ORSON SCHOFIELD PHELPS, guide and philosopher, belonged to Keene Valley and Charles Dudley Warner. He lived in the shade of the one, and in the light of the other. He was not a great guide. Indeed, many did not consider him even a good one. He delighted in showing the way but not in preparing the camp. His neighbors openly rated him as both lazy and shiftless, and of no genius could it more truly be said that he was not a hero to his valley. He went hunting or fishing as a housewife goes to market. What he lacked in sporting zest, however, was offset by a love of nature and a poetic cast of thought that made him a favorite with some of the most intellectual men of his day.

He was born in Wethersfield, Vt., on May 6, 1817. About 1830 he came into the Schroon Lake country with his father, who was a surveyor. The elder Phelps had to trace out some old lot lines, and his boy helped him. Their work gave them a glimpse of some of the higher mountains, and Orson conceived a youthful but abiding love for them. He returned home with his father, but only to wait for an opportunity of coining back to the wilderness. He made it a year or two later by finding employment at the Adirondack Iron Works. He stayed there till Mr. Henderson's death. Then he turned from a commercial career to the more congenial freedom of an outdoor life. He wandered over to Keene Valley and settled there permanently. He married a native maiden by the name of Melinda Lamb, who developed oddities of temperament and tricks of speech that matched well with those of her more conspicuous spouse. She never fell under the charm of Mr. Warner's pen, however, and so remained in the penumbra of the literary lime-light that was focused on her husband.

After his marriage, Phelps built a little home for himself and wife in a cozy nook near Prospect Hill, a little off the main road. Near the house is a bubbling stream and some pretty falls, to which Phelps's name has been attached. In this spot he lived and died. His hobby, which developed into a remunerative specialty, was climbing mountains. This exclusiveness led to his being called "Old Mountain Phelps"— a name in which he took both pride and pleasure. When asked to lead the way up some unfamiliar trail, he would often say: "So you want Old Mountain Phelps to show you the way, do you.  Well, I caller late he kin do it."

His favorite mountain was Marcy, and he boasted of having climbed it over a hundred times. In 1849 he blazed the first trail to its summit from the east, going in from Lower Ausable Lake and then passing Haystack and the head of Panther Gorge. Later he cut what was known as the Bartlett Mountain trail. About 1850 he guided two ladies over it to the summit of Marcy. They were the first women to make the complete ascent, and the feat of getting them safely to the top and back gave Phelps his first local renown.1

Old Phelps, like Dr. Johnson, owes the lasting and intimate quality of his fame to a clever biographer. In the "Atlantic" for May, 1878, Charles Dudley Warner published an essay entitled "The Primitive Man,"  introducing a new discovery to the world—an unwashed Thoreau of guidedom. As a result Old Phelps awoke one morning to find himself famous. He inquired into the cause, read it, and liked it. Thereafter he devoted himself, too obviously at times, to living up to the literary halo in which he had been most unexpectedly lassoed. It was a big halo and it got around his feet and tripped him up now and then, so that disappointed pilgrims returned from his shrine to accuse Warner of having raised exaggerated hopes. The deception, such as it was, however, was certainly not intentional. The writer says nothing that is not essentially true, but he says it with such grace and charm of phrase that we forget that a squeaky voice, the reluctance to use soap, and allied oddities may be less alluring in actual contact than in the pages of a book. This, it seems to me, is the most serious charge that can be brought against Mr. Warner's inimitable description of his primitive man. He says: