Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Karen R. Jones (review)

In Epiphany in the Wilderness, Karen R. Jones illuminates the act of hunting in the late nineteenth-century American West as a ritualized performance of individual and national identity. Positing the hunt as an act “saturated with the language of performance, recital and enactment” (12), Jones examines the structural semiotics of the hunt through the lens of performance theory. This analysis is offered through a chronological “three act” study that examines, first, the creators of the “hunter mythology” of the West; second, the “afterlife of the hunt,” a meticulous examination of hunting artifacts, artwork, and taxidermy (23); and third, the demise of the hunt as a cultural utopic performance of masculinity and the rise of conservationists and concern for the hunt’s ecological ramifications.

In the first “act,” Jones explores the “sporting hunter hero”—the signifier of the masculine ideal of national identity and power (34). From the masculine hunter hero, Jones broadens her scope to include landscape and animals, the stage and props of the hunt, and the hunting rituals that articulated certain males as dominant while denoting others as oppositional or supplemental to the white male center of the action. Yet Jones draws attention as well to narrative moments in hunters’ memoirs in which actors placed in the subaltern role pushed back through subversive acts like pranks on the hunter hero, a “gesture politics” of resistance (69).

In a similar fashion, Jones extends her analysis beyond the most common images of the hunt to those points where images blur or refract. For example, in her chapter on that most central of props, the rifle, she notes that on military campaigns, hunting was generally reserved for officers as a “gentleman’s leisure sport”—a sport that blurred the line between hunting and warfare. The Winchester rifle, she contends, thus becomes a “colorful tool of empire” (103). In the final chapter of the first act, Jones explores narratives by and about women hunters—a vivacious challenge to the narrative of the masculine hunter hero that dominated Western discourses.

In the next act Jones analyzes artifacts of the hunt, beginning with an analysis of the constructed landscape of the West through the autobiographies of the hunters, and then proceeds to visual reproductions of the landscape of the hunt, the hunt itself, and hunting kills. The power of her analysis lies again in her attention to the darker edges of familiar objects. In this case, Jones underscores for readers the resonance between photographs in which hunters pose with strung-up carcasses and photographs of lynchings. The visual assertion of white masculine mastery over the “other” was asserted through the photographic afterlife of the hunt, an assertion preserved and consecrated through viewers’ participation in that gaze of mastery over the dead.

Jones also analyzes the staging of the hunt, from James “Grizzly” Adams’s traveling menagerie of live and dead animals to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, concluding her chapters on the hunt’s afterlife with a detailed analysis of the popularity of taxidermy, in which the trophy, preserved and capable of traveling great distances, becomes the visual claim of mastery over the natural world as a transnational colonial enterprise.

Her final “act” traces the shift in rhetoric about the hunt from the mid-nineteenth-century’s emphasis on the West as a place of “cornucopian bounty” (274) to the late nineteenth-century’s elegiac rhetoric about loss—with the decimation of American bison as the emblem of that loss. Performances of hunting prowess as the essence of the West, such as Buffalo Bill’s extravaganzas, thus frame for audiences the rhetorical case for preservation and conservation.

Perhaps the book’s weakest segment appears in this final section as Jones contextualizes the Ghost Dance movement within the late nineteenth-century’s performances of resistance to the narrative of bounty and celebration of the hunt. While providing a helpful elucidation...