By the 1850s a growing number of native Adirondackers were engaged in the guiding profession. A guide was responsible for the food, shelter, transportation and safety of his party. He made all the preparations and bought all the supplies necessary for a stay in the woods lasting anywhere from a week to a month or more. He also furnished the boat, which was used for traveling, fishing, and hunting. The guide did everything he could to make sure the trip went smoothly and his customers were satisfied. The Adirondack guide has been both romanticized and ridiculed. He was woods-wise and independent, a skilled hunter, fisherman and cook, and a shrewd judge of character. Often a guide and his sport would develop a mutual admiration that lasted a lifetime; other guides and their city clients had a dim view of each other.

After the Civil War, people flocked to the Adirondacks, many of them inspired by William H.H. Murray's book, Adventures in the Wilderness published in 1869.These tourists were different from the earlier sportsmen; they wanted the comfort and convenience of the hotels that were beginning to spring up along well-traveled routes, and they were much less prepared for or interested in "roughing it" in the wilderness. They knew about the Adirondack guides, however, whose reputations had traveled far beyond the boundaries of the region.

"For many visitors the real Adirondack experience was a week with an Adirondack guide," wrote Michael Steinberg in Our Wilderness. "Murray's book and hundreds of others had made the Adirondack guide famous. Men paid high prices to say that they had been guided by Mitchell Sabattis, Alvah Dunning , or 'Old Mountain' Phelps."