Hunting

Hunting wild animals has been a primary male undertaking and a source of masculine identity throughout human history. It has provided food, clothing, bone tools, fuel, ritual paraphernalia, folk medicine, and trade goods such as skins, fur, and feathers. But its chief cultural significance, whether done for subsistence or sport, has been its function as a primal drama for the initiation of boys into manhood and for the ritual bonding of the male hunters.

The earliest European settlers in North America—especially the Protestant settlers arriving in the seventeenth century—associated hunting not with manliness, but with disorder, danger, and primitive savagery. Nor were manhood and hunting widely associated in eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century America. Republican values defined American manhood in terms of agrarianism rather than hunting—it was the yeoman farmer, not the backwoods hunter, on whom Thomas Jefferson and others rested their faith for the future of the republic. Nonetheless, a culture of hunting thrived in some regions of the colonies and the early United States, especially in the South, where the planter class embraced hunting as a class tradition, seeing the hunt as an important activity for demonstrating white masculine supremacy.

It was during the early nineteenth century that white settlement of game-rich western frontier land, romanticization of Native American male hunters, and a decidedly masculine nationalism encouraged the association of hunting with manliness and American identity. Such figures as Meriwether Lewis, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Andrew Jackson, for example, came to stand for a potent masculinity representative of a powerful nation. At the same time, an emerging northeastern urban middle class that cultivated genteel styles of manhood associated the West with rowdiness and disorder, and continued to link hunting with savagery. This association remained alive after the Civil War as the advent of industrialized food production, the spread of urban and suburban living, and a growing influx of immigrants from European societies and social classes without hunting traditions prompted a decline in subsistence hunting.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, other social and cultural changes made hunting for sport a perceived imperative of American manhood and an important activity of middle- and upper-class men. Concerned that urbanization, industrialization, and domestication had enervated American men by removing them from nature, advocates of the “strenuous life,” such as Theodore Roosevelt, urged men to seek reinvigoration through hunting and other outdoor activities. Several outdoor sports magazines began appearing during the 1870s, and in 1887 Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, the editor of Forest [Page 221]and Stream, founded the Boone and Crockett Club. This club, and many others modeled on it, served as exclusively male spheres where middle-class men could escape what they perceived as the increasing feminization of society. The dramatic loss of game animals for sport hunting in the closing decades of the nineteenth century helped spur the conservation movement of the Progressive Era, as hunting clubs and similar organizations pressed for the establishment of game preserves and other protected wilderness areas where men might continue to demonstrate their manhood through hunting.

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