I was well pleased with our sport among the Buffalo': Big-game hunters, travel writing, and cultural imperialism in the British North American West, 1847-72

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 83, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 555-583

  Gillespie, Greg ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 25444445083     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/chr.83.4.555     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books 1997), 12-13;
2. James R. Ryan, 'Imperial Landscapes: Photography, Geography, and British Overseas Exploration, 1858-1872,' in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin, and Michael Heffernan, eds., Geography and Imperialism, 1820-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995), 53-79
3. Ryan, Picturing Empire, 12-13
4. Colin Coates, 'Like "The Thames towards Putney": The Appropriation of Landscape in Lower Canada,' Canadian Historical Review 74 (1993): 330
5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books 1978),
6. and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1993).
7. Also see Derek Gregory, 'Imaginative Geographies,' Progress in Human Geography 19 (1995): 447-85.
8. For an alternative reading of Said, see David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001).
9. Ryan, 'Imperial Landscapes,' 74,
10. and Tina Loo, 'Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada,' Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001): 104
11. For a discussion of British game hunters and the social exclusivity of hunting, see John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988), 6-53.
12. For an outline of the sportsmen's code, see Tina Loo, 'Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880-1939,' Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 296-319;
13. Thomas Altherr, 'The American Hunter-Naturalist and the Development of the Code of Sportsmanship,' Journal of Sport History 5, 1 (1978): 7-22;
14. Thomas R. Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), 8-17.
15. See Colin Howell, Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport in the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: Toronto University Press 2001), 14-16.
16. For a specific discussion of big-game hunting and masculinity, see Loo, 'Of Moose and Men,' 296-319.
17. Edward Wyndham-Quin, Canadian Nights (London: Smith, Elder 1914), 27.
18. For an excellent overview of the sporting code, see R.G. Moyles and Doug Owram, Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988), 63.
19. On the issue of pothunters, see Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank, 'Sportsmen and Pothunters: Environment, Conservation, and Class in the Fishery of Hamilton Harbour, 1858-1914,' Sport History Review 28 (1997): 1-18;
20. John Sandlos, 'From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,' Environmental History 6 (2001): 6-31.
21. Frederick Courtenay Selous, Recent Hunting Trips in British North America (London: Witherby and Company 1907).
22. For more on caribou hunting, see Darrin McGrath, 'Salted Caribou and Sportsmen-Tourists: Conflicts over Wildlife Resources in Newfoundland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,' Newfoundland Studies 10 (1994): 208-25.
23. John Palliser, Papers Relative to the Exploration by Captain Palliser of That Portion of British North America (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1859), 14, Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM), No. 39119.
24. For more on Palliser's buffalo hunting, see John Palliser, Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in the Prairies (London: J. Murray 1853), 264-88.
25. Moyles and Owram, Imperial Dreams, 68
26. John J. Rowan, The Emigrant and Sportsman (London 1876), preface, CIHM, No. 12695.
27. For a few examples of other narratives written by big-game hunters who travelled in nineteenth-century Canada, see Frederick Selous, A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa and Sport and Travel in the East and West (London 1881);
28. Edward Wyndham-Quin, The Great Divide: Travels in the Upper Yellowstone in the Summer of 1874 (London 1876);
29. William Frances Butler, The Campaign of the Cataracts: A Personal Narrative of the Great Nile Expedition of 1884-1885 (London 1887);
30. Clive Phillipps-Wolley wrote Sport in the Crimea and Caucasus (London 1881).
31. For an example, see Clive Phillipps-Wolley, A Sportsman's Eden (London: R. Bentley 1888), 54, CIHM, No. 15890.
32. Loo, 'Of Moose and Men,' 296-319, and, for a primary source, see Charles Alston Messiter, Sporting Adventures among the North American Indians (London: R.H. Porter 1890), 1-104, CIHM, No. 30384
33. Frederick Ulric Graham, Notes of a Sporting Expedition in the Far West of Canada, 1847 (London: Private circulation 1898), 72, J.J.
34. Talman Regional Collection, D.B. Weldon Library, University of Western Ontario, London, 72. Although this article does not focus on gender formation or hunting masculinities, these reoccurring and conflicting images, in addition to the agency of Aboriginal guides in the growing nineteenth-century sport tourism industry, are topics deserving of further study. Sarah Carter raises an appropriate note of caution regarding the construction of Aboriginal peoples in travel writing in Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999), 44-6.
35. See 'A Far and Distant Corner of the Empire: The Image of Rupert's Land Before 1850,' in Doug Owram, The Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980), 7-37.
36. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge 1992), 25.
37. See also Lisbet Koerner. 'Purposes of Linnean Travel,' in David Miller and Peter Reill, eds., Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 117-52.
38. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 25.
39. For an example of geology and cultural imperialism, see Robert Stafford, 'Geological Surveys, Mineral Discoveries, and British Expansion, 1835-1871,' Journal of Imperialism and Commonwealth History 12 (1984): 5-32.
40. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997), 49-50 and 54-5;
41. Simon Ryan, The Cartographic Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 57.
42. James Carnegie, Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains: A Diary and Narrative of Travel, Sport, and Adventure, in 1859 and 1860 (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas 1875), 91, 113, 243, CIHM, No. 43075;
43. William Ross King, The Sportsman and Naturalist in Canada (London: Hurst and Blackett 1866), 145, 85-86, 73
44. Edney, Mapping an Empire, 55
45. In his work on landscape, MacLaren refers only to landscape associationism. However, British big-game hunters, eager to inventory the fauna of the land, compared and contrasted British North American game with that of Great Britain. I refer to this process as game associationism. For landscape associationism, see I.S. MacLaren, 'Aesthetic Mappings of the West by the Palliser and Hind Survey Expeditions, 1857-1859,' Studies in Canadian Literature 10, 1-2 (1985): 30.
46. Carnegie, Saskatchewan, 210
47. William Fitzwilliam Milton and W.B. Cheadle, The North-West Passage by Land (1865; London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin 1875), 204, CIHM, No. 29615
48. King, The Sportsman and Naturalist, 85-6
49. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987), 14
50. For more on the destruction of the Canadian bison, see William A. Dobak, 'Killing the Canadian Buffalo, 1821-1881,' Western Historical Quarterly 27 (1996): 33-52.
51. Graham, Notes of a Sporting Expedition, 79
52. Thomas Dunlap, 'Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature,' Journal of World History 8 (1997): 303-19.
53. For more on the British Acclimatization Society, see Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 239-42.
54. For ecological imperialism, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995),
55. and Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).
56. Dunlap, 'Remaking the Land,' 303-19
57. King also suggested the acclimatization of the colin, black bass, and white fish. For acclimatization in Newfoundland, see John Guile Mallais, Newfoundland and Its Untrodden Ways (London: Longmans, Green 1907).
58. For an early application of Pratt's systematization of nature, see Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745 (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), 11, 30, 37, 218.
59. See the introduction in Suzanne Zeller, Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1987), 4-6, 269-70.
60. J.B. Harley, 'Maps, Knowledge, and Power,' in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 282
61. Ryan, Cartographic Eye, 105;
62. G.N.G. Clarke, 'Taking Possession: The Cartouche as Cultural Text in Eighteenth-Century American Maps,' Word and Image 4 (April-June 1988): 455
63. Daniel Clayton, 'Circumscribing Vancouver Island' BC Studies 122 (1999): 19,
64. and Clayton, Islands of Truth (Vancouver: UBC Press 2000), 165-204;
65. Lawrence D. Berg and Robin A. Kearns, 'Naming as Norming: Race, Gender, and the Identity Politics of Naming Places in Aotearoa/New Zealand,' Society and Space 14 (1996): 99-122
66. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History (London: Faber and Faber 1987), xxiv
67. Milton and Cheadle, North-West Passage, 246 and 269, 249, 285, 288, 297, 307
68. Coates, 'The Appropriation of Landscape,' 320-22.
69. See also Colin Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 2000), 144-61.
70. Ryan, The Cartographic Eye, 62
71. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On the Art of Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire 1792), 36 (emphasis in original)
72. For specific references to the aspects of the picturesque outlined in this paragraph, see I.S. MacLaren, 'Retaining Captaincy of the Soul: Responses to Nature in the First Franklin Expedition,' Essays on Canadian Writing 28 (spring 1984): 64;
73. MacLaren, 'The Aesthetic Map of the North, 1845-1859,' Arctic 38, 2 (1985): 89-103;
74. MacLaren, 'The Grandest Tour: The Aesthetics of Landscape in Sir George Back's Explorations of the Eastern Arctic, 1833-1837,' English Studies in Canada 10, no. 4 (1984): 440;
75. MacLaren, 'The Aesthetic Mapping of Nature in the Second Franklin Expedition,' Journal of Canadian Studies 20, 1 (1985): 46;
76. MacLaren, 'Alexander Mackenzie and the Landscapes of Commerce,' Studies in Canadian Literature 7, 2 (1982): 149;
77. MacLaren, 'The Limits of the Picturesque in British North America,' Journal of Garden History,' 5, 1 (1985): 97-111;
78. MacLaren, 'The Influence of Eighteenth-Century British Landscape Aesthetics on Narrative and Pictorial Responses to the British North American North and West, 1769-1872' (PhD dissertation. University of Western Ontario, 1983), 1: 68.
79. Humphry Repton, Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803) in J.C. Loudon, The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Repton (London: Longman 1840), 222 (emphasis in original)
80. Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1995), 20
81. For the connection between landscape and the agrarian revolution in England, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986),
82. and John Barrel, The Dark Side of Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980).
83. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 75
84. MacLaren, 'Limits of the Picturesque,' 98
85. MacLaren, 'Aesthetic Mappings,' 30
86. MacLaren, 'Aesthetic Mapping of the West,' 26
87. For John Franklin, see MacLaren, 'Retaining Captaincy of the Soul,' 69;
88. See also the chapter 'Landscaping the Wilds' in Elizabeth Vibert, Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters on the Columbia Plateau (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1997).
89. Graham, Notes of a Sporting Expedition, 73. For an excellent article on Buffalo hunting, see Elizabeth Vibert, 'Real Men Hunt Buffalo: Masculinity, Race, and Class in British Fur Traders' Narratives,' in Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld, eds., Gender and History in Canada (Toronto: Copp Clark 1996), 50-67.
90. William Francis Butler, The Wild North Land (London: Low, Marston, Low, & Searle 1873), 235, CIHM, No. 30060
91. See also Ryan, 'Exploring Aesthetics,' 288.