The Hunter Elite

Historians of the U.S. West know that increased urbanization and industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century led to a desire among men to seek out manly experiences, which included hunting. Tara Kathleen Kelly follows this idea but takes it a step further. She argues that the hunter elite, not the average American hunter, shaped the ideas about wilderness, hunting, and, eventually, conservation. This hunter elite molded their ideals through a growing and vibrant media that they had untold access to. In the process, they re-centered the narratives around hunting to fit the particular manly virtues they sought. They also reshaped the broader American ideals about hunting and wilderness and used them to push new conservation legislation. Kelly explains that the workplace became less viable as a site for displaying manly virtues, therefore men had to seek out other places to display those qualities. The hunt was one of them. Hunting publications, such as T.S. Van Dyke’s The Still-Hunter (1882) espoused wilderness as a place to demonstrate one’s manly virtue. They also rewrote what hunting meant from being less about leisure and more about a hunter’s “inner self” (p. 29). These narratives emerged with the growth of the publishing industry, which allowed for the rewriting of outdoors activities such as the still-hunt.

Art · Elite · Environmental ethics · Industrialisation · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Virtue · Wilderness · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Ecology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy