Charlie L. Sabattis
A Legendary Adirondack Storyteller

I grew up in Long Lake and wouldn't trade my life there with anyone. I lived two miles outside of town, and played and spent all of my time in the woods. We moved into town in 1969 when I was 16. Long Lake was and is a unique place to live or visit. With only 200 kids in the whole school (K-12), it was like a large family. My class had 16 total. After graduating, I traveled around and saw some of the country. I soon returned and married my long time high school girlfriend, Jennifer E. Hunt. We started our family and I went to work for the town where I worked for some years before starting my own construction company.

Summer people have always flocked to the Adirondacks to visit their camps or enjoy the outdoors. One of these summers is when I met Jimmy Howard.  Jim, a young, ambitious man, and I became great friends over the years. We spent much of our time together, working in the summer and creating rustic furniture in the winter. Even though we lived there for years, we never forgot to take the time to enjoy the unique beauty of the mountains and the lake we lived on. The Adirondack Mts. have a special lure and so does the furniture that has evolved from that area. After years of building furniture, Jim and I created rusticvideos.com. We offer design and techniques of Adirondack rustic furniture building on video.

In 1988, the days of living and playing in the Adirondacks came to an end. Jenny and I moved our family to Fairfield, Maine. We needed to get closer to a hospital ,as Jenny is an R.N. Also, we felt our children would have more competition in a much bigger school. None of the kids wanted to move to Maine, but now none would move back to the Adirondacks. I now develop commercial land - house lots and rental property. I also oversee the East Coast office of "rusticvideos.com." To learn more about the Sabattis', you can search Mitchel Sabattis at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mtn. Lake, NY. There is a great book by Alfred L. Donaldson titled,  “History of the Adirondacks," you may want to read.

Mitchel Sabattis was a most famous Adirondack Indian Guide. Full-blooded Abenaki Indian, he lived in the small town of Long Lake, NY. He died April 17, 1906, the same day my son Mitchel J. Sabattis was born, April 17, 1974. My father, Charles J. Sabattis, still lives in Long Lake with his wife, Anne. My father, myself, and my son, Mitchel J. Sabattis, are the only ones left of the original Mitchel Sabattis line that we know of.

Capt. Peter Sabattis was Mitchel’s father and died in 1861 in Long Lake. He was 111 years old. Capt. Peter, his son Mitchel, his daughter Hannah, and another Indian friend, Thompson, shared their camp with the Plumleys (first white settlers in the area) while they built their first rough cabin. Mitchel had 14 kids. His oldest son was Charles, who had three children: Raymond, Joseph and Isaac. Raymond was the oldest. He died in 1957. He had three kids: Lloyd, Everett and Stanton. Lloyd was the oldest and my grandfather. He had two children: Charles J. Sabattis, my father, and Janet Sabattis, my aunt. My wife Jennifer and I have four children: Traci, Mitchel, Courtney, and Natasha.  

Mitchel Sabattis of Long Lake, New York

Source:  "The Adirondacks: Illustrated," by Seneca Ray Stoddard, Albany, 1874

Mitchel Sabattis is in a list of independent guides provided to the author of this source by the proprietor of Long Lake Hotel, C. H. Kellogg, Esq.

Mitchel Sabattis, who also keeps boarders, is a noted Indian guide, who has figured extensively in all histories of that region and deserves more than a passing notice.  He was born at Parishville, St. Lawrence county, September 29, 1823, a pure blood of the tribe of St. Francis, he early took to the woods as naturally as a duck to water.  On the death of his mother, which occurred when he was but seven years of age, his father, "Captain Peter," as he was universally called, used to take him along on his various hunting and trapping expeditions.  The Captain, who earned his right to the title by his services in that capacity during the war of the Revolution, is said to have been a noble specimen of a man - mentally as well as physically, and died in 1859 at the advanced age of 108.  As a proof of his physical powers a place is still pointed out a little below Raquette Pond, known as "Captain Peter's rock," from which he once leaped to the shore, fully sixteen feet distant.  Mitchel is earnest, intelligent and thrifty, a member of the Methodist church, is authority for many things relating to Indian history, has probably seen more of wood life than any other man in the wilderness, a fearless and successful hunter and is generously admitted by other guides to have the best knowledge of the woods of any man in the country.  He killed his first deer when 13 years of age, and since then the number that has fallen before his  unerring rifle is legion;  he has also taken several bears, nine panthers - actually driving one, a huge fellow, along a narrow shelf on the face of a ledge into a crevice, from which he was dislodged by two or three vigorous punches with a sharp stick in order that a companion might get a shot at him, but for some unaccountable reason he failed to do it, and Sabattis dispatched the beast himself;  on measuring, the panther was found to be 9 feet from tip to tip.  In his earlier days, moose were plenty in the woods and he has killed twenty of these huge animals, the last being in 1854.  The old hunter is still hale and hearty, bidding fair, with his iron constitution, to guide for many a year to come.