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Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] [Calico Rebellion]: A story of this sort has an almost mythical nature to it.
[00:00:05] Brett Barry: Today, we're in Andes, New York, where American independence came in waves.
[00:00:12] [Calico Rebellion]: What went on in this area should be in every social studies history book.
[00:00:17] Brett Barry: Calico Rebellion, a documentary by two Russian journalists, tells the story.
[00:00:24] [Calico Rebellion]: You can look at it as the final chapter of the American Revolution.
[00:00:29] Brett Barry: I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."
[00:00:34] Victoria Kupchinetsky: I am Victoria Kupchinetsky.
[00:00:37] Misha Gutkin: And I'm Misha Gutkin.
[00:00:39] Brett Barry: Victoria and Misha, I can tell right away with my astute listening skills that you have accents that are not of this area. Where are you from, and how did you find Andes, New York?
[00:00:51] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Very good, Brett. Your hearing is very professional. Your ear is very sharp. I was born in St. Petersburg. At that point when I was born, it was called Leningrad in the Soviet Union, and I immigrated to the United States in 1990.
[00:01:10] Brett Barry: And, Misha, same story?
[00:01:12] Misha Gutkin: Almost. I was also born in Leningrad, St. Petersburg, but we met here in New York, and I left earlier. I left with my parents in 1979. The war in Afghanistan, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, was just ramping up, and I would have been drafted into the army. Being 18, I kind of didn't care much, but my parents really wanted to get me out before I got drafted.
[00:01:45] Victoria Kupchinetsky: But first, they went to Ohio.
[00:01:47] Misha Gutkin: Yes.
[00:01:48] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Like, people need to understand that we were coming—like, it was—we were coming from Mars, like we were Martians, and we landed in New York or in the United States, and it was like, "Wow, we had no idea how this society worked." We had no idea how this education worked. We had no idea about, like, in general, of course, we understood the American ideals and ideas and, like, the idea of freedom, but what did it entail? How do you function day by day, right? How do you make a living? How do you communicate with people? So it took me at least 10 years to actually at least start feeling at home and comfortable in this country.
[00:02:31] Misha Gutkin: Especially, in my case, in '79 that was way before perestroika and glasnost, so we knew even less about the West.
[00:02:42] Brett Barry: Perestroika was Mikhail Gorbachev's program of economic and political reform in the late Soviet era. Glasnost was a companion policy of greater transparency and freedom of expression.
[00:02:54] Misha Gutkin: And coming from St. Petersburg, Leningrad, which is a very sort of European, large cultural city, coming to Akron, Ohio, was a kind of a double shock.
[00:03:08] Victoria Kupchinetsky: And now, these Martians have made a film about this rural America and unknown part of American history. We've come a long way, I think.
[00:03:20] Brett Barry: Yeah, Russian immigrants telling the story of a piece of history from the rural Catskills is interesting, so how did you even find out about this history? But, I guess, we need to back up and ask how you found Andes.
[00:03:37] Victoria Kupchinetsky: So we had friends in Andes way before it was becoming the Hamptons of the Catskills.
[00:03:46] Brett Barry: Pre-Hamptons, Andes, New York was, according to Victoria and Misha, about 15 years ago, when they used to come up to visit a friend who lives in the area.
[00:03:55] Victoria Kupchinetsky: We would come and visit him, and then we would be, you know, going around and loving the area, and then we stumbled upon the community day parade in Andes, and it was all very cute and quaint, and all these people in the fire trucks and, you know, people of different kinds, not necessarily the New York City kind, so it was all very interesting, and we were curious, and then we see this procession of people dressed in very weird masks and dresses and shaking their axes and, like, farm tools, and the announcer said from the announcing point.
[00:04:39] [Calico Rebellion]: Welcome to Andes: The Town that Shot the Sheriff.
[00:04:47] Victoria Kupchinetsky: And we were like, "What? They are celebrating the killing of an official/of an officer?" And we, being storytellers, started digging and researching, and we met all these wonderful people and descendants, also people who still had those original costumes from the 19th century.
[00:05:04] Brett Barry: So the Anti-Rent War, which kind of culminated on August 7, 1845, with Delaware County Undersheriff Osman Steele being shot dead right here in Andes. What was it that led to this event? What was the Anti-Rent War that Andes was in the center of?
[00:05:23] Misha Gutkin: So we have to start, I guess, with the system of land ownership in New York State. Even after the American Revolution, the land that was granted, huge tracts of land that were granted, they kept those lands, and they actually did everything in their power to do so, to keep those lands in perpetuity, and so the American Revolution didn't affect them very much, and what they did is they brought people from England and Scotland and other countries to work on this land, to farm the land, and the idea was they said, "Well, for seven years, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to pay anything. Just work the land," and they did, and...
[00:06:17] Victoria Kupchinetsky: But we have to note here that this land was wilderness.
[00:06:22] Misha Gutkin: Yes.
[00:06:23] Victoria Kupchinetsky: It was complete wilderness. Native Americans had been here, and they farmed here, and they also hunted here, but they moved around a lot, so it wasn't really settled, so it was these wild, wild forests, and the soil here is very rocky. There are a lot of stones, so basically these people, this farm who really wanted to farm, the immigrants, and also the children of the immigrants—they all wanted to farm. They wanted to have their own piece of land, a piece of home where they could grow, you know, fruitful farms, so they were kind of lured to this land and were told, "Develop, create something here, and then we'll see, and for seven years you don't have to pay anything." Just this is, like, presumably your piece of land, but there were leases that they had to sign with these landlords. The landlords were called patroons, and they were these descendants of European nobility who had inherited this land. Some of them never lived on this land, so they made these farmers sign these leases in perpetuity so the farmers could never purchase the land, and after seven years, they had to start paying the rents, and the rents they could pay were either in products that they produced on this land or in money or in both. They also had to go to the mansions of the landowners once a year, very often in the wintertime, and work on their roads and work on their houses, so it was a feudal relationship.
[00:08:13] Brett Barry: Indentured servitude.
[00:08:15] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Exactly.
[00:08:16] Misha Gutkin: When they signed those leases or indentures, I guess a lot of them weren't educated. They didn't quite know what exactly they were signing, being told that this is your land for seven years, and they, I don't know, maybe they didn't think about what happens afterwards, or they thought somehow it's going to work out, but eventually they found out that when they, after they cleared the land, made it more hospitable to agriculture and other productive activities, they found out that they have to keep this, keep payments up in perpetuity, and some of them actually did pretty well, and they saved up some money, and they said, "We want to buy this piece of land so that we will be the owners," and the patroon said, "No."
[00:09:15] Victoria Kupchinetsky: It was also kind of the betrayal of the ideals of the American Revolution because the idea, as we understand it, still, was that you can become an entrepreneur, a builder, and a creator of your own life and your own wealth and here it was not happening. It was almost 60, 60-something years after the revolution, and still these people were indentured servants, indentured farmers.
[00:09:49] Brett Barry: And these rent payments were going, in some cases, to people who had never even stepped foot on the land, right, who were still in Europe?
[00:09:55] Victoria Kupchinetsky: They were not in Europe. Most of them were somewhere close to Albany in their very rich, like, manors. Yeah, living like really...
[00:10:06] Brett Barry: Just collecting...
[00:10:08] Victoria Kupchinetsky: ...collecting, right?
[00:10:08] Brett Barry: ...and bushels of wheat and other things that they demanded as part of that exchange.
[00:10:13] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Yes.
[00:10:14] Brett Barry: Wheat being one example of something that doesn't really particularly grow that well in the Catskills, but still, they were required to produce a certain amount as part of that payment, and so there was eventually they had enough. There was an uprising, so what was the approximate period of time that this system was in place before this uprising began?
[00:10:34] Victoria Kupchinetsky: This system had been in place since the 17th century at least, so only in the mid-1830s did the farmers realize that it was a dead end for them, so they started organizing and started realizing that it's not working out for them, and it was a really widespread uprising. It went through all the upstate counties on this side of the Hudson and, on the other side of the Hudson River, all around Albany, and also there were people in New York City who actually published newspapers and journalists and activists who supported these farmers, so it was like a huge exchange of ideas and, in a way, grievances going on in the uprising. The actual people who participated in the uprising were huge. It was vast. It was like tens of thousands of people. Our film is focused on Delaware County, mostly on Andes, because that's where it all culminated, but it's been going on for years, a massive event in, like, agricultural movements of the United States, and very few people know about it.
[00:12:03] Brett Barry: There was no way to work within the system. The system had to be changed foundationally?
[00:12:07] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Yeah.
[00:12:07] Misha Gutkin: Right, right.
[00:12:08] Victoria Kupchinetsky: And that's a very interesting question, which stands for every generation. I think, how do you change the system that is stacked against you, which is unfair but it's legal for this particular moment?
[00:12:23] Brett Barry: So this all culminated again here in Andes, and Burr Hubbell, who you interviewed in your film, said you can look at it as the final chapter of the American Revolution. Lives here were being dictated by stakeholders who had no vested interest in this land other than a source of income. This led to farmers taking on these personas of Calico Indians. The name of your film is "Calico Rebellion," so what did that mean? What is a Calico Indian, and what was this association that farmers were creating this kind of mythology that they were aligning with?
[00:13:07] Victoria Kupchinetsky: This is a very, very interesting issue and a very interesting story because for the white settlers, European settlers who came here, of course, on one hand, they were taking, like, somebody else's land, right? The Native Americans had been here before. They pushed them off. They put them on reservations. They pushed them to the West for some reason. These farmers did identify with Native Americans. Maybe it was a class issue. They felt that they were persecuted. They were not given their land, so there was a certain complex identification with the Indians, so they called themselves Calico Indians. There is no such tribe. This tribe does not exist. They created these dresses made by their wives mostly, and it was this calico fabric, and calico fabric was a very commonplace for the Native American people to wear. They got this fabric from the white settlers at the beginning of the 19th century in exchange of, like, the furs of wild animals, things that the white people could take back to Europe and sell. Also, these farmers made these masks, and they went really crazy about these masks.
[00:14:32] Misha Gutkin: They were kind of spooky looking, and they would decorate them as animal parts and hair and...
[00:14:42] Victoria Kupchinetsky: And feathers and, like, animal parts and animal claws and...
[00:14:47] Brett Barry: Leather masks.
[00:14:48] Misha Gutkin: Yes.
[00:14:50] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Leather masks.
[00:14:50] Misha Gutkin: They were leather masks.
[00:14:50] Brett Barry: And this was to disguise them for what reason?
[00:14:54] Misha Gutkin: When they figured out that the legal system was not helping them, they organized kind of secret societies. They sprang up in many different towns in the Catskills and on the other side of the Hudson. Not only did they style their clothes after Indians, American Indians, but they also styled their organizational structure after them. They called those secret societies tribes, and they had chiefs. They took on monikers like Big Thunder or Yellow Jacket or something like that, so it sounded like Native American noms de guerre, so they wore those costumes because they wanted to keep their identity secret. They didn't want the authorities to know who they are, and also, it was kind of spooky and scary. When they heard that a sheriff is coming to a particular farm to collect the rents that the farmer refused to pay to the landlord, they would all gather there or along the road without doing anything, just standing there wearing those costumes [wearing those masks] and sometimes singing anti-rent songs that they created to just kind of shame and spook the authorities, the sheriff or undersheriff who is coming.
[00:16:28] Victoria Kupchinetsky: It was their, like, alter ego. They really, like, identified with the Native people, the people who were born and belonged to this land, who would come and save these farmers. I just want to read the lyrics from a song that they wrote in the 19th century. It's called "The Brave Indian." The song was written by the farmers, but they are presenting themselves as if they were Indians, and they were coming into these little towns to save the farmers, so the song goes as follows: "From Rocky Mountains, we are come to free our lands from slavery. Never again to see our home till we execute our bravery. Your pleasant homes, you shall enjoy. We boldly have allowed it. Your peace the tyrants would destroy, but we will not allow it," so it's from the point of view of an Indian who comes to save the farmers. This is really mind-boggling, right? Because they had these two identities. They would put on these costumes when sheriffs would come, and they would become these other creatures. It was, in a way, maybe their freedom.
[00:17:43] Brett Barry: And they had these horns that they would blow to alert other Calico Indians, aka farmers, that the sheriff was in town or that something was happening. Rent was being collected, so there was a network of sounds and horns that would go off to kind of reverberate through the region, right?
[00:18:03] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Yeah, every house at that point, every household, every homestead had those horns. Men mostly work in the fields, and women are preparing meals for them. When the meals were ready, they would come out on the porches, and there was a horn hanging on the porch, and they would blow those horns to let the men in the fields know that it was time for dinner or for lunch.
[00:18:28] Misha Gutkin: They were actually called dinner horns.
[00:18:31] Brett Barry: Like a dinner bell, but they were horns back then, and then these were adapted for other purposes.
[00:18:37] Misha Gutkin: Yes.
[00:18:37] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Anti-renters, those people who were in the movement, told other people not to use these horns for other purposes, for these dinner calls, so those who still wanted to use the horns for the dinner calls were considered traitors, so, like, the purpose of this horn from that moment on was to alert their compatriots, their fellow Calico Indians, that the sheriffs were coming.
[00:19:07] Brett Barry: When the horns were sounded, what did the farmers do? Were they hiding things or just preparing themselves in some way?
[00:19:15] Victoria Kupchinetsky: So all this started happening when the farmers... they started refusing to pay the rent. They said, "We're not going to pay the rent. We want to buy this land. We are not asking for this land for nothing. We want to pay for this land, but this is like, this cannot go on like this," and they refused to pay the rent to the patroons, so the patroons mobilized the officers of the law, sheriffs, undersheriffs, and constables, and they would try to sell the movable property from the farmers' land, their cattle, maybe their farm tools, and things like that, so they would advertise these auctions. The sheriffs would come and try to sell this cattle, so at the moments when the sheriffs were approaching, that's when the horns would be sounded, and that's when the Calico Indians, the farmers, would come from the fields, put on the costumes, and go to those auctions, and they would try to intervene, and sometimes, in order to, like, not allow for the auction to happen, they would even kill the cattle that were being sold, but what's really interesting and that shows that it was a very organized movement: they actually collected dues. When, like, the farmer lost his cattle through this auction that never happened because the Calico Indians would kill his cattle, he would get paid later for his cattle.
[00:20:52] Misha Gutkin: He would get compensated.
[00:20:53] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Compensated.
[00:20:54] Brett Barry: Like an insurance plan.
[00:20:55] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:57] Brett Barry: And so, eventually, it did lead to violence on a human level, and this is where Undersheriff Osman Steele was going to restore order, I guess, or to maintain order in a very large assemblage of Calico Indians, and he was warned that he'd be outnumbered, but he famously said that lead cannot penetrate steel, lead being a bullet and Steele being his name, and it did penetrate steel, so one of the Calico Indians shot the sheriff here in Andes.
[00:21:30] Victoria Kupchinetsky: We don't know that.
[00:21:32] Brett Barry: We don't know that.
[00:21:33] Victoria Kupchinetsky: We don't know that. He took three bullets.
[00:21:37] Brett Barry: So it may have been multiple shooters or...
[00:21:39] Misha Gutkin: Yes.
[00:21:40] Victoria Kupchinetsky: There was this farmer, an older farmer, Moses Earl, and he was not really an anti-renter, but under the peer pressure, he refused to pay his rent, and they organized an auction on his property on Dingle Hill, right outside of Andes, the town of Andes, so in the morning, Osman Steele and his constable came to the Hunting Tavern in Andes. They had breakfast or lunch there, and they were warned that the Calico Indians were gathering on Dingle Hill. It was really dangerous, and Osman Steele said, "Ha, lead cannot penetrate steel," and then they went to Dingle Hill and tried to get the cattle to the road to organize an auction. Hundreds of Calico Indians had already gathered there. Passions were running very high. An exchange of fire started. Somebody yelled, "Shoot the horses!"
[00:22:49] Misha Gutkin: There was gunfire, and the horses under Osman Steele and the constables started rearing because they were spooked by the gunfire, and whether it was intentional or not, Osman Steele was shot. That evening, he passed away in the farmhouse of Moses Earl, actually.
[00:23:14] Victoria Kupchinetsky: So hundreds of Calico Indians were arrested. The governor announced that Delaware County is in a state of insurrection. The militia, the state militia, was called into Delaware County, and it's really fascinating to imagine, so it's like these quiet towns of Delaware County, peaceful, very law-abiding, right? Farmers live there, a very kind of respectable life, and now it's this—the county's in this state of insurrection, like very dramatic events are happening. The militia are coming.
[00:23:54] Misha Gutkin: And so this militia was going house to house looking for anybody who was at Dingle Hill at the time that Osman Steele was shot, so a lot of farmers... they went into hiding places in the forest or whatever, but the militia was going house to house and looking for those costumes, which the costumes themselves became evidence of participation in this uprising, so a lot of the costumes were destroyed at the time. They were burned hidden away, and eventually they arrested several hundred people and brought them to Delhi, the county seat of Delaware County, and they had to build this stockade to keep all those people.
[00:24:41] Victoria Kupchinetsky: After they were arrested, there was a trial, and two people were sentenced to death.
[00:24:48] Misha Gutkin: There were several who were sentenced to life in prison and many others to different terms, from 6-7 years to 15 years and so on, so the governor who was elected next year was John Young, who was sympathetic to the cause, and eventually he, first, commuted the sentences of those who were sentenced to hang, and then eventually he pardoned all of them, and they came out. They returned to their communities, and soon after that, the legislature of the State of New York considered the issue of those perpetual leases and indentures and found that to be detrimental, and they changed the law and outlawed [made those indentures illegal].
[00:25:48] Brett Barry: Success.
[00:25:50] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Success of—we see this, and a lot of people in this area see this as a success of a struggle of ordinary people with a huge system, a huge unfair system, and through different means, they actually got what they wanted to get what they—what they needed.
[00:26:15] Misha Gutkin: This kind of leases were outlawed in England.
[00:26:19] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Like 100 or 400 years before.
[00:26:20] Misha Gutkin: 400 years ago, the people who had those leases here wanted to perpetuate them here, and that didn't sit well with Americans, I guess Americans who fought the British.
[00:26:38] Victoria Kupchinetsky: It was really bizarre to learn for us that New York State had that very outdated system of land ownership during the first half of the 19th century because we always think about New York as, like, this progressive, forward-looking state with, like, progressive economic initiatives.
[00:27:04] Misha Gutkin: Those were vested interests. The people who had those leases, they put pressure on revolutionary figures to keep that system intact, and Alexander Hamilton was involved in drafting those perpetual leases.
[00:27:22] Brett Barry: So you're both—you have a background in television journalism in New York City, and so learning about this history here must have been an inspiration for saying, "Well, this is going to be a great film."
[00:27:34] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Yes, because we did see a great story here. Visually great, conceptually great. It's also unique. There are so many stories that have been told already, and a lot of films just keep retelling the same stories from different angles. This is completely fresh and new, but it's also very timely, and it's of today, and we found these people who were talking about those events as if those events had happened to them because they are the descendants of those farmers. We also found the families that actually had the original costumes from the Calico Indians.
[00:28:20] Brett Barry: So you interviewed many locals who have ancestry and who were directly involved with this. Buffy Calvert, Burr and Rudd, Katherine Hubbell, a historian Ray LeFebvre, historian and storyteller Laurie McIntosh, whom people in this area know as Story Laurie, Marianne Greenfield, who's a gravestone cleaner, and Don and Doug Little. Doug is a gunsmith who works in very traditional ways. How did you find all these people? Was that difficult, or did one lead to the next?
[00:28:53] Victoria Kupchinetsky: There is one person you didn't have a chance to mention now. It's Jim Andrews, who is the historian of Andes, of the town of Andes, and I think maybe he was one of the first people that we met in Andes, and he was incredibly instrumental in pointing us in the right directions. He's also in the film. He's one of the main storytellers, and he just introduced us to a lot of people, and he told us like, "These people might have the costume. These people might have the story." We wanted to make this as the voice of the town. We didn't want to involve any, like, established academics who would just sit and very seriously give us the academic background of the events. We wanted for the people, for the descendants, and not only descendants but local people, to tell the story and to tell us what it means to them today. That's why it's kind of a multifaceted voice that you hear in the film from all these different people.
[00:30:02] Brett Barry: Was there any hesitation to speak to a couple of Russian journalists about Andes history?
[00:30:09] Victoria Kupchinetsky: Weird, right? Really weird. Maybe to other people I am an outsider. I speak with an accent. I come from a different country, but I didn't feel any hesitation at all, and I think maybe partially it's because it had been brewing for such a long time, for so many years. These people really wanted to tell the story, and finally, when somebody came, we were very eager, and we were very honest, and we were very curious, and we honestly thought that—that's the story was amazing, so maybe it was felt by those people that it's finally happening, so they, many of them, stepped forward. I also think that being an outsider a little bit really helps you with storytelling. You kind of don't go with the flow. You always have your little perspective and your little angle, and that makes, I think, maybe your art a little bit more interesting and unique.
[00:31:24] Misha Gutkin: Or maybe you don't take for granted things that people who grew up with the story take for granted, so we can maybe have a fresh look at it. First, when we discovered the story and we started digging and reading about it, we were surprised that so many people, especially outside of this area, don't know anything about it or have never heard of it or have never heard of the Anti-Rent War, and then when we started talking to the people here, people who do know about it, we were continuously surprised and inspired by how they talked about it. They spoke about it as if it happened to them, as if it happened two days ago: very animated, very involved, very invested in it, so we were always surprised by that [by those two things].
[00:32:25] Brett Barry: Are there reflections from the Anti-Rent War to now that you see, especially from the perspective of journalists who've come from Russia? I'd be interested to hear your ideas and thoughts about this country on our 250th birthday in relation to this material that you've really immersed yourself in.
[00:32:53] Misha Gutkin: The most important sort of takeaway from this for us, or for me at least, is that democracy is something that is in constant development. It's not a thing that was established and given to the next generation. It has to be maintained, and it's alive, and as Buffy Calvert in our film says, there are always forces that want to tap it down, and they will if you let them. When we first came to this country, we thought, "Well, so here we are. We're coming to this democratic country. This is great," and it is great in many ways, but we find out, especially now, that democracy has to be defended, that it has to be actively engaged with.
[00:34:04] Victoria Kupchinetsky: And here comes the question: "What are the means that are acceptable and justifiable in order to protect this democracy, in order to protect justice, and in order to actually face unjust laws or unjust actions of those in power?" And we are not claiming that we can answer those questions at all. We can just raise them, and that's why we love going to these communities and showing the film because it creates a very active, engaged conversation discourse that I think we have been kind of losing as of lately, but discourse, like, all kinds of people come, right? We know that it's usually very bipartisan gatherings, and people talk about whether violence can be justified. What do we do to change unjust systems? So, in that way, as Misha said, "This is a process. It's always a process."
[00:35:21] Brett Barry: To see "Calico Rebellion" for yourself, visit calicorebellion.com [upcoming screenings in Walton, Woodstock, Margaretville, and Jefferson], and I can tell you firsthand it's a gorgeous film worth the drive. "Kaatscast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio, always free every two weeks with a weekly radio encore on WJFF Radio Catskill, Saturdays at 11:00 AM. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas and a full searchable archive at kaatscast.com. "Kaatscast" is looking for underwriters, organizations who are invested in the Catskills and want to reach an engaged local audience. If that sounds like you, let's get in touch. You can reach me directly through the contact form on our website. That goes for all you listeners. Drop a line. We'd love to hear from you. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.