Saratoga, fought nearby in autumn 1777, culminated in a pivotal British surrender. Lauren Petracca

The Neilson House, in Stillwater, served as General Benedict Arnold’s headquarters during the Battles of Saratoga. The future traitor’s early battlefield heroism was critical to the American victory. Lauren Petracca

On my visit to the town, I strolled Broadway in search of the address at number 417 and was delighted to find that it still exists. It’s a three-story townhouse with large upstairs windows on enclosed balconies; the ground floor now houses a bar called, bluntly, the Wine Bar. A tiny metal plaque by its steps even commemorates Davison’s residence here, although it is nearly hidden by electric wires. But Saratoga’s raison d’être was its 21 mineral water springs, most still protected by ornate pergolas as they were in the 1820s. “Every spring had its own medicinal property, and physicians would recommend which one was good for your skin or back pain or gastrointestinal problems,” said Lauren Roberts, the county historian, when we met on the sunny porch of the Saratoga Arms Hotel, which dates to the Gilded Age.

The Saratoga Monument, erected in the 1880s, commemorates the Revolution’s “turning point,” when the Americans’ decisive victory persuaded the French to join the fight. Lauren Petracca

Several springs are in leafy Congress Park, where Davison described “little urchins” dispensing the waters in cups to a varied crowd. While noting that doctors admired the waters’ fizziness, which could “sparkle with the life of a good champagne,” Davison warned that the first taste is “frequently unpleasant.” As I cupped my hand to taste the waters, his warning rang true: The salinity was something of a shock. Congress Park is also home to an old majestic casino turned history museum, where hidden high in a corner I spotted a dark and murky oil portrait of Davison himself.

Eleven miles southeast of Saratoga Springs was another attraction—a battlefield where two engagements in 1777, together referred to as the Battles of Saratoga, decisively changed the course of the War of Independence. For vivid insight, Davison recommended seeking out a then-octogenarian Continental Army veteran named Major Ezra Buell, who lived on-site and gave tours (“his memory is still good”). The guidebook went into great detail about the actions at Freeman’s Farm on September 19 and Bemis Heights on October 7, which led to the surrender of General John Burgoyne and his 7,400-strong army, the greatest British military defeat in history at the time. (The Continental Army’s forces swelled from around 9,000 to more than 11,000 during the engagement.) The upset victory was so shocking that it persuaded the French to enter the war on America’s side, turning a remote colonial struggle into a global conflict that sprawled across the Caribbean and Europe.

In Schuylerville, an actor buttons up a 2nd Continental Army artillerist’s waistcoat. Lauren Petracca

Breakfasters in British garb eat on Broad Street. Lauren Petracca

Today, the battlefield site is a serene pastoral setting, with rolling, flower-filled fields fringed by forests, and can be toured by car. Davison singled out for a poetic reverie the picturesque hilltop where the mortally wounded British General Simon Fraser asked to be buried, delaying the British Army’s retreat with disastrous results. My own tour ended at a surreal monument depicting a sculpted boot. Unveiled in 1887, it was a tribute to the general who led the Americans to victory and was wounded in the leg on the spot: none other than Benedict Arnold, who because of his later treason was not named or identified in any way. While earlier generations knew the story by heart, I learned about it at Stop 7 on the National Park’s audio narration on the ten-mile Battlefield Tour Road: “The Decisive Moment.”

For the final stretch of the Grand Tour, American engineering took center stage. The Erie Canal’s 1825 completion was a 363-mile triumph that transformed transportation in the United States by connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie, and thus the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Overnight, a journey that had been the province of intrepid adventure travelers willing to endure two weeks by stagecoach along difficult roads could be completed in five relaxing days for less than $8, including meals. Sightseers could choose from an array of new boats that were pulled by horse teams on land, a gentle pace that continued day and night. In fine weather, they could bring chairs onto the roof to take in the scenery and marvel at the workings of the 83 locks that changed the canal level en route.

Although the Erie Canal fell into disuse in the 20th century, you can follow its length by car through drowsy hamlets north of the Finger Lakes, a region whose temperate microclimate now makes it a fertile wine district. I broke the journey at Aurora, on the eastern side of Cayuga Lake, where boats loaded with peaches stopped while sailing to the canal. The village is near intact from the early 19th century, and has been restored as a unique collection of lodgings called the Inns of Aurora, at its heart an 1833 Federal-style tavern built by E.B. Morgan, the wealthy co-founder of the New York Times and the first president of transport company Wells Fargo. In a quirky architectural success story, the string of historic structures was saved and renovated over the past two decades by Pleasant T. Rowland, the founder of the American Girl doll company.

The E.B. Morgan House was built in 1858 on Cayuga Lake as a private home and restored in 2005 as a centerpiece of the Inns of Aurora, a resort and spa incorporating numerous 19th-century private homes. Lauren Petracca

The parlor of the Aurora Inn features an original portrait of Nancy Eagles, whose husband, William, bought the inn in the 1840s and made it a hub for travelers coming by stagecoach, rail and Erie Canal boat. Lauren Petracca

For an experience of the canal itself, I arranged a rendezvous at its end point in Buffalo. After driving through industrial back blocks, I met members of the city’s Maritime Center at the ruins of the canal’s western terminus, where the 73-foot-long wooden replica of an 1825 canal boat called the Seneca Chief, painted canary yellow with green and brown trim, was moored. Davison found Buffalo “a beautiful and thriving village ... destined to become one of the most important ports of the state.” He was right. The city did boom—today it is scattered with stunning Art Deco civic structures and Tudor-style mansions—and the waterfront exploded into a red-light district catering to sailors from the Great Lakes and “canawlers,” as canal boat crews were known. The district has since been renovated as Canalside, with a promenade, outdoor cafés and bars.

Moved along by a push-boat, the Seneca Chief left the dock and entered the canal proper at the village of Tonawanda. Like any good 1820s traveler, I sat on the Chief’s roof and watched the verdure press in on either side of the canal while flocks of Canadian geese passed overhead. As we glided, John Montague, the Maritime Center’s president emeritus, explained that the center began rebuilding 19th-century watercraft to help Buffalo recover its civic pride after a long period of economic depression. “There was tremendous wealth here once,” he said, including the world’s largest collection of wheat silos and the most millionaires per capita in the early 20th century. “Every great American architect built something for Buffalo aristocrats, from Henry Hobson Richardson to Frank Lloyd Wright. The city has been struggling with its identity since the 1960s, when its industry declined and it became part of the Rust Belt. But if you look at its flag, the first things you see are a lighthouse and a canal boat. The Erie Canal is what made Buffalo! It was America’s real gateway to the West.”

On the Erie Canal in Buffalo, a replica of the *Seneca Chief*, which ceremonially traversed the canal upon its 1825 completion. The waterway transformed commerce and tourism, offering comfortable transport from the Hudson to the Great Lakes. Lauren Petracca

Eight hours later, we floated through the “Deep Cut”—a seven-mile stretch of solid rock that presented the most challenging engineering obstacle when it was dug by hand in 1825—and into our goal, Lockport. We were greeted on the dock by an eager crowd of passersby and locals who had spotted the antique-looking vessel’s arrival, as well as representatives of an artisanal beer company named after one of the canal’s fond 19th-century nicknames: the Big Ditch.

From Buffalo, it was only 20 miles to the Holy Grail for nature lovers in the 1820s: Niagara Falls, which most Americans had seen only in engravings. Travelers could visit the falls during a hectic day trip by stagecoach from Buffalo, but most preferred to stay at the newly opened Cataract House. From there it was a five-minute walk to Goat Island, which divides the American Falls from Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, although Davison warned that the two rickety bridges over “the frightful abyss” could strike terror in the fainthearted. Some travelers, he wrote, turned back. But once across, a network of stairs, trails and viewing platforms afforded breathtaking views. This strategic location also made the Cataract House a favored stop on the Underground Railroad. Black waitstaff helped runaways from the South, who were disguised as servants, slip out a side door and row to safety in Canada.

Horseshoe Falls, Niagara’s largest, which “descends to the river in the form of a curve,” Davison wrote. He promised that “the emotions of grandeur that fill the mind” can “scarcely be felt from any effort of description.” Lauren Petracca

The Cataract House burned down in 1945, but I pulled up across the street from its old location, at the Red Coach Inn, opened in 1923 and named in honor of the scarlet stagecoach the Marquis de Lafayette used in 1825 during his farewell tour of the United States. (The elderly French hero of the Revolutionary War was so awed by the grandeur of the falls that he fantasized about getting a summer cottage there, according to his travel companion and chronicler André-Nicolas Levasseur.)

Feeling a light spray on my face, I followed a thunderous roar into Niagara Falls State Park, across a thankfully solid bridge onto Goat Island and over to Terrapin Point. Confronting the falls, I took in the sensory assault that the Philadelphia lawyer and aesthete Dilworth Gilpin, a guidebook author and Davison imitator, described thus: “the vast body of water, whirling and fretting and foaming among the rapids above—the deep and death-like stillness with which it approaches the precipice, then, gathering all its mighty force, the plunge which it makes into the abyss below—the vapor clouds ... the rainbow, now glowing, now fading away ... and above all, the ceaseless roar, which diffuses through the mind a feeling of ungovernable awe.”

As I retraced my route back south, I had one last mission on my Grand Tour. While my jaunt on the Seneca Chief gave me the experience of being on the Erie Canal, I had found spending time on the once-teeming Hudson River difficult. But then I received word from a man named N.D. Austin, an artist, a designer and (of all things) a tugboat captain I had heard about from friends of friends in Brooklyn. He and a vintage tug owned by the nonprofit Tideland Institute, Shoofly, were at an annual “tugboat roundup” upriver. Austin suggested I hop aboard in the port of Hudson and return to New York City, 120 miles south, in traditional maritime style.

Today, Niagara’s Cave of the Winds tour includes a visit to the “Hurricane Deck,” which extends to within 20 feet of Bridal Veil Falls. The staircases and decks traversing the base of the falls are rebuilt every year. Lauren Petracca

The following afternoon, we chugged across the mirror-flat waters of the Hudson in an inflatable motorboat toward Shoofly, whose stately bulk was anchored midway in the river’s flow. “It’s an entirely different experience seeing the Hudson from the water,” Austin said, as a blue heron swooped past. “To see the river, you’ve got to be on the river.” The only sign of civilization on either of the densely forested, rocky shores was a ship’s graveyard with decaying hulls poking from the waterline.

Kaaterskill Falls, near Palenville, New York. “The road to the falls is extremely rough,” Davison cautioned, “but this objection will hardly deter the traveler from a visit to a spot so novel and romantic.” Lauren Petracca

After we clambered aboard the tugboat, we were joined by other vintage watercraft—a ramshackle houseboat, a string of old yachts and a restored schooner called Apollonia that runs cargo to New York City entirely by sail—each part of a modest and quirky maritime community that still exists along the Hudson. The vessels were lashed together to the tug, creating an improvised platform for around 50 people to enjoy a unique floating social gathering, complete with string musicians performing Herman Melville-era sea shanties.

It turned out to be a more immersive adventure than expected. After we weighed anchor the next morning, Austin handed me the wheel so he and two crew members could focus on minor repairs. And so I found myself steering the vessel south along the Hudson, keeping an eye on a navigational chart that showed the river’s depth and location of buoys and other markers while Austin blasted opera from a sound system and saluted passing vessels with salvaged ships’ horns and bells.

After sleeping a second night on the floor of the tug’s wheelhouse, I awoke to find the river enveloped in a ghostly mist. The sun burned weakly through. As I stood on the prow, watching the shapes of ancient trees on the banks drift in and out of the fog, past and present blurred. It could have been a moody scene painted by Thomas Cole or conjured by James Fenimore Cooper, whose adventures frequently took place along these shores.

But more importantly for me, it was a 19th-century traveler’s dream. For two weeks, I had followed the earliest American tourist guidebook, and this was precisely the wild escape it offered: immersion in a distinctive and inspiring American landscape. As Davison promised, I had a taste of the sublime.

Tony Perrottet | Read More

Tony Perrottet is a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times and WSJ Magazine, and the author of six books including ¡Cuba Libre!: Che, Fidel and the Improbable Revolution that Changed World History,The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games and Napoleon's Privates: 2500 Years of History Unzipped. Follow him on Instagram @TonyPerrottet.

Planning Your Next Trip?

Explore great travel deals

A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

America’s Original Travel Influencer Drew Up a Revolutionary Itinerary 200 Years Ago. There’s Still Plenty to See Along the Way

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99

You Might Also Like

Planning Your Next Trip?