Philip Dray. The Fair Chase

In The Fair Chase: The Epic History of Hunting in America, Philip Dray takes his reader on a breathless whistle-stop tour through the place of hunting in the American historical imagination, journeying through various terrains and elucidating an often polemic subject in a book that deftly engages in a critical interrogating of its theme in past and present. The approach here is chronological, with a veritable trophy cabinet of biographical vignettes drawn upon to shed light on sport hunting in its many guises. Described as “America’s oldest recreation,” Dray makes a strong case for the enduring significance of hunting as something engrained in the national psyche—a carrier for national ambitions, masculine rituals, codes of self-reliance, and territorial/resource acquisitions. As he sees it, the hunt opens a window onto how the “national temperament” played out, particularly, in the convoluted engagements between humans and the rest of the natural world (xi). This story begins with an introduction that explores the “hunting hypothesis” and the idea of the foundational importance of the hunt to human social and psychological development. Here, too, is a hint of the terrains to be traversed later, as well as a nod to the rich tapestry of cultural productions and consumer economies around hunting. Dray rightly points to the controversial nature of his subject—killing animals is a subject that invites strong moral opinions—although his contention that “hunting has largely been neglected as a topic of historical inquiry in America” (6) somewhat overlooks the raft of recent publications on the topic that provide sophisticated deconstruction, especially, of the gender and racial dynamics of American hunting culture and its connected material ecology (see, for instance, Monica Rico, Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West [2013]; Karen R. Jones, Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West [2015]). Thereafter, Dray lays out his exploration of hunting as “America’s national entertainment” (to borrow from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show strapline) across thirteen chapters. Chapter 1 delves into the history of Henry Herbert, a.k.a “Frank Forester,” and his liturgical tales of pioneer hunting and ethics, from which we trek to Arkansas and Missouri on the trail of hunting writer William Porter, before delving into the mythological reaches of classic frontiersmen archetypes Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Early sport in the Adirondacks and the imprint of hunting in art and advertising embellish the story, before entry into the West with Washington Irving and William Drummond Stewart. Here, the focus falls on Forest and Stream magazine, founded by Charles Hallock, and the rise of sporting organizations and literary genre. Guns and technology dominate the narrative in chapter 6, with case studies of Samuel Colt and a brief foray into the world of the professional sharpshooter in the shape of Annie Oakley and Captain Adam Borgardus. The West takes over—unsurprisingly—in the next few chapters, from the charismatic megafauna that captured hunters’ imaginations (bison and grizzly bear, specifically) to the swaggering hunter heroes in the form of Bill Cody and General George Armstrong Custer. The scale of transformation in the nineteenth-century West provoked an ethical intervention, the subject of chapters 9 and 10 on buffalo and bird mass killings and efforts to initiate species protection by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Bergh, William Hornaday, and George Grinnell. The last three chapters track Roosevelt and Martin and Osa Johnson to Africa, return to conservation work in the early twentieth century with Aldo Leopold, and finish proceedings off with an up-to-date roundup of early twenty-first-century concerns, from food politics and gun culture to the killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe.

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