The hunter’s game : poachers and conservationists in twentieth-century America

Description

This book takes a new look at the angry struggles between American conservationists and local hunters since the rise of wildlife conservation at the end of the 1800s. From Italian immigrants in Pennsylvania to rural settlers and Indians in New Mexico to Blackfeet in Montana, local hunters' traditions of using wildlife have clashed with conservationist ideas of "proper" hunting for over a century. Louis Warren contends that these conflicts arose from deep social divisions and that the bitter history of conservation offers a new narrative for the history of the American West. At the heart of western - and American - history, Warren argues, is the transformation of many local resources, like wildlife, into "public goods," or "national commons." The Hunter's Game reveals that early wildlife conservation was driven not by heroic idealism, but by the interests of recreational hunters and the tourist industry. As American wildlife populations declined at the end of the nineteenth century, elite, urban sportsmen began to lobby for game laws that would restrict the customary hunting practices of immigrants, Indians, and other local hunters.  Read more... Prologue: Going West: Wildlife, Frontier, and the Commons -- 1. The Killing of Seely Houk -- 2. Boon and Bust: Pennsylvania's Deer Among Sportsmen and Farmers -- 3. "Raiding Devils" and Democratic Freedoms: Indians, Ranchers, and New Mexico Wildlife -- 4. Tourism and the Failing Forest -- 5. Blackfeet and Boundaries at Glacier National Park -- 6. Erasing Boundaries, Saving the Range -- Epilogue: Localism, Nationalism, and Nature.