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

Epiphany in the Wilderness is a well-conceived, wide-ranging reexamination of hunting in the American West, executed with wit and lively writing. Particularly interested in sport hunting from the Civil War to 1890, Karen R. Jones compellingly applies actor-network theory to argue that the elaborate performance of the hunting trail—from setting out on the chase and stalking game, all the way to the retelling of the kill story—reinforced imperial narratives of westward expansionism. The West was a stage upon which the masculine hunter hero acted out his rugged individualist American character.

The book’s theoretical foundation allows space alongside humans for other agents like guns, paintings, theatrical sets, and animals both dead and alive to act out the hunt. It relies heavily on the marquee cultural and literary theorists, and in the American West specifically it follows Monica Rico by revealing the importance of whiteness and masculinity to the relationship between hunting and American imperial goals. Jones, though, has expanded the mostly elite cast of characters beyond such figures as Theodore Roosevelt. She has also complicated understandings of women’s acceptable roles on the frontier by recovering the stories of lady adventurers beyond wild women like Calamity Jane.

Epiphany in the Wilderness is organized in three sections, or acts, which follow the chronology of the hunt. The first section, “Actors and Agents: The Cultural Ecology of Hunter’s Paradise” (1), traces the historical roots of the hunter hero (and heroine) in American culture. It also explains the West as martial landscape and the hunt as martial culture, both reinforced by the fetishizing of the firearm as a tool of colonial conquest. Act two recounts the “afterlife” of the hunt, the dissemination of the hunting moment (the “epiphany in the wilderness”) through autobiographical literature, theater, photography, and taxidermy. Jones’s theoretical emphasis is most useful and provocative here, since these media were both the clearest articulations of the hunt as performance, and the critical moment of translation from mere personal story to powerful national narrative. The third act, “Saving the Hunting Frontier” (271), explores the end of the hunting trail’s golden age. Near the close of the nineteenth century, many experienced a new epiphany in the wilderness as they recognized the imperilment of the hunter’s paradise in the West. Through the diverse responses from sportsmen and others in both the East and West, Jones unsettles understandings of conservation and national park creation as elite eastern impulses only. Consistent with her theoretical grounding, Jones reveals how these impulses manifested themselves in new performances, like the “hiker’s paradise” and “camera hunting,” both non-consumptive uses of nonhuman nature.

While Texas receives only occasional anecdotal inclusion, jostling for space with all the American West, Epiphany in the Wilderness should raise questions for cultural and environmental historians of that state and the Southwest. The book’s thesis, that the performance of the hunting trail buttressed imperial narratives, has obvious implications for the Southwest in the nineteenth century. Jones’s success at cogently engaging such diverse questions about masculinity and whiteness, animals and nature, even technology and industrialization, should attract any reader interested in the meaning of westward movement in American culture.