whence "nundagao"
A disclaimer: this is dredged up from the memory of young child many decades hence, but here goes...in the late 40s/early 50s my dad, Walter Biesemeyer, proprietor of the Mountain House, together with Burns Weston, both charter members of the Hurricane Mountain chapter of the ADK, had cleared an abandoned trail to Lost Pond and laid the route of today's herd path over the so-called Soda Range and its then-unnamed highest point. Walter and Borden Mills, former president of the ADK and frequent guest at the Mtn Hse, thought the range deserved a better name. Borden claimed to have found in some archive that Hurricane Mountain was the white man's mistranslation of its aboriginal name, "nun-da-ga-o", meaning hill of the wind spirits (for the cool evening breezes from the mountain into the valley of Keene). Walter liked the sound of that. Changing the name of Hurricane Mountain was out of the question, but few people knew about the soda range. Walter, Borden, and Burns were prime movers in lobbying to apply the name Nundagao to it, and Weston Peak to its highest point. So far as I know, no one has ever been able to authenticate the name. It does not appear in William Beauchamp's "Aboriginal Place Names of New York State". Long ago I read an historian's observation that we owe the name Nundagao to a Swiss architect and an Albany lawyer, "two most dubious cartographers". Thus is history invented!
