Emerson Hough as Conservationist and Muckraker

Murray State University D E L B E R T E. W Y L D E R Emerson Hough as Conservationist and Muckraker* Remembering the days of his youth, Emerson Hough wrote in 1912 that I was raised in Iowa at the time when prairie shooting was very abundant. Another man and I once shot two days and killed seventy-six chickens without missing the birds. I have never cared to shoot them since.1 % He does not mention the name of his partner, although the paragraph is partly a discussion of his father’s skill as a hunter. Even at that late date, he would not have mentioned anything disrespectful to the memory of his father. Obviously, the event remained in his mind, however, and in his novel The Way of a Man, Hough describes a prairie shooting contest between his protagonist and the villain. In this situation, the birds are wild pigeons which have been trapped and then are released one at a time for the shooters, who alternately butcher them. After they shoot over a hundred of the birds, the contest is stopped by the arrival of the heroine, Ellen. The men try to explain that they are merely engaging in “a little sport.” *From a forthcoming Twayne United States Authors book. 'Letter, EH to Paul R. Martin, March 15, 1912. Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa. (ISDHA.) 94 Western American Literature “Sport, great sport, isn’t it?” cried the girl, holding out her drabbled hands. “Look there” — she pointed tow ard the pile of dead birds — “hundreds of these killed, for money, for sport. It isn’t sport. You had all these birds once, you owned them .” And there [the protagonist narrator remarks] she hit a large truth w ith a wom an’s guess, although none of us had paused to consider it so before.2 Very much like Hough in his own reaction to the slaughter of prairie chickens, or grouse, in his youth, the novel’s protagonist narrator goes on to explain: For my part, although I hope mawkishness no m ore marks me than another, and although I m ade neither then nor at any time a resolution to discontinue the sports of the field, I have never since then shot in a pigeon m atch, nor cared to see others do so, for it has never again seemed to me as actual sport.3 There was little in Hough’s background that would have prepared him for the role of conservationist with the exception, perhaps, of the kind of “waste not — want not” type of philosophy espoused in most middlewestern middle-class homes of the time, and his own obvious sensitivity to killing for the sake of killing. His experience in the American West would have exposed him to the most rampant wastefulness, which would be reflected years later in a series of articles on “The Wasteful West.” He, himself, did some overly-enthusiastic hunting and fishing during his days in New Mexico, and later in Kansas. As a journalist for “sports of the field” publications, however, he was made very much aware of the fact that many practices were causing the depletion of varieties of game, of birds, and of fish. He did not imme­ diately develop into an ecologist and an over-all conservationist, but he gradually assumed an understanding of the inter-relationship of all forms of life through his own experience and research. Furthermore, his sense of history and his love for the early frontier days provided him with a sense of loss at the reduction of those animals particularly which seemed to symbolize the way of life and the old freedoms of early America. In his early works as a conservationist, he seemed motivated primarily by two concepts. The first of these was that, as an amateur sportsman himself and as a journalist writing primarily for other amateur sportsmen, he thought that game should be protected from the careless slaughter 2Emerson Hough, The Way of a Man (New York, 1907), pp. 83-4. 3Ibid., p. 85. Delbert E. Wylder 95 of professional or “market” hunters. It should be protected so that amateur...