Hunting narratives of the age of empire: A gender reading of their iconography

Environment and History

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 269-291

  Wonders, Karen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GÖTTINGEN   (Germany)

Author keywords

British Columbia; Gender; Hunting; Iconography; Trophies

Indexed keywords

COLONIAL LEGACY; GENDER; HUNTING; NINETEENTH CENTURY;

BRITISH COLUMBIA; CANADA; NORTH AMERICA; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 25444482184     PISSN: 09673407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3197/096734005774434511     Document Type: Article

References (100)

1. On mounted animals as cultural icons, see Donna Haraway's deconstruction of the Akeley Hall, 'Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36', in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 26-58.
2. On the art history of dioramas, see Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1993).
3. On wild animal representation in general, including trophies, see John Dorst, Framing the Wild: Animals on Display (Laramie: University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2002).
4. Karen Wonders, 'Sportsman's Eden: A Wilderness Besieged', The Beaver (Dec. 1999/Jan. 2000), 30-37,
5. Karen Wonders, 'A Sportsman's Eden: A Wilderness Beckons', The Beaver (Oct./Nov. 1999), 26-32.
6. William Francis. Ainsworth, ed. All Round the World: An Illustrated Record of Voyages, Travels and Adventures in All Parts of the Globe, 4 vols. (London: W. Kent, 1860-62);
7. William A. Baillie-Grohman, Fifteen Years' Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America and British Columbia (London: Horace Cox, 1900, 1907);
8. J. R. Bradley, Hunting Big Game in Far Northwest British Columbia (New York: Mail & Express, 1904);
9. William T. Hornaday, Camp-Fires in the Canadian Rockies (New York: Scribners, 1906);
10. Edward J. House, A Hunter's Camp-Fire (New York, Harper, 1909);
11. Horace G. Hutchinson, ed. Big Game Shooting, 2 vols. (London: Country Life, 1905);
12. A. E. Leatham, Sport in Five Continents (London: Blackwood, 1912);
13. Thomas Martindale, Sport Royal (Philadelphia: Shaw, 1897);
14. Thomas Martindale, Sport Indeed (London: Everett, 1907);
15. Thomas Martindale, With Gun and Guide (Philadelphia: Jacobs, 1910);
16. Paul Niedieck, Mit der Büchse in fünf Weltteilen (Berlin: Parey, 1905);
17. Philipp von Oberländer, Jagdfahrten in Nordamerika (Wien: Hubert & Lahme, 1911);
18. Clive Phillipps-Wolley, ed. Big Game Shooting, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1894);
19. Warburton Pike, Through the Subarctic Forest (London: Edward Arnold, 1896);
20. John Rogers, Sport in Vancouver and Newfoundland (London: Chapman & Hall, 1912);
21. Heywood W. Seton-Karr, Bear-hunting in the White Mountains (London: Chapman & Hall, 1891);
22. Charles Sheldon, The Wilderness of the North Pacific Coast Islands (New York, Scribners, 1912);
23. George O. Shields, Cruisings in the Cascades (New York and Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1889);
24. George O. Shields, ed. The Big Game of North America (New York and Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1890);
25. Mrs. Algernon St. Maur [The Duchess of Somerset], Impressions of a Tenderfoot (London: John Murray, 1890);
26. William S. Thomas, Hunting Big Game with Gun and with Kodak (New York: Putman's, 1906);
27. J. Turner-Turner, Three Years Hunting and Trapping in America and the Great North-West (London: Maclure, 1888);
28. Life in the Backwoods (London: Stereoscopic, 1888);
29. Harold F. Wallace, Stalks Abroad (London: Longmans, 1908);
30. George Bird Grinnell, Casper Whitney, eds. Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat (New York: Macmillan, 1904).
31. Paul Niedieck, Mit der Büchse in fünf Weltteilen; Beschreibung von 14 Jagdexpeditionen (Berlin: Parey, 1905). 2nd edition 1905. Reprints 1906, 1907, 1909. 3rd. edition 1922. French translation 1907.
32. English translation by H. B. Stanwell, With Rifle in Five Continents (London: Rowland Ward, 1908; New York: Scribners, 1909).
33. William. A. Baillie-Grohman, Camps in the Rockies: Being a Narrative of Life on the Frontier, and Sport in the Rocky Mountains (London: Sampson Low, 1882), reprint 1883. (New York: Scribners, 1882), reprints 1884, 1896, 1898, 1905, 1910). By 1900, Baillie-Grohman could report in Sport and Life, that his books had received over 57 reviews in the English and American press.
34. British Sports and Sportsmen Past & Present, 13 vols (London: Sportsman, 1908-38).
35. Baillie-Grohman, Sport and Life, frontispiece.
36. The animal-man symbolism of big game hunting as a celebration of masculinity is explored in my 'Caccia grossa nel XIX secolo: un trionfo della mascolinita', in Georgio Verzotti, ed. Il Bello e le bestie: Metamorfosi, artifici e ibridi dal mito all'immaginario scientifico (Milano: Skira, 2004), 199-208.
37. James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion, 1997), especially chapter 4, 'Hunting with the Camera', 99-138.
38. Oberländer, 59.
39. Hornaday, 103.
40. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1987), chapters 5 and 6, 205-88.
41. See also Ritvo's recent overview of the role played by animals in environmental history, 'Animal Planet', in Environmental History vol. 9, no. 2, (April 2004), 204-20.
42. Michael Lynch and S. Woolgar, eds. Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990);
43. Renato Mazzolini, ed. Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900 (Florence: Olshki, 1993);
44. Stephanie Moses, Ancestral Images. The Iconography of Human Origins (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998).
45. David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 8.
46. Livingstone, 10.
47. Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, eds. Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: Tauris, 2003).
48. Baillie-Grohman, Sport and Life, 142-3.
49. Ibid., 88.
50. William Baillie-Grohman, 'Hunting the Rocky Mountain Goat', The Century (Dec. 1884), 193-203; 199.
51. I b i d.
52. Another account by Baillie-Grohman is 'Stalking the Haplocerus in the Selkirks', World Wide Magazine (May, 1895), 127-33.
53. John Fannin, 'The Rocky Mountain Goat', in G. O. Shields, The Big Game of North Amrica (New York: Rand, McNally, 1890), 343-61. Fannin was a knowledgeable self-trained naturalist and in 1896 was appointed provincial taxidermist and curator of the new Provincial Museum.
54. Owen Wister, 'The White Goat and his Ways', George Bird Grinnell and Casper Whitney, eds. Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 227-76.
55. Karen Wonders, 'Big Game Hunting and the Birth of Wildlife Art', in Carl Rungius: Sportsman Artist, ed. M. Kjorlien (Toronto: Warwick, 2001), 17-38.
56. Shields, Cruising in the Cascades, 180.
57. Maximilian zu Wied, Reise in das Innere Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1832 bis 1834 (Koblenz: Hoelscher, 1839-41), 2 vols. and Atlas.
58. Palliser published an illustrated hunting narrative of his expedition to the American West, Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in the Prairies (London: Murray, 1853).
59. Catlin's Life Among the Indians (London: Gall & Inglis, 1874) included an illustration of a grizzly bear attack, 'Grizzly bears overhauling us'.
60. Ainsworth, All Round the World.
61. Baillie-Grohman, Sport and Life, 43.
62. National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Phillips' large trophy collection was donated to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. In 1923 he received the gold medal from the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund.
63. Shields, Cruising in the Cascades, 181.
64. Baillie-Grohman, Sport and Life, 44.
65. William A. Baillie-Grohman, 'Wapiti Hunting in North America', The Illustrated London News, 6 Nov. 1886, n.p. The engraving is by Richard Caton Woodville, a London-based artist whose father was the American artist of the name, a well-known illustrator of western scenes.
66. Baillie-Grohman, Camps in the Rockies, p. 122.
67. Prentiss Gray, ed. Records of North American Big Game (New York: Derrydale Press, 1932), 73.
68. House, 307.
69. Ritvo, 287-88.
70. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988);
71. Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
72. William Storey, 'Big Cats and Imperialism: Lion and Tiger Hunting in Kenya and Northern India, 1898-1930', Journal of World History 2, no. 2 (1991): 135-73;
73. and William Beinart, 'Empire, Hunting and Ecological Change in Southern and Central Africa', Past and Present 128 (1990): 162-86.
74. For an example of how the notion of biological nativeness became invested with political meaning in the Swedish context, see my 'Habitat Dioramas and the Issue of Nativeness', Landscape Research, vol. 28, no. 1, (2003), 89-100.
75. Greg Gillespie, '"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', The Canadian Historical Review 83, 4, (2002): 555-84;
76. and F. G. Moyles and Doug Owram, '"Hunter's Paradise": Imperial-Minded Sportsmen in Canada', in Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities, British Views of Canada 1880-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 61-85.
77. This view persisted well into the twentieth century and included Canada, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, India and East Africa. See Hugh Gunn, 'The Sportsman as an Empire Builder', in Hugh Gunn, ed. Empire Big Game (London: Simpkin, 1925): 1-26.
78. An essay by Charles Hose, 'Big Game and Fur Animals of British Columbia', ends with a quote from Kipling to express the English hunter's longing for 'the wilder parts of our glorious Empire', 56.
79. Ritvo, 287.
80. Tina Loo, 'Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada', The Canadian Historical Review (2000), 92-121.
81. See Sharon Macdonald, 'Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: An Introduction to the Politics of Display', in Sharon Macdonald, ed. The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998),
82. and Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994).
83. George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003).
84. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: a Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 136;
85. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature;
86. Tina Loo, 'Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880-1939', Western Historical Quarterly 32 (Autumn 2002), 296-319.
87. Loo, 'Of Moose and Men', 296.
88. This conclusion is supported by trompe l'oeil paintings of hunting trophies, a genre practiced by the influential American artist William M. Harnett (1848-1898). See David M. Lubin, A Manly Art: American Trompe L'Oeil Painting and the Manufacture of Masculinity,' in The Material Culture of Gender: The Gender of Material Culture (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), eds. Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames, 365-89.
89. A broader study in the same volume further supports the centrality of gender to hunting iconography: Ruth Irwin Weidner, 'Gifts of Wild Game: Masculine and Feminine in Nineteenth-Century Hunting Imagery,' 337-64.
90. The caption 'Victor and Vanquished' appears on an photogravure of a wilderness hunter dressed in buckskins and posed beside his massive grizzly trophy which is spread out so as to clearly show the sharp weaponry of claws and teeth possessed by the beast. This is one of many trophy representations in Game of British Columbia, Official Bulletin No. 17, Legislative Assembly, Bureau of Provincial Information (1906).
91. Ritvo, 267.
92. Shields, Cruising in the Cascades, 181.
93. Baillie-Grohman, Camps in the Rockies, 123.
94. Baillie-Grohman, 'Wapiti Hunting in North America' (1886), n.p.
95. 'Landscape and Gender: the Visual Representations of Alexander von Humboldt's "Views of Nature"', a paper presented by Karen Wonders at the European Society for Environmental History conference, St. Andrews University, Scotland, 2001.
96. A. O. Wheeler, The Selkirk Range (Ottawa: Government Printing Office, 1905). Chapter 5, 'Notes on the Upper and Lower Kootenay Valleys and Kootenay Lake' by Baillie-Grohman, was taken from an account published first in The Field (25 April and 29 May, 1885).
97. See William A. Baillie-Grohman. Sport in the Alps in the Past and Present (London: A. & C. Black, 1896) (New York: Scribners, 1896).
98. Wheeler, 47. Archival photographs taken in 1906, for example, show Wheeler proudly posed on a mountainside with three grizzlies lying at his feet as trophies (in the Wheeler papers at the Whyte Museum and Archives of the Canadian Rockies).
99. Baillie-Grohman, Camps in the Rockies, 121-22.
100. Charles Sheldon, The Wilderness of Denali; Explorations of a Hunter-Naturalist in Northern Alaska (New York: Scribners, 1930), 159.