A third reading explores an extreme view of wilderness taken by a group of elite men, members of the Boone and Crockett club, who see the frontier experience as an essential ingredient in forming men into American citizens.
Receiving an invitation from Theodore Roosevelt to attend a club dinner celebrating the opening of the Hunter’s Camp exhibit in the summer of 1893, the fair’s designer Daniel Burnham jumped at the chance for an evening out ‘with the boys’.23 Ensconced in its dark woodland setting, the two-room log cabin was filled with the bulky figures of Victorian gentlemen in informal clothes. Warmed by a blazing campfire and hearing the sounds of the fair muted across the water, Burnham joined other men of power and influence for a night of eating, drinking and talking. Always the genial host, Roosevelt had gone so far as to arrange for elk meat to be sent by train all the way from Yellowstone National Park so he could host an ‘authentic’ barbecue on this small patch of wilderness in Chicago.
This simple cabin was a great deal more significant than its modest dimensions might suggest (see Figure 8.4). Targeted to a specific elite group of men, and employing tropes familiar to that group, it was designed to persuade visitors of the value of conservation. The cabin was sponsored by the Boone and Crockett Club of New York, a club of sportsmen that wished to represent ‘so typical and peculiar a phase of American national development as life on the frontier’.24 The president of the club Theodore Roosevelt personally supervised every detail of the exhibit, commissioning Holabird and Root, one of the best architectural firms in Chicago, to design it and arranging for Elwood Hofer (an outdoor guide he knew from his years in Montana) to be its interpreter.25 Although the Hunter’s Camp was open to all exposition visitors in the daytime, it came to life at night during events such as the opening night dinner.
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8.4 Boone and Crockett Club house, 1893 |
The point here is that the cabin was an exhibit which worked best when one was invited to participate. But we must keep in mind that the contact with nature which it was meant to bring about was not intended for everyone. The Boone and Crockett Club was an unusually exclusive men’s society, even by the rarefied standards which governed admission to men’s clubs at that time. Restricted by its by-laws to 100 persons, the membership of the Club reads like a roster of Who’s Who in the 1890s, including the influential politicians Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge; the historian Frances Parkman; and the Civil and Indian War generals Sherman, Jackson and Sheridan. It had scientists among its members like the anthropologist George Grinnell and the Harvard botanist Charles Sprague. It included the painter Albert Bierstadt and the novelist Owen Wister.
One could hardly imagine a more effective group of men to carry out the conservation agenda: there were men of science to provide scientific rationale and tools, politicians to establish policy, and artists and writers to persuade and convince. With a small but active membership widely distributed across the country, the club could track the progress and setbacks of the conservation movement nationwide. They were not unaware of their reach and influence, as we see from an article celebrating their tenth anniversary, ‘With a membership which though small, reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, covering. . . our largest cities and States,
which are only just beginning to develop their resources, the club covers a vast territory, and the precept and example of its members come to a great many people.’26
The decision to name the club after Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett is significant. In the view of club members, Boone and Crockett had chosen a simple life away from civilization, and that choice distinguished them from the merely poor. The willing primitivism of Boone and Crockett had a hard edge too, which was appropriate to the kind of ideology the club wished to justify. The violence of conquest associated with the frontier and embodied in the hunt was seen as a necessary precondition to ‘blazing the way for civilization’. The club saw no ambiguity in the frontiersman who refuses civilization while initiating and facilitating development. They did not see the virtues of frontier life as a rebuke to the values of commercial society, but as an embryonic form of those values.27 Identifying with the figure of the frontiersmen, they saw themselves as the cutting edge of civilization expanding into ever-new frontiers.
Yet the American log cabin represented as the Hunter’s Camp is not a home for a family. The interior is resolutely a masculine place. We see deer antlers driven into the wall to support chaps, buckskin shirts and stock- saddles, but no baby cradle, spinning wheel or other signs of family life on the frontier. The frontier, in this vision, is not ‘a collective process in which nearly everyone participates’, but the domain of an exceptional person – a hero, if you will.28 This hero is a man alone in the wilderness.
A club of naturalists
If we look at C. D. Arnold’s photograph of the interior of the Hunter’s Cabin we are struck by its rough appearance. But on closer investigation we see binoculars on the table, an ink bottle, flasks of chemicals on the mantelpiece and a newspaper on the settee. These objects of observation and recording set this group apart as upper-class men. Our first impression of the cabin slowly transforms as we realize who was meant to inhabit this simple dwelling. For all its rustic atmosphere, this cabin is a place where gentlemen study and hold forth about wilderness.
And indeed, members of the Boone and Crockett Club had close ties to national institutions of science. The stuffed trophies prized by club members as souvenirs of a memorable shoot led to their support for taxidermy, furnishing natural history museums across the country. Club members assisted in capturing live animals for zoological societies. Elwood Hofer for example, carried the title ‘Smithsonian Hunter’ for his job in capturing wildlife in Yellowstone National Park for the National Zoo in Washington.29
Members who were politicians arranged for others with scientific backgrounds to be appointed advisors to government on questions of land use and resource management. Arnold Hague for example, was on a panel of experts nominated by the National Academy of Sciences to advise the Department of the Interior on the establishment of forest preserves. Gifford Pinchot, an old friend of the club and eventual member, was the ‘father’ of scientific forestry in the US. ‘Conservation above all, was a scientific movement’, Samuel Hays tells us, ‘[its] leaders brought the ideals and practices of their craft into federal resource policy’.30 And if conservation is to move forward, members of the club believed, it would be because of well – reasoned arguments set forth by wilderness experts such as themselves. The Hunter’s Cabin shows us that the conservation crusade should be led by those who have the education to promote it and the time to enjoy it.
The strenuous life of the hunt
So we see that the Boone and Crockett Club played a central role in wilderness conservation at the turn of the century. What is not yet clear is how they reconciled their seemingly contradictory goals of big game hunting with their advocacy of wildlife protection. In this contradiction lies some of the darkest aspects of the movement – aspects that continue to haunt conservation to the present day. To preserve their vision of a sportsman’s paradise, the club recognized that big game hunting should be restricted to certain periods of the year and that entire areas should be set aside as ‘nurseries and breeding grounds of game [that are] elsewhere inevitably exterminated by the march of settlement’.31 They advocated wildlife ‘preserves’ that were entirely made from scratch: re-introducing species that had been exterminated, facilitating the reproduction of animals that were considered good for the hunt, and changing the hunt from a livelihood to a sport.
Sportsmanship for the club meant that the hunter spared females of any big game to ensure reproduction. In a report of their annual meeting in 1897, the club passed a resolution to condemn the use of steel traps and the killing of game animals while helpless in the water or in deep snow.32 This, they argued, would not be ‘fair chase’. And, as Roderick Nash put it, how the hunt was conducted was of central importance to the members of the club; ‘The purpose of the Boone and Crockett club was the encouragement of big game hunting, but the character of the hunter was the real object of
concern.’33 Roosevelt was quite explicit that his ideal hunter must not actually
need the meat:
True sportsmen, worthy of the name, men who shoot only in
season and in moderation, do no harm whatever to game. . . . The
professional and market hunter who kills game for hide, or for the feathers, or for the meat, or to sell antlers and other trophies; the market men who put game in cold storage; and the rich people, who are content to buy what they have not the skill to get by their own exertions – these are the men who are the real enemies of game.34
The hunt was more than a sport, it held a moral lesson for the hunter, a lesson learned in the perfect moment when man and animal come face-to-face in battle. These men took care to distinguish themselves from hunters who kill for money or food. They killed for love. In The Century Magazine in 1884, Julian Hawthorne describes well the sentiments behind club members’ love of the hunt:
The hunter pursues animals because he loves them and sympathizes with them, and kills them as the champions of chivalry used to slay one another – courteously, fairly, and with admiration. . . . Far from being the foe or exterminator of the game he follows, he more than anyone else is their friend, vindicator, and confidant. . . . He loves the mountain sheep and the antelope, because they can escape him; the panther and the bear, because they can destroy him. His relations with them are clean, generous and manly. And on the other hand, the wild animals, . . . seem after they have eluded their pursuer to the utmost or fought him to the death, to yield themselves to him with a sort of wild contentment – as if they were glad to admit the sovereignty of man, though death comes with the admission.35
The violence of blood sport is implicitly equated here with the manliness of the hunter. Physically invigorated by the ‘strenuous life’ of the hunt, fortified in courage, numbed to the weaker sentiments of pity, and vindicated by the process of winning the struggle, the hunter of the Boone and Crockett Club was a man who transcended his physical limitations and would pass these attributes onto future generations of fighters and winners. ‘A race must be strong and vigorous’; Roosevelt said, ‘it must be a race of good fighters and good breeders… no capacity for building up material prosperity can possibly atone for the lack of the great virile virtues’.36
The Hunter’s Camp on the wooded island then, represents a technology through which over-civilized elites could rediscover the ‘natural man’ and become stronger, more virile and more aggressive. They were the willing Spartans of the Gilded Age. Accustomed to the comforts and luxury of city life, American elites feared they had lost the native vitality of their frontier ancestors through over-exposure to feminizing civilization.37 This belief in the benefits to be had from greater contact with wilderness corresponded to an evolution of the masculine ideal in upper-class society. In contrast with mid – nineteenth-century society, when Christianity and gentility were viewed as the primary masculine virtues, men in the latter part of the nineteenth century were encouraged to develop their internal vigor and bodily strength. Contact with wilderness would develop and nourish the ‘natural man’ or, in Theodore Roosevelt’s words, ‘make the wolf rise in a man’s heart’.38
A ‘natural aristocrat’
The figure of the hunter was a useful trope to justify the privilege of class in turn-of-the-century America. Under the buckskin of the frontier hunter, there is always, Richard Slotkin argues, a potential aristocrat. This notion attracted Roosevelt and he used it to justify his belief in leadership through bloodline. In this schema, the so-called ‘civilized’ white man at the top of the Darwinian pyramid must return to a more primitive state in order to be reinvigorated.39 Such ‘regeneration through regression’ was not for the untutored and labouring masses, who were first expected to evolve through the successive stages of civilization. This Darwinian view of social class in a capitalist society provided a justification for the power enjoyed by those at the top of the economic pyramid while at the same time it provided reasons to despise people of lesser means. Roosevelt had no pity for labouring immigrants or the American Indian.
For the eugenicists who relied on Darwinian theories to advocate the so-called ‘science’ of ‘clean-species’, genocide was as natural an occurrence as a flood or earthquake – terrible perhaps, but inevitable. As an example, the description of a diorama of buffalo and cougar in the US Government building concludes that animals and Native Indians are bound by the same inevitable phenomenon: ‘The bison of the American plains. . . has been ruthlessly exterminated from the path of civilization. The aboriginal natives of this country are also fading away, and it is easy to perceive the connection of the two facts.’40
The reproduction of civilized elites had to be encouraged, and that of inferior types discouraged. Natural selection was given a helping hand with respect to those deemed to be not worth saving. Famines on Indian reservations were precipitated by withholding provisions agreed to in treaties, and legislation to help the urban poor was frowned on by the elite. Eugenicists ‘asserted that the welfare programs of the state ignored the natural laws of the survival of the fittest. According to eugenics dogma, society must emulate nature for the future of the race’41 – that is, for the future supremacy of Anglo – Saxon Americans. Together, conservation and eugenics were intended to secure the resurrection of the ‘natural man’. They would also provide the theoretical basis for the idea of the national parks. Wilderness no longer provides the uplifting experience anticipated by Olmsted, but rather, wilderness preserves were to become a Noah’s Ark for the lucky few. As the spiritual benefits of a wilderness sojourn were re-cast in ‘scientific’ terms, the ‘preservation of nature and germ plasm all seemed the same sort of work’.42
This third reading reveals a sobering side to the imaginary frontier of the turn of the century. For the members of the Boone and Crockett club, the memory of the frontier was not to be an escape for the working class or an elegy for Native Americans. It held a moral lesson specifically directed towards the country’s elite, a lesson that justified racial and economic privilege and asserted the prerogatives of conquest.
The fluidity of ‘wilderness’ at the close of the frontier
As we peer into the Hunter’s Cabin on the wooded islands, we find a Pandora’s box unleashing its genies and demons across the globe. The frontier experience, cast as a site for an encounter between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’, between man and beast, is a disturbing legacy that shows the ugly side of American mythology. Even conservation, a seemingly neutral term, carries with it troublesome associations it cannot shake off. Thank goodness for popular culture. Billy Stubbs, who falls into the Wild West show and comes out elated, if somewhat cynical about media hucksterism, reminds us that people have the ability to distance themselves from myths – about wilderness, frontier, battle and domination – and rework them to suit their own, perhaps more modest and more humourous view of life.