Lord knows what I'm setting myself up for with this crowd, but hey, ya gotta put it out there.

I've recorded a short essay on the etymology and pronunciations of Shawangunk for WAMC/NPR Albany, 90.9 or 90.3 FM locally. It will air tomorrow morning at 10:35. There is also a live feed at www.wamc.org/roundtable, where it will be archived afterwards. Click on "Roundtable Interviews/Congressional Corner," link to the right of the page.

Good work Chris. Any idea if it will get picked up by NPR nationally? It's always amusing to hear someone you know on the radio.

Nah. It's far too provincial a subject. I know four others who have recorded essays for WAMC. One of them has done nine. They're a dime-a-dozen.

I liked your essay; well said and well spoken. All I'd read, including guidebooks, the WPA Federal Writers Project Guide to New York, etc. led me to believe that the proper pronunciation of Shawangunk is shongum. Could it be that all the above writers took information from the same erroneous source? Since, I suppose, there is no "horse's mouth" on the subject, there must be a source or sources more authoritative than the rest. Might you give us a bibliography here?

Thank you, MJ. I thought I commited the worst offense for a reader, the kind of thing I'm always chafing about at live readings - a flat and unanimated performance - and I wished I'd pushed for a loosened-up second take.

Marc Fried has 9 pages on Shawangunk in the opening of his new book, Shawangunk Place-Names, which you can pick up at some bookstores in the region, including the Preseve's gift shop. He self-publishes. I can PM you his address if you'd like.

I also have an essay I published several places last year which I can forward to you. They're not on-line. PM me if you're interested. I updated the Name section on Wikipedia under Shawangunk Ridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawangunk_Ridge

That's it for the updated material. Marc and I were working independently, tracking down the same sources simultaneously. It's curious how that happened. There are other recent sources, but they all cite much older work from EM Ruttenber's 1906 Indian Geographical Names or his earlier The Indians of Hudson's River; and a paper from the 1860's by the Reverand Charles Scott for the Ulster County Historical Society.

We were fortunate to find the linguist Raymond Whritenour, who's unequivocal about the Lenape pronunciation. He provided Shawangunk's part of speech, the "in the smoky air" translation, and is as close to the horse's mouth as you're going to find anywhere. The surviving Lenape from Oklahoma and Ontario (there's a discussion board at lenapeindians.com), and places like the Smithsonian, rely on him.

Marc remains a fervent advocate of SHONG-gum based on its vernacular longevity.

Very well done

cheers dude!

I just listened to the podcast of this essay. Nice piece of work, Chris. And it’s great to see your references in your reply to oenophore. I hope that information made it into print in the written essays you referred to.

Have you approached DW about putting this in his next guide (presumably, the one for the Nears)? Or any trail guide/nature guide authors? Your research has value; it would be nice to see it preserved in one or more of the local guide books. Another thread has recently suggested that Dumais' table top book is going to be reprinted with revisions. I don't know if this is true, but perhaps you could make him aware of this essay, in any case.

Thank you for the suggestions, Frank. Yes, I included a survey of the previously documented work on the pronunciations and translations in the essay.

I've used the NPR piece as a reminder to folks that new sources have been published within the last year. I've contacted all of the ridge organizations and local libraries as well as several journalists who cover the ridge, and pointed them to Marc's book and my essays. I contacted the NY/NJ Trail Conference who publish the ridge hiking maps, and their map person says they'll include the new information in their next printing. I learned about a month ago that the Dumais book was being re-issued: too late to get anything in there. The research was completed by the time the Trapps guide was in production, but Dick and Gregory were so deep into the editing and layout sweating their deadline, that I didn't want to burden them with another detail. An opportunity may be there for the Nears guide.

And, I'm not going anywhere, so every chance I get I'll be out there beating the bushes and republishing.

The essay has rotated out of The Roundtable's archives, so here's the text, edited slightly from the original. It was adapted from pieces I did last year for The Shawangunk Conservancy's Spring newsletter, the Summer edition of Ridgelines, and the Autumn issue of The Weekender magazine. WAMC has invited me to become a regular contributor. For supporting my writing and for offering me the opportunity to challenge a fiercely intransigent misnomer, I have extended my gratitude to these medias. Thanks also to everyone on the site who dropped me an encouraging note...

Here in Ulster County, there is a ridge that rises between its lush and lovely river basins, curling up to quartzite crags that stretch down the crest of the ridge like breakers along a petrified wave. The crags are North America’s busiest rock climbing destination. Peregrine falcons jet the cragline, scorching awe in their slipstreams. Coyote track along the ridge’s glacial lakes and yawning waterfalls. Black bear scats mound among its blueberry ledges. Rumors of phantom mountain lions haunt its pitch pine barrens – an environment more rare to mountain ridges than the big cat is to the eastern seaboard.

It is a landscape all together precious, and to some, pound for pound, it is the most beautiful place on Earth. In the indigenous Munsee Lenape tongue, the name of the ridge is Shawangunk.

But ask librarians, historians, and the administrators who manage the 40,000 protected acres of the ridge, and you will hear – as I heard it pronounced recently on WAMC (and often with a scolding piety) – that the ridge is called the SHONG-gums. Many insist that SHONG-gum is Lenape, because brow-beating the ignorant with the received word trumps doing a little homework.

In September of 1663, the Dutch raided and torched a Munsee fort at the eastern base of the ridge – a massacre ending the Second Esopus War – which effectively opened the mid-Hudson interior to European colonization. In land deeds following the massacre, nearly a dozen three-syllable variations of Shawangunk were recorded for adjacent parcels. By the early 1700s, the name had spread from the valley to the ridge.

As historian Marc Fried has noted, colonists began to truncate Shawangunk – like Worcester or Gloucester – into SHONG-gum. Its Lenape lineage was contrived and championed by 19th century researchers, teachers, and preachers who never considered, or ignored, the original deeds. Masquerading as native, SHONG-gum emerged as another European victor in the skirmishes of culture.

New research has found that Shawangunk means “in the smoky air.” The Lenape linguist Raymond Whritenour suggests the name derives from the impression the fort’s torching left on the surviving natives. This poignant narrative exists from the ashes of that massacre:

“When the Dutch troops left it, it was a terrible picture of desolation. The huts had been burned, the bodies of the Indians who had been killed and thrown into the corn pits had been unearthed by wolves and their skeletons left to bleach on the plain, with here and there the half eaten body of a child. For years it was a fable told to children that the place was haunted by the ghosts of the slain….”

“In the smoky air” rekindles like an elegy for the indigenous souls who left us this precious place. Does Shawangunk not deserve the dignity of its Munsee Lenape pronunciation?

And I paid those geology fact checkers good money.

I wanted to use quartz conglomerate, or just conglomerate (but didn't think that would work for a general audience), and I kept pinching things to get it under three minutes, and lapsed into the shorter quartzite, yep, not thinking there's a difference. My proofers with some background in geology missed it, too. One of them says I can call it poetic license, but that don't sit right, given the piece's facts straightening point.

Thanks for the clarification, Timbo.

Nice piece, Chris.

Funny, I never heard anybody say, "I'm going climbing in the 'Gums' this weekend." Nice essay.

Oenophore's description of quartzite conforms to that reported by the American Geological Institute.

Quartzite is listed twice in the AGI dictionary, once as a term for metamorphic rocks and once for sedimentary. In the latter case, the description is, "a very hard but unmetamorphosed sandstone, consisting chiefly of quartz grains that have been so completely and solidly cemented with secondary silica that the rock breaks across or through grains rather than around them; an orthoquartzite."

Notice that no thermal event or regional mountain building is implied. Silica solutions in the Gunks rock percolated through the strata and extensively filled voids. You can see this in the "whitey, tighty" layers that are especially recognizable at the top of the Arrow wall or out at Millbrook. The same solutions also are responsible for making the shale layers in the rock tough and brittle.

So Yorick had it right.

There is a large percentage of rounded quartz inclusions in the silica matrix. These inclusions are of a much larger size and derived from another source as the other material, thus it is a conglomerate.

Is there no nomenclature for a conglomerate that breaks through the pebbles?

I've always called Gunks stone quartzite conglomerate. Why can't it be both terms? There's conglomerate in a few spots in the Catskills; I might call that shaley conglomerate. If I thought I knew what it was, that is.

How about we save everybody the headache and just call it nice rock. Nice rock....niiiiice rooock.....

RR

Sorry, RR, it's winter and the lack of climbing is wearing on some of us. So in lieu of that activity, and even as I agree that it is a nice rock, either to look at or climb on, I'll happily rag on some more about its classification.

If I understand Timbo's argument correctly, he doesn't want to call this rock a quartzite because the original sediment wasn't well sorted, that is, it contained a variety of grain sizes. Yup, it does, and that permits the term conglomerate, specifically a quartz pebble conglomerate. He contrasts the Gunks' rock to the quartzite at Devils Lake and Seneca, two examples of more well sorted material, that is, with more uniform sand-grain sized original sediment. He could have also mentioned the quartzite at the back end of Lake Louise, another exposure with uniform sized original grains that a lot of climbers are familiar with.

What we have at the Gunks is a silicified rock, that I still think is well described by the term quartzite (or orthoquartzite) precisely for the reason Oenophore mentioned that also has a good number of pebbles in it. The advantage of using this nomenclature is that it indicates the tough, tight character of the rock. Calling the Gunks a conglomerate emphasises the range of particle size, but doesn't indicate the extensive cemetation that's taken place.

Maybe if I was writing a technical paper I'd call the rock orthometaconglomerate. Jeez, I hope DW never puts that in a guidebook! And if Yorick had called it that in his report, I'll bet people would have tuned him out right there. Only dweeby geo-types like Timbo and myself would parse out the true sense of the word to figure out what it implied in terms of rock composition and subsequent process of lithification.

Final points: Timbo, you said that the different sized sediment grains had different sources. Why? What supports that conclusion? And isn't the Tuscarora (Seneca's rock) actually a a distal equivalent of the Gunks' rock? Both were deposited in essentially the same transitional environment during the Silurian, as I understand it. (Please correct if this is wrong.) The only real differences are that the Tuscarora is more well sorted and then later was metamorphosed into quartzite during tectonic events. The lumpier Gunks outcrops are still horizontal and presumably were flushed with silica-rich groundwater as a consequence of these same events.

RR, you still with us?

Have I ever told this board how glad I am that I didn't go into geology?

To the geologists posting on this thread I'll address my wonder: why is that formation so quartzite-like in some places and not in others?

I say lets give it a few million years and it might erode, lose all those nasty quartz pebbles, regroup, and metamorphose into a quartzite.

Would that be impacted by the build-up of chalk on the rock?

So Mr. Rawdon can refer to it as quartzite conglomerate if he chooses; however, the material contains numerous grain sizes and is by definition conglomerate, not quartzite. So, quartzite conglomerate is OK, quartz conglomerate is OK, plain vanilla congomerate is OK, but it is not currently a quartzite.

As close to consensus as we'll get; I'll take it.

According to the Wikipedia article, portions of the Shawangunk caprock are in fact sandstone. I certainly can't disagree. Just look at parts of the Mac Wall, Yellow Wall and Lost City.