When Robert Juet gazed on the lower North River's shoreline in 1609, he noted that “the mountains look as though they contain some metal or mineral, for some of them are almost barren of trees, and what few trees do grow there are blighted.” Further upriver he “found good land for growing wheat and garden herbs. Upon it were a great many handsome oak, walnut, chestnut, ewe and an abundance of other trees of pleasing wood. In addition, there was much slate and other good stone for houses.”1 Sailing with Henry Hudson, Juet was among the first Europeans to view the river valley that would later bear his captain's name, although the ways in which subsequent travelers interpreted that landscape would change dramatically over the next four centuries. Juet and other seventeenth-century Europeans saw the land through the lens of economic development. Every tree, mountainside, meadow, or water body...
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