Outdoorsmen

The outdoorsman has long been an American cultural ideal, combining physical skills and closeness to nature with such manly qualities as individualism and courage. The antecedents of modern-day outdoorsmen were the pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who opened up the West, lived off the land, and established a history synonymous with the advancement of American values. Early trackers such as Davy Crockett came to represent a “natural” frontier masculinity that resisted social conformity, reform, and the niceties of genteel civilization and, as such, has entered American mythology. Fur traders explored and settled the Northeast, while the transcontinental railway pushed westward in the 1860s, allowing men to explore and settle western lands more easily. These early outdoorsmen cultivated a rigorous, energetic version of masculinity that was associated with the ownership, settlement, and exploitation of land.

As industrialization and urbanization brought a greater number of men to America's cities to work in factory jobs in the nineteenth century, a growing number of men, fearing that these developments undermined masculine vigor, looked to the values associated with outdoorsmen and sought to revitalize American manhood through recreational activities in natural settings. Such concerns informed the establishment of the Boy Scouts of America (1910), the preservation movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and the establishment of national parks, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt, who was a conservation leader, outdoor enthusiast, and avid hunter, urged American men to pursue a “strenuous life” by engaging in activities that forged a link with the natural world.

While industrialization was perceived by many American men as a threat to masculine vigor, its fostering of consumerism and leisure also encouraged the spreading and embedding of the outdoor ideal in American culture during the twentieth century. As men increasingly sought fulfillment and self-definition through activities other than their work, they turned to such outdoor sports and activities as cycling, skiing, camping, canoeing, hiking, tracking, sledding, archery, and, more recently, mountain biking and snowboarding. Such activities have opened up a consumer market that offers all American men the chance to buy reassurance of their manhood despite being surrounded by modern amenities—and to escape both a corporate existence and the domestication of married life. The film City Slickers (1991)—released as the media declared that late-twentieth-century life had generated a “crisis” in American masculinity—exemplifies these developments: It depicts a group of urbanized male friends who spend a vacation driving cattle in the West in an attempt to reclaim their masculinity through outdoor pursuits.

The symbol of the outdoorsman continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture. Some—such as the journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, who titled her profile of outdoorsman Eustace Conway The Last American Man (2002)— have suggested that modern American life has left few American men capable of living up to the ideal of the outdoorsman. Yet it has played a part in recent political developments. For instance, some members of the gun lobby argue that every American possesses the right to own a [Page 352]gun—a vestigial symbol of life on the frontier where guns were necessary for protection and hunting game for survival. More recently, in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, outdoorsmen communities fervently answered President George W. Bush's call for “standby volunteers.” Since the settling of America, the mythic notion of the heroic outdoorsman has remained a persistent theme in defining American masculinity.

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