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WORK TITLE: Epiphany in the Wilderness
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
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NATIONALITY:
http://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/2742-epiphany-in-the-wilderness *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 97055859
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n97055859
HEADING:
Jones, Karen R.
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PERSONAL
Born 1972.
EDUCATION:University of Bristol, doctorate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. University of Kent, Kent, England, reader in history, 2004–; previously was a teaching fellow at the University of Essex, Colchester, England. Has worked with public and media organizations, including Parks Canada the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Appeared in the documentary How the West Was Lost, 2008.
AWARDS:James Bradley Fellowship, Montana Historical Society, 2004-05; also fellowships at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2012, and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody WY, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Civilizing Nature: A Global History of National Parks. The Environment in History: International Perspectives, Berghahan Books, 2013; Wild things: Nature and the Social Imagination, White Horse Press, 2013; Cosmopolitan Animals, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; and A Fairytale in Question: Historical Interactions Between Humans and Wolves, edited by Patrick Masius and Jana Sprenger, White Horse Press, 2015.
Contributor to professional journals, including American Review of Canadian Studies, Canadian Historical Review, European Journal of American Culture, History, History, Journal for the History of Science, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and War and Society. Editor of the journal Environment and History.
SIDELIGHTS
Karen R. Jones is a historian focuses on the nineteenth century with a particular emphasis on environmental and cultural history. Her book titled Wolf Mountains: The History of Wolves Along the Great Divide examines the biology, mythology, and culture of wolves in national parks in the Rocky Mountains. The Invention of the Park: Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, written with John Wills, is survey of the ideas for parks. Jones and Wills also coauthored American West: Competing Visions, which examined a wide range of topics associated with the American West, including the Lewis and Clark Expedition, cowboy mythology, frontier women, and the conservation movement.
In her book titled Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West, Jones examines the history of hunting on the western frontier in terms of environmental, economic, political, and cultural impact. In the book’s opening, “Introduction: The West, Storytelling Animals, and the Hunt as Performance,” Jones comments on “the centrality of hunting to the western experience as well as its embedded codes of staging and performance.” Jones goes on to write: “Enacted for reasons of subsistence, for the market, and for sport, hunting left an indelible mark on the mechanics of westward expansion in the nineteenth century, lassoing environments and human communities in a consumptive and cultural bind that was nothing less than transformative.”
Jones draws from the theater as a metaphor to explain how the West was a crucial staging ground that helped foster the image of the American character as a rugged individualist who was resourceful and resilient. According to Jones the leading player in this drama was the hunter, a masculine hero who helped tame the West. Jones also examines the role of women ini the West as people outside normal conventions who were just as resilient as the men as adventurers and homesteaders. “Jones consistently acknowledges that the American West never was exclusively a proving ground for masculine hunting heroes, the province of demure (or raconteur) women, or source of anti-hunting or conservation sentiment,” wrote Journal of Historical Geography contributor David G. Havlick, adding: “It was each of these, and more.”
Epiphany in the Wilderness is broken up into three sections, starting with “Actors and Agents,” which focuses on topics such as hunter heroes, gun culture, and hunter heroines. The second section, “Story, Image, and Trophy,” examines presentations of the American West via art and photography, stage productions, and animal taxidermy. The final section, “Saving the Frontier,” looks at an emerging U.S. conservation movement and a changing outlook toward the hunting ethos.
Jones’s “compelling examples and anecdotes artfully illustrate her arguments, and her facilities as an imaginative historian are everywhere evident,” wrote J.W. Cox in a review for Choice. Writing in the Journal of Historical Geography, Havlick remarked: “Jones calls forth a refreshingly diverse cast of characters, processes, and perspectives in this ambitious book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Book Review Annual, annual, 2002, review of Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves along the Great Divide, p. 405.
Choice, October, 2016, J.W. Cox, review of Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West, p. 272.
Journal of Historical Geography, January, 2017, David G. Havlick, review of Epiphany in the Wilderness, pp: 116-117.
ONLINE
University of Kent Web site, https://www.kent.ac.uk/ (September 4, 2017), author faculty profile.
University Press of Colorado Web site, http://upcolorado.com/ (September 4, 2017), author profile.
About
Karen Jones earned her doctorate from the University of Bristol, and worked as a teaching fellow at the University of Essex, before arriving at Kent in 2004. She is a nineteenth century specialist with particular interests in environmental and cultural history.
Her books include Wolf Mountains: The History of Wolves Along the Great Divide (2002) – a comparative study of the biology, mythology and culture surrounding wolves in national parks in the Rockies and The Invention of the Park (2005) – a survey of the park idea from the Garden of Eden to British landscape parks and beyond. Karen was awarded the James Bradley Fellowship at the Montana Historical Society (2004-5) for her research on hunting and conservation in late nineteenth-century Montana. She has earned fellowships at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (2012) and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody (2013) for projects on horses and war in the nineteenth century and on taxidermy and the 'afterlife' of hunting animals. Co-author of a post-revisionist monograph on the American West (The American West: Competing Visions, 2009), she explored the popular appeal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, cowboy mythology, women on the frontier, and the conservation movement. Her article ‘From Big Bad Wolf to Ecological Hero: Canis Lupus and the Culture(s) of Nature in the American-Canadian West’ won the Rufus Z. Smith for best article in the American Review of Canadian Studies (2009-11). More recently, she has published on national parks and transnational nature conservation (Civilizing Nature (2012)), co-edited a collection on guns and empire in the nineteenth century (A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire (2013)), and written on hunting and photography (Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination (2013)). Karen’s latest monograph - Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature and Performance in the American West (University Press of Colorado, 2015) - looks at the environmental and cultural imprint of hunting on the western frontier, with particular focus on animal encounter, ritual and storytelling, and gender tropes and transgressions.
Her current research interests include:
Hunting, taxidermy and the interior ecologies of animal display (with Quex Park)
‘Lungs for the City’: Parks, wellbeing and the urban metabolic landscape
‘Heroine of the Plains’: Calamity Jane and the Culture of Frontier Celebrity (for Yale University Press)
Karen is an enthusiastic supporter of environmental history, landscape history and animal studies. She is the editor of the journal Environment and History. She is interested in supervising postgraduates who want to work on any aspect of environmental history. Her taught modules include Wolves, Walruses and the Wild: Animals in Anglo-American Culture, How the West Was Won (or Lost): The American West in the Nineteenth Century and From Buffalo Bill to Bison Burgers: A History of the Twentieth Century American West.
Always eager to find a reason to talk about animals, green spaces and landscape stories, Karen has worked with various public and media organizations, from Parks Canada to the BBC. She appeared on Rich Hall's documentary ‘How the West Was Lost’ (2008).
After work she can be found in the garden or walking the dog.
Contact Information
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Article
Jones, Karen R. (2017) The Story of Comanche: Horsepower, Heroism and the Conquest of the American West. War and Society, 36 (3). ISSN 0729-2473. E-ISSN 2042-4345. (In press) (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
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Jones, Karen R. (2017) Restor(y)ing the ‘Fierce Green Fire’: Animal Agency, Wolf Conservation and Environmental Memory in Yellowstone National Park. British Journal for the History of Science, . ISSN 0007-0874. (In press) (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
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Jones, Karen R. (2016) The Rhinoceros and the Chatham Railway: Taxidermy and the Production of Animal Presence in the "Great Indoors”. History, 101 (348). pp. 710-735. ISSN 0018-2648. E-ISSN 1468-229X. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12325) (Access to this publication is currently restricted. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
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Jones, Karen R. (2012) ‘Lady Wildcats and Wild Women’: Hunting, Gender and the Politics of Show(wo)manship in the Nineteenth century American West. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 34 (1). pp. 37-49. ISSN 0890-5495. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2012.646547) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2011) Writing the Wolf: Canine Tales and North American Environmental-Literary Tradition. Environment and History , 17 (2). pp. 201-228. ISSN 0967-3407. (doi:https://doi.org/10.3197/096734011X12997574042964) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2010) From Big Bad Wolf to Ecological Hero: Canis Lupus and the Culture(s) of Nature in the American-Canadian West. American Review of Canadian Studies, 40 (3). pp. 338-350. ISSN 2722011. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2010) ‘My Winchester spoke to her’: Crafting Montana as a hunter’s paradise, c.1870-1910. American Nineteenth Century History, 11 (2). pp. 183-203. ISSN 1466-4658. E-ISSN 1743-7903. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2010.481871) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2010) "The Old West in Modern Splendor”: Frontier Folklore and the Selling of Las Vegas. European Journal of American Culture, 29 (2). pp. 93-110. ISSN 1466-0407. (doi:https://doi.org/10.1386/ejac.29.2.93_1) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2003) 'Never Cry Wolf' Science, sentiment and the literary rehabilitation of Canis lupus. Canadian Historical Review, 84 (1). pp. 65-93. ISSN 0008-3755. (doi:https://doi.org/10.3138/CHR.84.1.65) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Book section
Jones, Karen R. (2015) From the Field to the Frontier: Hounds, Hunting and the Canine-Human Alliance. In: Cosmopolitan Animals. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137376275. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2015) Introduction - Companionship. In: Nagai, Kaori and Jones, Karen R. and Mattfeld, Monica and Rooney, Caroline R. and Sleigh, Charlotte, eds. Cosmopolitan Animals. Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 135-137. ISBN 9781137376275. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Sleigh, Charlotte (2015) "Only a spectacle”: frogs and the environmental crisis. In: Jones, Karen R. and Sleigh, Charlotte and Nagai, Kaori and Mattfeld, Monica and Rooney, Caroline R., eds. Cosmopolitan Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137376275. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2015) Writing the Wolf: Canine Tales and North American Environmental-Literary Tradition. In: Masius, Patrick and Sprenger, Jana, eds. A Fairytale in Question: Historical Interactions Between Humans and Wolves. White Horse Press, Cambridge, pp. 175-202. ISBN 978-1-874267-84-3. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2013) Unpacking Yellowstone: The American National Park in Global Perspective. In: Civilizing Nature: A Global History of National Parks. The Environment in History: International Perspectives . Berghahn Books, Oxford. ISBN 9780857455253. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Bowman, Timothy (2013) Irish paramilitarism and gun cultures. In: Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate. ISBN 9781409447528. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Beckett, Ian F. W. (2013) Retrospective Icon: The Martini-Henry. In: Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate, Surry / Burlington, pp. 233-250. ISBN 9781409447528. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Macola, Giacomo (2013) “They Disdain Firearms”: The Relationship Between Guns and the Ngoni of Eastern Zambia to the Early Twentieth Century. In: Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate, Surry / Burlington, pp. 101-128. ISBN 9781409447528. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2013) Guns, Masculinity and Marksmanship: Codes of Killing and Conservation in the Nineteenth-Century American West. In: Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 39-56. ISBN 9781409447528. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2013) ”Hunting with the Camera”: Photography, Animals and the Technology of the Chase in the Rocky Mountains. In: Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination. White Horse Press, Knapwell, pp. 24-43. ISBN 9781874267751. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David (2013) Introduction:New Perspectives on Firearms in the Age of Empire. In: Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate, pp. 1-13. ISBN 9781409447528. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2003) 'Way out West…Ghost towns, gray wolves, territorial prisons and more!' Celebrating the wolf in the new west. In: Nicholas, Liza and Bapis, Elaine M. and Harvey, Thomas J., eds. Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity and Play in the New West. Utah University Press, Salt Lake City, US, pp. 27-44. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Book
Jones, Karen R. (2015) Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting and Nature in the Nineteenth Century American West. Colorado University Press, 360 pp. ISBN 978-1-60732-397-6. E-ISBN 978-1-60732-398-3. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. and Wills, John (2009) The American West: Competing Visions. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-7486-2252-8. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. and Wills, John (2005) The Invention of the Park: From the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom. Polity, Cambridge, 216 pp. ISBN 074563138X. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Jones, Karen R. (2002) Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves Along the Great Divide. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, 336 pp. ISBN 1-55238-072-6 (hardback) 1-55238-121-8 (paperback). (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
Edited book
Jones, Karen R. and Macola, Giacomo and Welch, David, eds. (2013) A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire. Ashgate (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided)
This list was generated on Wed Aug 9 21:04:06 2017 BST.
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===
Epiphany in the Wilderness
Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West
by Karen R. Jones
Epiphany in the Wilderness
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“A compelling, multi-faceted analysis of the importance of the West—and its taming—in our national narrative.”
—Jan E. Dizard, Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of American Culture, Amherst College
"As a measure of hunting’s power, Jones deftly offers a sophisticated account of hunting and its evocation by women and Indigenous peoples to challenge the fraternity of white male hunters and the power they wielded. Her compelling examples and anecdotes artfully illustrate her arguments, and her facilities as an imaginative historian are everywhere evident. . . . Highly recommended."
—CHOICE
"[Epiphany in the Wilderness] makes a compelling case for hunting's significance and thus stands as an original contribution to the cultural and environmental history of the West."
—Montana The Magazine of Western History
"[Epiphany in the Wilderness] provides a rich and detailed narrative that illuminates the significance of the hunt in the nineteenth-century American West and offers a meaningful contribution to western studies."
—Western American Literature
"[A] rich account of the complex ways that hunting constituted a theater where women and men could craft for themselves diverse social identities. . . . we are still living with the legacies of these diverse hunting performances, and Epiphany in the Wilderness offers readers a broad and provocative foundation for historical reflection."
—Western Historical Quarterly
"[A] well-conceived, wide-ranging reexamination of hunting in the American West, executed with wit and lively writing."
―Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"The many-faceted inquiries of Jones’ work will provide grist for discussion for many years to come."
―Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"[Karen Jones] calls forth a refreshingly diverse cast of characters, processes, and perspectives in this ambitious book. . . . Jones's characterizations of early western women, both well-known and obscure, are rich in detail and effectively disrupt any visions of a uniformly masculine American frontier."
―Journal of Historical Geography
Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.
Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.
Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement.
The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University toward the publication of this book.
Media
Access Utah, Utah Public Radio
Reviews
Kansas History
Karen R. Jones is a historian of the American West with particular interests in nineteenth-century cultural and environmental history. Her books include Wolf Mountains: The History of Wolves along the Great Divide, The Invention of the Park, and The American West: Competing Visions. She was awarded the James H. Bradley Fellowship at the Montana Historical Society for her research on hunting and conservation in late nineteenth-century Montana and has earned fellowships at the Autry National Center and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center for projects on horses and war in the nineteenth century and on taxidermy and the “afterlife” of hunted animals.
Imprint: University Press of Colorado
Book Details
Hardcover Price: $55.00
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60732-397-6
Ebook Price: $44.00
30-day ebook rental price: $9.99
EISBN: 978-1-60732-398-3
Publication Month: December
Publication Year: 2015
Pages: 360
Illustrations: 13
Discount Type: Short
Author: by Karen R. Jones
ECommerce Code: 978-1-60732-397-6
Rights and Permissions: Copyright Clearance Center
Member Institution Access: Member Institution Access
Tagged under
Karen R JonesColorado Utah and The WestHistoryNature and Environment
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Wolf Mountains
Canadian Book Review Annual.
(Annual 2002): p405. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wolf Mountains." Canadian Book Review Annual, Annual 2002, p. 405. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA35430520&it=r&asid=4da25848063d493ebef59f73a5628217. Accessed 9 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A35430520
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Mars Attacks!
Chronicle.
19 (Oct. 1997): p51. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mars Attacks!" Chronicle, Oct. 1997, p. 51. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA34632286&it=r&asid=bfc2233d5c3826209f969832ff920b5f. Accessed 9 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A34632286
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Jones, Karen R.: Epiphany in the wilderness: hunting, nature, and performance in the nineteenth-century American West
J.W. Cox
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p272.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Jones, Karen R. Epiphany in the wilderness: hunting, nature, and performance in the nineteenth-century American West. University Press of Colorado, 2016. 363p bibl index afp ISBN 9781607323976 cloth, $55.00; ISBN 9781607323983 ebook, $44.00
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With her study of this rich yet still neglected topic, Jones joins a growing number of scholars writing on hunting's power and place in US history. Hunting, Jones argues, was not just a matter of subsistence or provision for markets or a passionate pursuit of the rich. It was central to the taking of the 19th-century American West. Grounding her study of hunting in performance affords Jones powerful analytical tools through which to recount and assess hunting stories for their symbolic and material power. Hunting was an exercise in dominance and communion, and storytelling about people, animals, and nature continued long after the hunter returned from the trail with trophies, tales, and claims to status. As a measure of hunting's power, Jones deftly offers a sophisticated account of hunting and its evocation by women and Indigenous peoples to challenge the fraternity of white male hunters and the power they wielded. Her compelling examples and anecdotes artfully illustrate her arguments, and her facilities as an imaginative historian are everywhere evident, but her prose sometimes becomes too clever and betrays her considerable skills as a writer. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. W Cox, University of Arizona
Cox, J.W.
Journal of Historical Geography
Volume 55, January 2017, Pages 116-117
Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West, Karen R. Jones. University Press of Colorado, Boulder (2015). 60 pages, US$55 hardcover.
. Author links open the author workspace.David G.Havlick
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.07.007Get rights and content
Too often, the frontier history of the American West is popularized as a two-dimensional tale of cowboys versus Indians, with successive waves of explorers, trappers, soldiers, and settlers pushing westward, overcoming obstacles of (Native) man and nature. While many of these same elements remain in view in Epiphany in the Wilderness, historian Karen Jones calls forth a refreshingly diverse cast of characters, processes, and perspectives in this ambitious book.
In the introduction, Jones highlights her intentions to present a richer version of western US history: ‘Disentangling the complex relationships between the human actors and the wild things they pursued sits at the heart’ of the book (p. 5). This rings true, though not every tangled thread of U.S. western development can be picked fully loose, and the actual events of this period are likely just too messy to fit honestly into a clean chronology.
At one level, Epiphany in the Wilderness centers upon the ‘colorful procession of sport hunters’ (p. 8) that inundated the nineteenth century American West. Jones identifies this group of gun-toting visitors as the main interest of her book, and while it's true that Epiphany attends to sport hunters in vivid detail, this framing sells the book a bit short. It's necessarily about much more than sport hunters, and keeping to this orbit at times seems to limit the book's reach. While sport hunters played a critical role in the political ecology of the nineteenth-century American West, and Jones does well to elevate these characters, their motives, and their lasting impacts on frontier ecology and culture, the systematic destruction of the American bison as a genocidal program to eradicate indigenous culture and resistance only fleetingly comes into view.
Jones readily acknowledges that the history of the American West is replete with complexity, contestation, and diverse characters. To try to capture this, Jones structures the book around three main sections. The first, Actors and Agents, includes chapters on the masculinity of the hunt and frontier-era Hunter Heroes; the martial culture of guns and their evolving technologies; and the proto-feminism of Hunter Heroines in the early West. The second section turns upon ideas of Story, Image, and Trophy, with chapters dedicated to nineteenth-century art and photography, stage(d) productions of the West, and animal taxidermy. The relatively short final section moves to Saving the Frontier, and the emergence of a US conservation movement and rejection – at least in part – of the frontier hunting ethos.
While the book's main sections provide a helpful degree of internal coherence, taken chapter by chapter Epiphany in the Wilderness seems to reproduce some of the complexity Jones pledges to disentangle. To her credit, Jones avoids the temptation to try to fit American frontier history into a series of distinct and progressive eras. Without this, however, it's a bit hard to find a coherent narrative arc. The American West was (and in many ways remains), for example, highly masculinized, but also can be seen as a place where women created political and personal identities that defied convention. The relationship between humans and wildlife is similarly difficult to cast in singular form – or as a steady progression – as wanton killing, market hunting, trophy hunting, ‘hunting’ by camera, and anti-hunting perspectives co-existed and overlapped; many of these do even today. A visit to one of the many ‘game farms’ that exist across Texas and other parts of the US West, for instance, would quickly dispel notions that we now live fully in an era of fair chase, just as the mounted heads of taxidermied wildlife in myriad western bars, hotel lobbies, and airport terminals demonstrate that we have not exactly moved beyond creating the “necrogeographies” that Jones describes more historically.
Taken individually, the chapters hold together well. Individual or clusters of chapters would work nicely in a course reader or to examine a theme such as the role of women or that of performance in the early American West. Chapter six's examination of taxidermy stands out for its examination of preserved carcasses that spread across North America and Europe as animals were killed, then mounted and shipped as trophies. It's difficult to find a broadly progressive message in the book as a whole, but this does come through in some of the individuals Jones profiles, and for whom the title's promise seems to hold. William Hornaday, Bill Cody, and Aldo Leopold, for example, each seem to find their life-changing moment in the wild, though a bit late for the thousands of critters that died at their hands before this came to pass.
Jones consistently acknowledges that the American West never was exclusively a proving ground for masculine hunting heroes, the province of demure (or raconteur) women, or source of anti-hunting or conservation sentiment. It was each of these, and more. And yet, I can't help but wish that Jones's history linked more explicitly and more often to the many politics of nature, both past and present. Jones brings the political ecology of hunting women, for example, into view, noting that, ‘women found in the landscape of the hunt a place for the loosening of cultural norms… successful hunting endeavors undoubtedly fostered the idea of women as strong, resilient, and competent in realms typically seen as the preserve of men’ (p. 129). This is an enticing prospect – that the feminine (and feminist) performance of the hunt would springboard women toward emancipation, suffrage, and careers in politics or business – and I would have loved to see Jones explore these possibilities in more depth. She later offers a hint of what this might look like, with the intriguing example of Martha Maxwell's activist brand of truth-in-taxidermy (pp. 253–262). Instead of developing these ideas more fully, Jones largely dismisses the linkages between hunting and progressive feminist politics as being difficult to document and the disjointed efforts of ‘deviant figures’ (p. 129). That said, Jones's characterizations of early western women, both well-known and obscure, are rich in detail and effectively disrupt any visions of a uniformly masculine American frontier.
Introduction: PG.