The hunter elite: Americans, wilderness, and the rise of the big-game hunt

Beginning in the 1880s, an influential group of men, including Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, George Bird Grinnell, and Caspar Whitney, changed the way that Americans conceived of big-game hunting and its connections to manliness, imperialism and conservation. Through popular hunting narratives published in both generalist and recreational periodicals, they created a discourse that constructed the hunt, in print, as an experience that displayed the hunter's self-control and manly character. These ideals had originated in the nineteenth-century middle-class workplace, but, in the period after the Civil War, displays of manliness began to be displaced from the world of work and imported into leisure instead. Turn-of-the-century big-game hunting thus served a transitional function, allowing traditional ideals of manliness to be acted out in new sites---both in the experiential world of the leisure-time hunt, and in the written world of the published narrative.;These narratives never stood alone, but were part of a contested set of meanings that interacted with other kinds of hunting, and of writing about hunting---in particular with the work of women big-game hunters, who challenged links between manliness and the hunt, and of British big-game hunters, whose imperial narratives offered an alternate reading of the hunt's meaning. Over time, as American sportsmen-hunters interacted with these other readings of the hunt, the big-game hunting narrative became a site for negotiations over issues ranging from questions of empire and national identity to discussions over gender roles and the meaning of the hunt for both men and women.;Hunters also confronted two greater sets of challenges in the first decades of the twentieth century: the expansion of hunting economies into full-fledged transnational ventures that belied nationalist meanings of the hunt, and, paradoxically, the loss of game and habitat within the United States itself. Both changes raised the central question of whether having a new use for wilderness meant having a new rationale for preserving it. Although it had originated as a tale of manliness and middle-class virtues, in the end the story of the big-game hunt gave tremendous emotional impetus to the turn-of-the-century plea for preservation, becoming part of a language through which hunters and non-hunters alike talked about conservation, game, and the meaning of wilderness for Americans.