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The Fair Chase: The Epic Story of Hunting in America

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 106; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaz361

1945-2314

Andrea L. Smalley,

Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Philip Dray promises readers an “epic story” of hunting in America. The Fair Chase delivers on that promise in many ways. Dray's engaging history of sport hunting in the United States is at once a wide-ranging saga about the development of a uniquely American character and a richly detailed accounting of some of the sport's early heroes—both tragic and triumphant. With a narrative that finds connections to “the fair chase” in a wide assortment of expected and unexpected places—an artists' Adirondack wilderness camp, military campaigns on the plains, an urban zoo's anthropological displays—Dray weaves hunting into the fabric of national culture and national events. The result is a grand rehabilitative tale designed to make hunting relevant to a predominately nonhunting contemporary audience. Dray begins by analyzing the nineteenth-century concoction from which the American sportsman-hunter was distilled: equal parts British-style sporting codes, backwoodsman wilderness skills, and Transcendentalist-inspired beliefs about nature's restorative powers. The book's central chapters turn next to the sport's popularization in literature, art, and mass culture. In this section, Dray pays particular attention to the West and its re-creation as “a sportsman's paradise” by characters ranging from western artists such as George Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller to wild West performers such as Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley (p. 135). In the late nineteenth century, dwindling wildlife populations and spreading humane sensibilities motivated Progressive Era sportsmen to champion conservation and limits on hunting—topics addressed in two later chapters. Dray picks up twentieth-century challenges to sport hunting in the book's final portion, including those presented by competing depictions of animals in literature and films, the ecological effects of predator control, and modern debates about hunting and human nature.