American Hunting

Introduction

Of all human activities, hunting is the second oldest, perhaps oldest, and is found at the root level of all early cultures. Hunting develops when the seeking and killing of animals becomes enfolded within a social and cultural tradition that finds a socially important excess of meaning in the pursuit and killing of animals. Hunting as it is practiced today in America results from the convergence of primordial hunting activity with a set of social attitudes and behaviors that have specific context in American life. It should be noted here that hunting is not synonymous with killing wildlife: some wild animals can be killed--the killing of a poisonous snake underfoot, the stoning of an intrusive buffalo--without hunting being involved, nor does the use of specialized tools such as guns, spears, or bows and arrows, mean that hunting occurs. Some animals--a rabid skunk or raccoon--can be killed with a firearm but such activity is not properly called hunting. Killing by itself is not per se hunting, even if the animal killed is wild.

The activity of seeking and killing wild animals does not become hunting until specific kinds of meaning are associated with these acts, and these meanings then serve as the explanation and justification of these acts. What makes hunting hunting and not just killing is the set of cultural meanings associated with the seeking and killing. These cultural meanings involve ritual, memory, narrative, and symbol and can be among the most powerful indices of personal identity and socialization in a culture. In post-hunting cultures, these meanings can also be among the most controversial indices of identity and socialization. Hunters and their cultural dependents constitute the cultus of hunting activity: it is among them that the primary rituals and recollections of the drama of hunting are displayed.

The human seeking and killing of wild animals has occurred in North America for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years. Although almost all of this killing involved seeking or searching for the animals to be slain, what is commonly called hunting develops when the necessities of food acquisition are combined with varieties of social and cultural behaviors associated with the process of seeking, killing, and consuming animals. Hunting in this sense had already developed to a degree among pre-Columbian Amerindians, but it was the infusion of European cultural values into the rich arena of North American wildlife that led to the development of a unique hunting tradition for which there has been no parallel elsewhere in the world. North America, more than Africa, became for a time a continent of hunters; while white hunting safaris have attracted much of the romance of hunting, hunting in North America both among the pre-Columbian Indians and their successors and among the invading Europeans was a more generalized and familiar craft than was ever the case across Africa.

What is currently referred to as American hunting has a long history, however, and there has been much development away from the early colonial form. It is difficult--impossible--to assert that the present form of hunting is an unbroken lineage from the taking practices of early explorers, colonists, or settlers. Survival, subsistence, supplementary and recreational hunting are very different projects regarding the entry into the wilderness or the pursuit of wild animals. Some early American settlers hunted to survive: wild animals provided the only food available to them. Other settlers, for whom the basics of life were secure, subsisted upon diets made up largely or exclusively of wild animals; these settlers, however, might have turned to other resources--a stock of beans or potatoes--to survive. Later inhabitants of the mature settlements farmed and secured their basic food supply by other means but supplemented their domestic food through animals taken by hunting. Recreational hunters hunt for the meaning of the activity and not because they are in any way dependent upon the food supply made available by hunting.

Today, most American hunting is recreational, and it is this non-necessary aspect of hunting activity that brings hunting into conflict with the post-hunting sensibility of contemporary society. It should be noted, however, that the several modes of hunting can occur near each other in time and sometimes overlap. Although it is not widely recognized, subsistence hunting continues to occur alongside recreational hunting across much of present-day America. In many of the coves of the Appalachian mountains as well as in the peripheries of the Indian reservations, quasi-survival hunting still occurs. Appalachian poverty, in particular, is both invisible enough and deep enough to force some residents of the depressed areas of this region to hunt in the survival mode even late in the twentieth century. The prejudices of the culture of recreational hunting and its property-rights orientation against "poaching" often cause us to misread out-of-season hunting as wildlife vandalism when it may be survival hunting.

Over the years, many social, political, economic, and even religious factors emerged and affected the formation of the hunting tradition as increasing numbers of colonists arrived from Europe and as early settlers expanded out of their coastal enclaves and confronted the resources and risks of North America outside of the protections of early forts and villages. The Scots-Irish whose backcountry settlements followed the earlier English coastal and tidewater plantations had a very different view of the utility of wild animals and of the means of taking them than their English compatriots along the coast. And Amerindian hunting and taking practices began to change quickly as they were pulled within the orbit of the local economies of the English (and other European) villages and as new technologies (such as firearms, animal traps, and edged tools made of steel) became available to them. The backcountry Moravian storekeepers and their Jewish wholesalers in Charleston had very different views of hunting from the sons of English planters along the Carolina coast.

And despite the white rhetoric and local laws which denied the fact and the right of hunting to slaves, both narrative tradition and archaeological evidence support an important hunting tradition among African-Americans; these Americans whether slave or free possessed firearms and used them to hunt. Recently excavated slave quarters on St. Catherine's Island off the Georgia coast indicate that not only did slaves possess firearms, but that they kept them in some numbers and kept parts for making repairs upon them. Other coastal plantation narratives suggest that wild game was a desired supplement to slave diet and that plantation owners either supplied guns or knowingly overlooked the presence of hunting arms among slaves. We also know now that as the migration of drovers or "cowboys" moved from the hills of Appalachia and the coves of the Cumberland Plateau across the Mississippi into Texas and the Great Plains, many African Americans were among these cowboys and the firearm was already a familiar tool to them. There is both ethnic and practical diversity in early American hunting practices.

Early Colonial Hunting

Although Ortegya y Gasset observes that it is a scarcity of game that leads us to call the activity 'hunting', there were perhaps two places in the world where hunting was a relatively simple decision of selection because of the plenitude of game: the pre-colonial worlds of Africa and North America. The story of the Serengeti and the other great migratory zones of African wildlife are familiar to hunters and conservationists alike; the story of North America is far less familiar though no less remarkable. Around the year 1500 the first Europeans in North America came upon the greatest diversity of game they had ever encountered; nothing remained in Europe of the wild populations which once filled the great woods and had been woven into the lore as well as tapestries of the Medieval world. In societies already conditioned by the scarcity of both wild and domestic food, North America in its fullness was described as "Edenic". Edward Bland's 1650 advertisement "The Discovery of New Brittaine" only echoed what had already been observed and asserted for more than a century. Bland noted that "Virginia"--embracing portions of what is now both Virginia and the Carolinas--deserved to be compared to the biblical Eden, not only because of the coincidence of latitude with the Biblical Eden, but also because of the great bounty of the land. 'Eden' became a familiar placename in the colonial period and in the 1720's, for many of the same reasons as Edward Bland, William Byrd named his richly forested, speculative tract along the Roanoke River near the Virginia border with North Carolina "The Land of Eden."

This bounty included great open forests sheltering wild turkeys apparently beyond number; open prairies or savannas in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee on which were found herds of deer, elk, and bison; coastal bays and estuaries which made home for millions upon millions of waterfowl. By most accounts the Passenger Pigeons numbered in the billions not millions. In the rivers and bays fish and shellfish were so common that collecting them was only a matter of reaching out the hand to do so, and an observation arose early on that those who starved or had difficulty subsisting did so only because of laziness. These great herds of animals were chronicled in the accounts of early discoverers, in the journals of the first colonists, in the store records of the backcountry traders, in the letters of lonely indentured servants, and in the diaries of priests. The later accounts of William Bartram or Mark Catesby only lend the precision of the naturalist's description to what was already known.

North America in 1500 or 1600 was a land ripe for hunting yet the collection of animals for food proved difficult for the first colonists. Early coastal outposts and the Jamestown settlement in particular were haunted by starvation--not because the food supply was absent but because the means of taking it was not part of the conceptual and behavioral repertoire of most of the settlers. In the "starving time" in Jamestown during the winter of 1610, it was later noted that many of those who starved--or who were driven to eating the flesh of the dead--did so because they would not abandon their refined expectations and toil to get their food. The social class distinction of 'gentleman' was particularly debilitating because the members of this group expected to be waited upon and served and held themselves to be above common labor--including hunting or gathering.

On the other hand, the category of 'soldier' was almost as debilitating as that of gentleman; the military concepts of martial discipline and the use of weapons only for combat mitigated against the effective use of firearms for hunting by soldiers. Military thinking on the part of this group also worked against the development of the forest skills necessary for hunting. The inability of the English to rethink the firearm in the context of the North American forest haunted colonial militias and the British Army until the period of the America Revolution. Although soldiers were present in the colonies from the beginning and often made up the largest fraction of the population in the early settlements, soldiers did not initially anchor the hunting tradition in America. Much of the game eventually supplied to colonists was purchased from Native Americans working under contract to individual settlers, to plantation companies, or to the civil administration of towns. The American mythology of the supposed first Thanksgiving in New England at least is accurate to the extent that it suggests confirmation of this idea: that of Amerindians supplying settlers, who were armed but apparently unable to acquire food, with food such as the wild turkey.

In time, a labor specialty called "huntsman" or "woodsman" developed, but this skill owed little to the arts of soldiering. The interchangeablness of the two terms suggests the close association of hunting with wood cutting and the other forest skills of plant and animal identification. The great hunting and exploratory expedition of William Byrd in the late 1720's to survey the Virginia boundary with North Carolina relied upon such huntsmen to keep the surveying party supplied with food: deer, bear, turkey, bison. By Byrd's time in the early eighteenth century, these huntsmen had nearly a century of experience behind their craft and had already constituted a separate skill group in the inventory of colonial crafts. The huntsmen had learned from and had taken their place alongside the Native American suppliers of food to the settlements.

If Andrew White's 1584 drawings and account of the Amerindian villages of the Chesapeake region are accurate with respect to gardening, fishing, and hunting, the food supply of these Indians must have been highly stable and hunting would have had a supplemental instead of survival or subsistence function. The fire herding of deer observed around Jamestown early in the seventeenth century probably reflected a hunting method more relied upon for its effectiveness than chosen out of the desperation of starvation. Starvation would not affect Indian groups until European diseases began to kill off entire villages and tribes and until Amerindians entered the European economic system and began to exchange animal products, notably hides, for European trade goods.

The so-called fur trade was an extensive continental exchange system which matched the originally fragmented productivity of the Amerindians with the retail distribution system of the Europeans. By supplying systematic coherence to what had otherwise been supplemental or subsistence hunting, Amerindian hunting was transformed in technique and goal. Only at this point do we find Amerindians killing animals for their hides alone or killing species which they traditionally did not use or eat such as hummingbirds. (The hummingbirds were captured and their skins exported to Barbados where a small industry sewed up the skins packed with scented sand and shipped them on to London, Paris, and Brussels as cachets to be worn around the waist or at the breasts of European ladies.) The fur trade anticipates by a century and a half the market hunting of the nineteenth century and differs from market hunting only with respect to the particular part of the animal shipped to market. By 1800 the population of America was large enough and growing rapidly enough that forest product entrepreneurs were no longer dependent upon exclusively European markets.

The social development of hunting from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries also mirrors the great strides in firearms development during the same period. From early matchlock and wheellock pieces which were heavy and not particularly suited for use in wooded cover through the development of flintlock muskets and rifles, the huntsman's tool evolved with the craft. By the time Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Charleston, South Carolina, developed in the eighteenth century as firearms manufacturing centers for the fur trade, the European military shoulder arm had already been modified into a portable and reliable hunting tool. And already design refinements were beginning to distinguish sturdy muskets which were capable of mounting bayonets from hunting firearms which did not need the strength of barrel or stock for such military purposes. Early on, in craft and equipment, the tradition of American hunting detached itself from the society and equipment of militias.

The touted "right to keep and bear arms" is obviously not a pre-revolutionary concept in as much as it is formally unrecognized until the writing of the Bill of Rights for the U.S. Constitution. Prior to the Constitution, the necessity of the civilian keeping of individual arms was almost entirely a matter of maintaining local militias and had little to do with personal defense or hunting. The divergence between hunting and military shoulder weapons has continued from the seventeenth century to the present. During the Civil War, the famed Sharps Repeating Rifle attained notoriety for its capacity to deliver more than one shot in succession, but the effect of this rifle upon the outcome of the war was negligible; the Civil War was essentially a musketeers war and the infamous slaughters of that war were occasioned not by repeating rifles but by well-drilled musket units. The Sharps Rifle, of course, like the Henry and other repeaters would win acclaim not as military weapons--the future in military weapons lay in smokeless powder and high pressure steel--but as premier hunting arms on the plains and in the Western mountains.

Despite the ballistic characteristics and general acclaim of the .30-'06 cartridge as the best all-around sporting cartridge in North America, this military cartridge and the guns designed for it have accounted for proportionately little game in comparison, for instance, with the Henry series of rifles or the widely popular Winchester Model 94 chambered for the .30-30 cartridge. Currently, no military cartridge including the 7.65 Nato and the .223 M16 rounds can compete as hunting rounds with the .270 or the .243. And in the realm of handgun hunting, no serious hunting load or firearm is developed off a .45 ACP platform popular as that round has been in military and law enforcement use; ballistically the .45 is a stone-age tool for the modern hunter. Military weapons simply have never made good hunting firearms.

Early Recreational Hunting: the 18th Century

In the first two centuries of American settlement--1500-1700--hunting was largely of the survival/subsistence/supplement types: colonists and settlers took wild animals for food and little ritualization or social symbolization occurred in conjunction with this hunting. The element of danger deriving from conflict with Indians overshadowed the socialization of the hunt itself while the general scarcity of domestic food dictated an unromantic and unsentimentalized view of the killing of deer and turkey. At the same time the large numbers of these animals in the supplementary diet of the colonists caused more than one early writer to lament the sameness of the deer-turkey diet and to long for more exotic fare from Europe. Early American colonists hunted because they needed food and did not symbolize the hunting process.

In the northeast, as Puritan theology increased its grip upon civil order through the seventeenth century, most forms of leisure activity were submitted to severe moral scrutiny and hunting rituals and extended social forms associated with hunting never developed there in any full sense. In the south, the large areas of land and the relative difficulty of communication between plantations retarded the development of hunting rituals at least during the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth century. In the early narratives of exploration and settlement, there is a remarkable absence of reflection upon hunting as an activity qualitatively different from cutting wood, digging out stumps or other domestic chores.

There is an even more remarkable absence of interest in the size or physical distinctions of the animals killed. William Bartram, for instance, writes with much greater passion about the size of an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake discovered near one of his camps than he ever wrote about the size of the game animals killed for food and brought into the camps. While the weight of wild turkeys was sometimes noted by other explorers, usually as part of the 'rhetoric of Eden' the point of which was to reveal the ample resources of the colonies, the earliest reflections upon hunting itself were English observations about the waste and wantonness associated with Amerindian hunts. Interest in the size of antlers of deer and elk is conspicuously absent.

The development of hunting as a social tradition requires the introduction of a process of symbolization which in turn requires a stable social economy and sufficient valuation of leisure. Hunting as a "tradition" only develops under the conditions which associates important social values with the taking of wild food. These social values might be virility, manliness, resourcefulness, courage, esoteric knowledge but such values do not intrinsically have anything to do with the skill of finding and killing animals. In the hunting tradition, however, the finding and killing of animals becomes a platform on which these social forms are staged. Hunting becomes an American tradition only at the point at which the society can afford to emphasize the social circumstances rather than the fact of finding and killing animals.

Gentry class distinctions and recreations were imported to the colonies from the beginning of settlement. In the seventeenth century these distinctions were largely matters of clothing, refined recreation such as music and dance, and symbolic issues of social status. By the eighteenth century, plantation development and returned income had proceeded to the point that land centered and land affirming activities such as hunts would come to represent gentry life, particularly in the South. Hunting became a socially required and acceptably conspicuous display of both leisure and wealth. Hunting in this context, however, had far less to do with the stalking of animals in the forest than with the display of the horse-and-dog culture of formal fox and deer hunting. The horse represented gentry culture and gentry hunts found ways to utilize horses. Although fox hunting attained significance only in a few carefully controlled areas, the gentry interest in horses, dogs, and the hunt would spill over into a regionally significant form of deer hunting in which mounted hunters would use dogs to drive deer toward other hunters. The long association of horses with gentry lifestyle is also reflected in the use of horses in the highly gentrified plantation quail hunting found across the contemporary south.

An notable consequence of the gentry involvement in hunting left an important legacy in the American hunting tradition: the interest in the quality of the weapons used in hunting. Although in part influenced by another gentry pastime--dueling--the interest in well-crafted and highly functional firearms became a hallmark feature of European, English, and American hunting. In the eighteenth century this interest led to the production to some of the finest firearms ever made combining the skills of machinist, cabinet maker, and engraver in guns subsequently recognized and preserved as works of art. Although the typical hunting firearm is not inordinately expensive nor a unique production, the tradition of the last two hundred years reflects an interest in high quality of design and manufacture and the attainment of a functional elegance unmatched in other manufactured goods. The lore of quality firearms is a special subset of the group of meanings that define the hunting tradition.

Westward from the plantations of the gentry, the Scots-Irish and other immigrants of the backcountry were forging another dimension of American hunting. Living daily under conditions of acute need and real danger from animals and Indians, skill with a firearm--marksmanship--became a practical necessity and was socialized as a virtue. Not only did hunters tell stories of famed long shots or one-shot kills of great mammals, they also invented public occasions for socializing other members of society in the life of the hunt. On occasion a particularly large pelt was displayed at a store and demonstrations of shooting skill were frequently staged. Marksmanship events became a staple of market gatherings, fairs and festivals, and hunting camps. Hunting was given an important interface with other masculine pastimes when the saloon-casino interest in betting was connected with the outcome of shooting matches. Bets were sometimes made for cash, but in a largely cashless backcountry society, the prize was as often a dog, saddle, or other tool of frontier life. An important domestic connection was established when the prize of shooting matches was a turkey, ham, or slab of bacon. Although seemingly minor amusements, shooting matches served a vital function in making hunting and its associated crafts an acceptable and rewarded part of larger social patterns. As skilled shooting exercises, candle snuffing and playing card splitting had already emerged as camp and fair demonstrations before 1800.

Later Recreational and Market Hunting: the 19th Century

The first half of the 19th Century saw a rapid settlement of the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. With the end of the Revolutionary War and the subsequent treaties with the British, French, Spanish and Indian interests, large areas of land were opened to settlement. Although initially some effort was made to respect the tribal enclaves in the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the pressure of migration from the east was strong and Indian lands were intruded upon both for hunting and for settlement. By 1810 Davy Crockett was hunting in the Elk River Basin of middle Tennessee, and the great licks around Nashville and northward into Kentucky became legendary for the game--particularly turkey, deer, and black bear--they produced.

The first waves of trans-Appalachian settlers encountered a richly forested country abounding in game. Despite more than a century of fur trade activity, the wildlife was still adequate for both Indian and European subsistence hunting although some reports before 1820 had noted the local scarcity in some animals. Elk and bison were already gone, disappearing before the fur trappers east of the Mississippi by 1750. In some areas turkeys had become scarce by 1830 as had white-tailed deer. Yet in most areas, deer and bear could still be found and small game numbers had begun to increase with the opening of the forests to make fields. This early Tennessee valley settlement was topographically specialized--the settlers favored access to rivers both as a way of travel into the country as well as the preferred route for shipping their goods out of the country. This settlement pattern meant that very large areas--Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi bottomlands and large tracts in the upland South plateau region--were as yet unbroken by farms or roads. Some of these areas have remained prime wilderness habitat down to the present. These areas also remained as prime hunting areas recalled in novels such as Faulkner's Go Down Moses and in autobiographies such as Ely Green's Too Black, Too White.

A disturbing demographic pattern appeared across this western area by 1820: the decennial doubling of population. Although this rate would slow somewhat, the decennial growth for the next forty years was dramatic. States were quickly chartered as settlers poured in and organized their petitions to Washington. In 1790, Tennessee probably had about 70,000 inhabitants, but this number grew to 105,000 in 1800 and more than doubled to 261,000 by 1810. By 1820 population had reached 423,000, by 1830 it had reached 681,000, by 1840 it was 821,000 and more than a million in 1850. Between 1810 when Davy Crockett hunted Mulberry Creek on the Elk River and 1840--that is, in the span of one generation--much of Tennessee went from a hunter's wilderness to a domesticated landscape of farms and villages. Kentucky and Ohio saw similar trends followed later by Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. By 1850 St. Louis had already become established as the new inland center of the fur trade and American population was massing for the push across the Mississippi. By the 1840's "GTT"--Gone to Texas--signs would be appearing on the gateposts of abandoned farms in Tennessee and Alabama.

The migration from the east coast increased by additional European migration, particularly Irish migration after 1840, would work a continuing settlement and transformation of the land--and of the wildlife that lived on the land. Hunting activity was transformed as well. Davy Crockett's sense of the land and game in 1810 was similar to that of the great African hunters in the 1890's, but that open hunters' world did not last so long in the South as it did in Africa. Within thirty years of initial settlement, most American areas west of the Appalachians were domesticated and the frontier had passed forever. While there were still large unbroken tracts of land, and while "open range" common law practices still prevailed even in eastern states like Georgia and Tennessee, most land was enclosed by fence and deed. Even though the systematic logging of forests would not begin until after the Civil War, already the pattern was clear: wilderness had disappeared from the east and domestic hunting replaced wilderness hunting.

Domestic hunting, roughly, is hunting that serves the household, is conducted near the household, and where the household serves as the anchor point for the hunt. Wilderness hunting, by contrast, is distant from households and is associated with the camp and trail. Domestic hunting falls under the diurnal control of social order: the day, week, and month. For domestic hunters, hunts begin and end with more attention to the hour of the day and the nightly return to the domestic base whereas wilderness hunters may pursue game and be in camp or on trail for weeks or months at a time. Although semi-wilderness hunting survived for a while in parts of the east, it was largely gone by the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The eastern hunter's ambiance, the amount of land and the sense of isolation or the sense of hunt integrity associated with the land, grew smaller with each decade. Hunting was practiced not far from home on pieces of land that were seldom more than a few thousand acres, and often much smaller, which could be walked out of or crossed in less than a day.

Throughout the 19th century, American towns particularly east of the Mississippi continued to grow and by century's end, industrial and other social forces were rapidly expanding the populations of towns and cities. A population trend away from the land and toward the cities had begun and an American urban sensibility divorced from the ways of both farming and hunting developed. In almost contradictory fashion, many of these urban people, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard and flyway persisted in a taste for wild birds, especially Passenger Pigeons and waterfowl. Although a kind of market hunting had transpired for more than two hundred years as Indians, woodsmen, and trappers had brought game into settlements and sold it, the last quarter of the century saw the development of systematic economic exchange in America: an interlocking system of transportation, finance, and exchange in terms of which market hunters, wholesalers, merchants, railroaders, legislators, distributors, restaurant keepers, and customers made one large and interwoven fabric.

When Tink Sullivan maneuvered his punt and punt gun slowly into position in the near dawn over Potomac or Aquia Creeks off the Potomac River in Virginia in 1890, he was not working as a lone, renegade hunter breaking the law or trying to upset the balance of nature. There were dozens of men like him working the creeks and coves all along the Chesapeake. When Tink turned his head to tighten the trigger string in his teeth and touch off his enormous blackpowder firearm loaded with a pound of black powder and a pound and a half of shot, the discharge would kill perhaps 150 ducks outright. Junie, his son, worked with 10 and 12 gauge side-by-sides and a black lab to kill and retrieve the cripples. They worked quickly and effectively. The rowboat was put out, the ducks loaded, and they rowed to the dock and packed the ducks like blue crabs into bushel baskets. Sometimes they had more than a dozen baskets to show for their work, often much less.

On the dock, just after daylight the steamer from Baltimore or Washington picked up the ducks bound for the table that evening. Tink and Junie were paid 25 cents a bushel on the dock. At eighteen to two dozen ducks per bushel, that came to about one cent per duck. They were the first links in a long chain of production that reached consumers at the highest levels of society and legislature in Washington. There was less of the hunting imagination in market hunting for Tink and Junie than there was in the minds of the consumers who enjoyed the complex fiction that their table fare was provided by "hunters." Certainly they hunted, and while there was careful skill in what they did, there was little ritual in it. The narrative came later, decades later, as they and other market hunters told their stories, recalling a life almost past as they were living it. But this hunting was mostly killing, not hunting, and evoked no more romance than did the plowing and hog killing Tink and Junie turned to as they left the dock.

Other market killers were more efficient and even less romantic as they attacked the remaining Passenger Pigeons, setting upon and sometimes dynamiting the last great midwestern and southern roosts. Once again an extended system prevailed as the railroads not only transported the pigeons to market but conductors and telegraphers worked together to watch migrating flocks and send word ahead of where flocks had roosted for the night. Actual hunting--particularly wingshooting--had very little to do with the demise and eventual extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Contemporary estimates noted that skilled marksmen using shotguns could kill about a dozen pigeons per hour--around a hundred a day. Wingshooting even of Passenger Pigeons is not the easiest of shooting tasks, and the ordinary hunters showed much poorer results than the skilled shooters. Simple arithmetic calculations suggest that even thousands of hunters shooting with great skill could not wipe out flocks numbering billions of birds in anything like a finite lifetime of hunting, much less in a single hunt or season. (At 100 birds per day, it would take 1000 hunters 27.4 years shooting every day of each year to kill one billion birds.) The radical conservationist's myth of hunter fault fails us here.

The real causes were much more prosaic, diffuse, and far less amenable to culprit resolution. The Passenger Pigeons disappeared as the result of a combination of circumstances, some documented and some surmised: the fragmentation and clearing of the eastern forests which destroyed or disturbed centuries old roost and nesting sites, the spread of avian diseases or the vulnerability of flocks to the diseases once conditions of stress entered their ecological niches, and "critical breeding mass" phenomena according to which breeding is adversely affected once population minima are subceeded. These and other factors, in combination with wasteful slaughter of local flocks together caused the demise of this pigeon, not hunters as such. The Passenger Pigeon succumbed to the same domestic and developmental forces that shaped settlement all across the east: the mechanical breakdown of a primordial natural order and the disruption of the ecological processes dependent upon that order. Settlement and development have driven many extinctions: including now that of hunting itself.

Sport Hunting: 20th Cent.

Much of what is so much associated with hunting as an American tradition developed not in the first three hundred years of American settlement, but in the last one hundred--since the turn of this century. It was stated earlier that, "Hunting develops when the seeking and killing of animals becomes enfolded within a social and cultural tradition that finds a socially important excess of meaning in the pursuit and killing of animals." With the passing of the frontier, with the near virtual domestication of the landscape, with the driving of the last "hostile" Indians onto reservations, and with the social balance in American life tipped from farm to town, hunting emerges as the great tradition of American manliness: that is, it emerges at precisely that point in time and culture when it is least a token of manliness and is made to serve other important social concerns. The apotheosis of hunting occurs in a culture which has done proportionately less actual hunting than in any other period of American history.

The elements of this latter tradition, however, are powerful and are laden with narrative and symbolic elements of memory and nostalgia. Though there are hundreds of books detailing the lore of American Hunting in this period, perhaps the most representative--because of the reciprocity between the hunters' values and the values of the surrounding society--is Robert Ruark's The Old Man and the Boy. It is a book filled with hunting but is ultimately not a hunting book: it is a elegantly sparse small town morality play acted out with two characters on a stage of marsh and field and wood. Its continuing power--the power of the hunting tradition itself--lies in its ability to connect powerful images of identity with an idealized past. The boy is novice to a wisdom keeper who discloses to him a world where character, uprightness, integrity, and fallible but beneficial skills are the marks of manhood. The Old Man is the ultimate civics teacher, not hunter: his lessons to the Boy are always lessons of virtue, not technique.

The Old Man embodies the wisdom of small town America and of life lived close to the land and to the values of the people of the land set in a halcyon time--sunset--just before the single greatest demographic transformation of the human race--World War II--was to occur. As the covey breaks and rises, as the Boy carefully picks out a single bird and fires, as he dutifully reports to the Old Man his day's work, he is less hunter returning home than pupil turning in his notebook at the end of school. And it is all an innocent world where virtue and action meld in performance and there is no distance of reflection, no disturbance of second thoughts, to mar the transparency of life and deed. It is a great American fiction: that once--once upon a time in the wilderness, once in the small town, once in the field beyond the barn--life was pure and men worthy. No one who knows the sequel in The Old Man's Boy Grows Older or in Robert Ruark's life culminating in alcoholism and decadent white-hunting can imagine that that "once-upon-a-time" world remained in place.

The post-war years saw a rapid decline in the physical and cultural conditions of American hunting while The Old Man and the Boy was read with increasing fervor among hunters who remembered more than was the case and sought to pass on via nostalgia and fancy a lost world to their own children. The ducks told a more accurate story. When Lafayette Smith and Jimmy Roe set out 400 carved decoys three hours from port in the Back Bay below Norfolk in 1940 and shot only canvasbacks if they chose to on a given day, they saw ducks in numbers that were still high even if down from the numbers Tink and Junie Sullivan had seen sixty years earlier and a hundred and fifty miles north. Lafayette and Jimmy's hunting was enfolded in narrative as all good hunting is, and the narrative served them well for decades after they stopped hunting. Once they said, speaking of the flights of ducks over their open water blind, that the flights were so thick that on sunny days they felt a chill as the ducks passed between them and the sun. No duck hunter in North America will ever feel that chill again.

Tink and Junie, Lafayette and Jimmy, and all the rest of that wonderful tribe of bird hunters and waterfowlers did not destroy duck hunting for the rest of us. The forces that destroyed their world and ours were no different, or if different, not in kind but only in scale and rate of effect, from the forces that disturbed Davy Crockett's hunting in Tennessee in 1810: the clearing of the land, the building of houses and barns and stores and mills, the inexorable driving back not just of wilderness but of wildness from the doorstep and the barnlot. Wetlands were drained by the millions of acres, and a blight of pollution swept over the estuaries and into the hormonal systems of the ducks. The hunters' land was eroded by development in dozens of forms.

By 1960, the post-war economic system had attained a global momentum that has not yet been dampened. That global economy has driven a transformation of the landscape of North America that reaches into every niche unprotected by conservancy or park ownership. Although large tracts of land remain intact in the western states, the pressure of development is a national phenomenon. Today more and more land--mountain ridge lines and tight valleys--have roads cut into them and houses built. What had been a pattern of development only around resort towns such as Aspen or resort/retreat towns like Brevard, N.C. has become a general real estate pattern in rugged areas. Around major metropolitan areas suburban pocket communities leapfrog outward, connected to the core economic zones by multilane feeder roads. Fragmentation of the agricultural and wilderness landscape has become a major, if unglamorous, national ecological problem. Hunting has been squeezed into and now out of the last remaining cracks in that once unbroken hunters' elysium that reached westward from the Virginia coast in 1550.

A curious condition has now developed across the nation. While ducks because of their breeding and migratory requirements remain a special case, some other wildlife species have attained record population levels in the fragmented landscape of suburban development. The white-tail deer is now at perhaps a historic population high and has become a nation-wide suburban problem. Deer are common in fields and yards across the white-tail range and are logged in the tens of thousands annually in collisions with vehicles. "Urban Deer Management" has become a scientific specialty for wildlife biologists who must now deal with their successful results in supplying deer for the diminishing numbers of deer hunters. Most urban/suburban deer live in landscape niches that allow survival but which because of the congestion of houses make these animals un-huntable. At the same time, predatory animals such as the coyote have returned to former ranges in record numbers and are now found in many of the same landscape niches as the white-tail deer in all states east of the Mississippi.

The problem for hunters, particularly deer hunters, can be viewed another way. The classic firearm of choice for deer hunters is the rifle, not the shotgun. With the fragmentation the landscape because of intruded houses many areas are now regulating deer hunting on a "shotgun" only basis because there no longer exist safe down range intervals for the use of rifles. The state of Virginia and other areas east of the Appalachians reached this situation decades ago; today the problem is reaching westward. Tennessee which has a long-standing and traditional opposition to the use of shotguns for deer and the specific prohibition of buckshot loads will soon have to confront a general public safety problem caused by the combination of the use of rifles in a landscape in which it has become virtually impossible to be out of range or sight of houses. For the traditional deer hunter, the scoped deer rifle--the .243 or .270--will become an increasingly useless tool. The hunting technology will be driven off the scene before the hunter, but the reality is already dawning for hunters. It is already difficult for hunters to find safe and acceptable areas to sight-in their rifles much less to use them in the field.

Quail, the quintessential small game species and the symbolic focus of the American sport hunting tradition, reflect another situation. Two things have happened in the countryside: first, as land has changed hands from older farmers to their non-farming children and re-sold by them to people moving out from town, many small farmsteads have been sub-divided and are now the scene of "mini-ranches"--five to ten acre single house lots which are just close enough to each other to preclude hunting but far enough apart to still seem rural. The old farm which had counted perhaps 300 acres had contained a mix of plowed fields, pasture and woodlot--and enough rough cover interspersed with cleared grassy swaths to provide prime habitat for quail. This was the kind of cover that had sustained the remarkable pre-1950 quail populations and made the bobwhite the premier game species for most hunters in the first half of the century. Technical quail plantations in the last few decades have been successful to the extent that they are able to afford deliberate reversion to this kind of land management. On the five acre mini-ranch, however, the rough cover disappears to the bushhog and the new house may be centered in three to five acres of groomed lawn maintained by a new generation of efficient lawn tractors.

A second thing has happened in the countryside all across rural America: the average farm size has been steadily increasing since World War II as smaller farms were absorbed into larger ones. As the harsh economics of agri-business have driven out all but the most dedicated family farmers and the most professional business farmers, farm consolidation has increased. The economics of grain and of grain machinery, storage, and transport dictate inexorable efficiencies of scale in farming. Old fence rows are bulldozed, and old fields are connected end to end for continuous plowing and harvesting. At the same time, since many farmers rotate crops or plant three crops in two years, they no longer rotate livestock into harvested fields--so they no longer need to fence those fields. This means that they can remove the fences and plow edge to edge. Unless there are strong local sanctions, farmers will plow not merely to the edge of their property but will plow through the state or county right-of-way up to the edge of the road ditch. These agricultural practices greatly increase soil loss and siltation of streams, but they also have driven quail, other small game, and many of the birds and mammals in the understructure from the land. The old farms were bio-diverse before that concept became chic; the new farms are devastatingly clean from the perspective of small game habitat.

The End of the Tradition

Today the American Hunting tradition is entrapped in a three-sided standoff: on one side are the great majority of non-hunting Americans for whom the memory, rituals, and narratives have no existential connection but whose sensibilities are shaped by a pop-ethic sentimentality driven by decades of Disney movies and isolation from the realities of the natural world. These people have little or no interest in hunting, typically associate guns with crime not sporting virtue, and mostly believe that wild animals should be left alone and not hunted. The wide contemporary designation of hunting as "sport" hunting generates the impression--nearly impossible now to suppress--that hunters kill animals for "fun;" the ethical implications of this nomenclature and hunters' acquiesence in these implications has given the rhetorical and moral ground to the non-hunters. Hunters themselves, lacking any adequate rationale for their craft, noisily protest their "right" to kill in this fashion and deride the virtue or intelligence of even other hunters who feel that 'sport' is not an adequate rationale of hunting activity.

Opposite this group of non-hunters are two other groups, both hunters: one we may call the renegade, the other the righteous hunters--or the slob and snob hunters. The first of these two are the people, often socio-economically marginal, who hunt and who have little investment in either the legal restrictions of hunting or in the social values associated with it in the tradition. The second of these are the hunters who view wildlife under their narrow construction of property rights and consolidate their control of access to hunting lands via clubs and miles of "posted" signs. Neither of these groups are good representatives of the great tradition of American hunting.

That tradition was once revealed in an broad ethic that associated hunting with the common good even if certain hunting areas were jealously guarded. This sense of the common good was not merely the collective good of hunters but was perceived by hunter and society alike as a benefit held in common by all in the community whether they were hunters or not. It was this sense of the common good and of the code of behavior that corresponded to it that kept posted signs off the gates and allowed hunters almost free range as they pursued a broken covey from one farmstead to the next. The common good was strong enough that you could claim passage without the authority of written pass or verbal permission. In this social order which was the ultimate validation of the hunting tradition, hunters, in virtue of their ethical sportsmanship, were seen as representative, exemplary Americans. Their character was held up for the emulation of young men, and they were not spoken of in disparaging or hostile terms in the public schools.

Today the tradition of hunting is increasingly becoming non-public and is devolving into the hands of the slob and snob hunters who do not hold the tradition on the basis of a covenant of common good with the surrounding society. A narrower self-interest is the driving force of both these hunting groups: the one to satisfy elemental hunger and perhaps to display a culturally conditioned rage against established authority; the other to use hunting access as a conspicuous display of wealth or privilege which self consciously defines itself in terms of exclusivity and detachment from the common order of society. The privatization of hunting represented by the second of these groups is of great significance for the future of the American hunting tradition. The economic clout of club hunters gives them the multi-year leases and enormous acreages to guarantee that their kind of hunting will survive for a long time to come in America, but this kind of hunting will have been bought at the price of its isolation from the public trust and more importantly from the community of hunters: club hunting does not benefit hunters; it benefits club hunters. Club hunting represents the end of American hunting as an American tradition.

Club hunting does supply, however, an important conservancy function with respect to the land and game that is enclosed in club leases. Club lands across the U.S. range from leases of single farm woodlots by a half dozen local hunters to large, professionally managed plantations or estates containing tens of thousands of acres. These large holdings, particularly if managed not only for the production of trophy whitetails but for bio-diversity and with ecosystem criteria in mind, can be critical in preserving unique ecosystems--swamp bottoms, for instance--or in sequestering sufficiently large areas of undisturbed land to allow protection of range-sensitive species such as cougars. In a few areas, political alliances between hunting clubs and environmental organizations have actually led to improved perceptions of the role of hunting and hunting lands in the overall picture of land management.

The future of hunting, though, is far less likely to be decided by political or economic factors than by demographic ones. The slob hunters and the non-privileged hunters are more and more excluded from access to all but a few areas of intense public hunting where hunter presence is many times greater than on the leased club lands. Yet I do not think that hunting will be banned or nationally prohibited nor that private firearms ownership will disappear or become so encumbered with regulation as to make it impossible for all but registered club members to possess firearms. The future of hunting in America will be decided almost mechanically by the numbers of people and their structures on the land. A contiguously domestic landscape is not a hunter's landscape. Northern and central Virginia and Maryland provide an example of the ultimate condition of the land: total occupation and enclosure for hundreds of miles. The trees still grow and woods are still there, but the woods are surrounded and webbed with houses. Across America it is simply becoming harder and harder to find places to hunt.

Franklin County, Tennessee, where I live is a predominantly rural county with a large deer herd and an annual kill that usually ranks in the top ten percent of Tennessee counties. Yet much of the land here exhibits the fragmentation of development referred to earlier: new houses are being projected into more remote areas. Ridge lines and bluff sites that have stood empty since creation now have houses hanging over them. In the dark before dawn in the deer woods, yard and kitchen lights can be seen in nearly every direction. No where in the county is there a safe zone of fire for the five-mile downrange reach of a .30-'06. The landowners recognize the constriction their houses, barns, and pastures has created for hunting, and they affirm the reality of that constriction by imposing safe boundaries in the form of "Posted" signs on their property. Now such signs are common and the commonality of exclusion has replaced the common good of free access and covenanted permission to hunt.

An Old Man's Guns

In my gun rack, build one weekend by me and my son, there is a long shelf with a butt rack mounted with brass plates to keep the long guns erect. Just below sight level there is a bar with trim wooden pegs to separate and protect the barrels of the guns. A shooter's and hunter's order prevailed down the gun rack: target and plinking rifles, mostly .22's first, Winchesters, Remingtons, Brownings; then the deer rifles--.30-30 Winchester, .30-'06 Ruger No. 1; then specialty rifles--.22 Hornet, .30 Carbine, '03A3 Springfield; then the shotguns--the first gun of all, the Winchester Model 37, then other shotguns: Savage, Stevens, Smith & Wesson, Harrington & Richardson, Remington, Franchi, Lanber. There were perhaps three dozen long guns, a gun for every season and purpose: skeet, ducks, dove, quail, turkey; squirrel, rabbit, deer. Below the rack was a long wooden cabinet, securely locked, with ordered rows of boxes of cartridges and shells, each in place by kind, size, and degree from the .22 blanks and shot cartridges to the steel shot for ducks. Also shelved here were the dozen handguns and their cartridges: Rugers, Brownings, Colts, Smith & Wessons.

No hunting was ever done or will ever be done better than could be done with these guns. The 20 gauge Franchi, over and under, was designed for one thing: flushing quail, first and second shots. I could buy more expensive guns; I have never used a better one. These guns to me were elegant not because of fine engraving or checkering, but because of their utter functional reliability as hunters' tools. The Stevens 12 gauge pump was intended as a $100 knock-about boat and duck blind gun for winter days in the muck when I could not take time to care about scrapes or mud and water in the receiver. It replaced a Remington that never fit right and was just expensive enough to distract me when I set it down in the duck blind. Duck hunting, I did not want to think about that kind of thing or even to look to make sure it was secure. The Stevens was already well worn in when I took it home from Judge's gun shop. That winter when I fired it for the first time, I took nine ducks with the first 10 shots from it, and I never thought of any other gun as my duck gun again. Like the turntables of the 33 rpm records which peaked in audiophile technology just at the point when the entire recording industry was on the cusp of digital sound, these guns were quite simply the most functional hunting tools ever seen, but they reached their working perfection coincidentally with their uselessness.

Over a half century these guns meant for my grandfather, father, me, and my son and daughter a life of range and field and game and companionship and afterwards ever afterwards the telling of it all in story. Hardly have I ever raised a glass of scotch whiskey in thirty years that the surrounding conversation has not sooner or later touched upon things of wood and brass and leather, of duck and deer and dove. It has been my life. It will not be my children's or theirs. When my son is fifty he will probably have a greater likelihood of using one of these guns for self-defense in a barricaded house in Atlanta than he will of using it at dawn to take a settling mallard in a river marsh. The world of river marshes and river marsh hunters, of deer hunters and their camps, of quail hunters and the long afternoon walks through short fields as an American tradition is over and nothing will bring it back.

Gerald L. Smith
Sewanee, TN
December, 1996