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1 2 7 The American alligator (known to scientists as Alligator mississippiensis) is a large, toothy reptile that can grow to sixteen feet or longer. Although it inhabits freshwater swamps, marshes, rivers, and lakes throughout much of the southeastern United States, the species is most abundant in Florida and Louisiana .1 As a member of the order Crocodilia, the alligator belongs to a 230million -year lineage that survived the Cretaceous mass extinction, when a remarkable 85 percent of the earth’s species perished. As a semi-aquatic creature , the alligator moves freely between water and land. And as a large, toplevel carnivore, the species not only projects a menacing presence but also occasionally consumes humans and their pets. Given these many boundary crossings—chronological, geographical, and gastronomical—Americans have long struggled to get a precise handle on this charismatic reptile, and they have thought about it in various (and sometimes contradictory) ways: as a fearsome predator, a landscape symbol, a marketable commodity, an endangered species, and a dangerous nuisance.2 This essay explores Euroamericans’ responses to the American alligator, a species that serves as a “repository of meaning,” to borrow historian Richard White’s evocative phrase.3 It seeks to unpack the tangled layers of perception associated with this multivalent vestige of the prehistoric era. What such an examination reveals is not only a long-standing fear of the alligator but also a yearning to tame or domesticate the beast. For centuries, Euroamericans have sought to manipulate and control the natural world, to impose order on The Alligator’s Allure Changing Perceptions of a Charismatic Carnivore m a r k v. ba r row j r . m a r k v. b a r r o w j r . 1 28 nature while bringing it under human dominion. In the case of the alligator, that urge to master nature initially came in the desire to destroy the fearsome creature. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, a longing to domesticate the alligator—in the sense of making it more docile or adapting it to live in an increasingly human-dominated environment—largely supplanted the urge to simply destroy it. As Florida’s human population continued to rapidly expand, especially in the post–World War II period, the species has been confined to smaller and smaller wetland plots, while individual alligators transgressing the artificial boundaries erected to confine it face swift and sure destruction. As a result, the American alligator has become a kind of semi-domesticated reptile subjected to intense human surveillance, manipulation , and intervention.4 Yet, the species has not remained a totally passive victim in this process of domestication; rather, it has continually resisted efforts to confine it to human-sanctioned habitats, just as it has confounded efforts to encompass it within simplistic views about its biology and behavior. For several decades now, environmental historians have been arguing that the discipline of history needs to take nature more seriously, that historians need to move beyond the unreasonably parochial view that the natural world is simply a backdrop against which human actors have played out their own uniquely compelling drama. Nature has agency, too, advocates of environmental history have insisted , and scholars ought to pay much more attention both to its profound role in shaping our thoughts and lives as well as to the equally profound ways we have transformed the earth.5 As a species that ranges widely across the Florida landscape and occasionally attacks people and pets, the alligator offers a vivid reminder that nature remains a potent force, despite our ongoing efforts to bring it fully under our thumb. The story of the American alligator also reminds us how difficult it is to draw a sharp line between nature and culture, between the so-called real world that exists independent of humanity and the ideas and activities of people.6 The ancient reptile is a tangible physical presence on the landscape, the progeny of a prehistoric lineage that thrived for hundreds of millions of years before humans first walked the earth. Yet, humans have also clearly transformed the alligator since the period when Amerindians began migrating across Beringia at the end of the last Ice Age. For example, although the reptile lacks natural predators once it reaches adulthood, it becomes noticeably skittish when humans begin hunting it. Nor has it escaped the barrage of synthetic chemicals that modern industrial society has rained down upon the earth. A 1980 pesticide spill in Lake Apopka, the fourth-largest body...

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