The Catskills (zCat Creeky in Dutch), Americas original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five countiesDelaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; Americas first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudsons first spotting the distant blue mountains in 1609; the New York State constitutional convention, resulting in New Yorks own Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its own constitution, causing the ire of the invading British army . . . the Catskills as a popular attraction in the 1800s, with the construction of the Catskill Mountain House and its rugged imitators that offered WASP guests zone-hundred percent restrictedy accommodations (zHebrews will knock vainly for admissiony), a policy that remained until the Catskills became the curative for tubercular patients, sending real-estate prices plummeting and the WASP enclave on to richer pastures . . .