Early Southern Sports and Sportsmen, 1830-1910

Jacob F. Rivers

Description

Jacob F. Rivers III has collected twenty-two classic hunting tales by twelve southern writers including Davey Crocket, Johnson J. Hooper, and Henry Clay Lewis. These stories spring not only from a genteel literary tradition but also from the tradition of the tall tale or stories of backwoods humor. Antebellum and post-Civil War tales reflect changes in the social and economic composition of the hunting class in the South. Some reveal themes of fear for the future of field sports, and others demonstrate an early conservation ethic among hunters and landowners.

Early Southern Sports and Sportsmen brings to new readers a wealth of hunting and fishing lore heretofore hard to find by any but scholars in the field of southern literature. Rivers has gathered a host of well-read and well-heeled sportsmen who relish each and every detail of their encounters with their environment. Sports authors come from every spectrum of southern society, but their common vocabulary and shared enthusiasm bond them together.

Rivers corrects unfortunate stereotypes of hunters as indifferent to aspects of nature other than environmental exploitation. Whether humorists or serious advocates, these authors reveal their sense of their place in the wild, and many advocate ecological good citizenship that disdains wanton slaughter and unethical practices. They condemn such acts as beneath the dignity and honor of true sportsmen.

The collection includes accounts of hunting many types of game indigenous to the South from 1830 to 1910, from aristocratic foxhunts to yeoman deer drives. The structure is largely chronological, beginning with John James Audubon's essay on the American wild turkey from his Ornithological Biography (1832) and ending with stories from Alexander Hunter's The Huntsman in the South (1908). Whatever their era, the chief characteristics of these sporting accounts are the excitement the authors experience upon suddenly encountering game, the rigors and hardships they endure in its pursuit, their keen powers of observation of the woods and waters through which they travel, and the comedy often found in the strong friendships that frequently mark their adventures. But above all the tales resonate with a reverence for field sports as the means through which humans establish meaningful and lasting relationships with the mysteries and the magic of nature.

Sujets

• Essays
• Sciences et techniques
• Land and Water
• Archibald Rutledge
• Tally-ho
• Game law
• Boar spear
• Cap gun
• Cataract of Lodore
• William Gilmore Simms
• Cur
• Anhinga
• Izaak Walton
• General officer
• Fox hunting
• Predation
• Writing
• John James Audubon
• Bear Hunter
• Inception
• Setter
• General
• ICO (format de fichier)
• Izaac Walton
• Hunting
• Davy Crockett
• Jean-Jacques Audubon
• Anhingidae
• Galliformes
• Nature
• Henry David Thoreau

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 18 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173987
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Early Southern Sports and Sportsmen 1830-1910
The Wild Turkey Hunter
Early Southern Sports and Sportsmen 1830-1910
A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY
Jacob F. Rivers III
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rivers, Jacob F., 1951-
Early Southern sports and sportsmen, 1830-1910 : a literary anthology / Jacob F. Rivers, III.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-397-0 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-398-7 (ebook) 1. Hunting stories, American. 2. Hunting-United States-Anecdotes. 3. Hunters-United States--Biography. I. Title.
SK33.R37 2014 799.20092 2-dc23
2014007291
Frontispiece from T. B. Thorpe, The Hive of The Bee-Hunter : A Repository of Sketches, including Peculiar American Characters, Scenery, and Rural Sports , 1854.
JACKET ILLUSTRATION
John James Audubon , by John Syme, oil on canvas, 1826, courtesy of the White House Historical Society (White House Collection)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
John James Audubon, 1785-1851
The Wild Turkey
David Crockett, 1786-1836
Bear Hunting in Tennessee
Alexander G. McNutt, 1802-1848
A Swim for a Deer
Chunkey s Fight with the Panthers
William Elliott, 1788-1863
A Wild-Cat Hunt in Carolina
A Day at Chee-Ha
Random Thoughts on Hunting
William Gilmore Simms, 1806-1870
Bucks have at ye all. -Old Song
Which Augurs an Affair of Boars!
Phillip Pendleton Kennedy, 1808-1864
The Falls of the Blackwater
Thomas Bangs Thorpe, 1815-1878
Wild Turkey Hunting
Wild-Cat Hunting
Johnson Jones Hooper, 1815-1862
The Gentleman s Amusement
The Setter and Pointer
On the Shooting of Quail
Henry Clay Lewis (Madison Tensas), 1825-1850
The Indefatigable Bear-Hunter
Charles B. Coale, 1807-1879
A Bear Hunt in the Iron Mountain
Charles Edward Whitehead, 1829-1903
The Deer Hunt
The Drowned Lands
Alexander Hunter, 1843-1914
Among the Quail in Virginia
Cobb s Island
A Sporting Fiasco
Sources and Suggestions for Further Readings
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Among those many people who have helped me to collect and to edit these gems of early southern sporting adventures, Patrick Scott, distinguished professor of English and director for Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, deserves my deepest and most sincere gratitude. He first suggested this project to me. Alexander Moore, acquisitions editor for the University of South Carolina Press, encouraged and inspired me to persist to completion. Special thanks go to the librarians and staff of the Thomas Cooper and the South Caroliniana Libraries for their help with locating primary and secondary materials.
I should also like to acknowledge my sincere debt of gratitude to Mrs. Beulah Hiers Rivers, whose pristine moral refinement and love for the world of nature have enriched and inspired many generations of native South Carolina sportsmen.
Introduction
Chief among the literary genres that depict the southern reverence for the natural landscape is the work of the literate sportsmen of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Affluent and well educated, they were nature writers who articulated communal values through their stories about hunting and fishing. The best of their sporting narratives reveal a deep involvement with the natural world and its importance to southerners, both real and as characters.
While the excitement of the chase and the appreciation of nature are themes common to southern sporting writers of all generations, the artistic and environmental sensitivity of these authors has often been undervalued. This is unfortunate for several reasons. During the particular period of American history covered by this anthology, the serious sporting essay was the primary form of nature writing. Even the scientific exactitude of John James Audubon s Ornithological Biography (1832) reveals its well-known author s dependence on practicing the hunter s craft in order to understand the subtleties of his subjects. In his selection reprinted here on the American wild turkey, we see the work of the noted ornithologist as he discovered the details of their secretive lives through his total involvement with the hunt.
Faithfully reflecting their author s view of life as both highly competitive and dangerously uncertain, the writers included here accepted the struggle for survival in the natural world as an inescapable reality that permeated the physical and philosophic fabric of their own lives. In contrast to the great wave of nineteenth-century Romanticism that sought to celebrate nature as a sylvan glade immune from what were often harsh realities, the authors reprinted here portrayed the ritual confrontation with death in the hunt with the same honor and fidelity that they gave to any other dignified undertaking. In the opening pages of Alexander Hunter s The Huntsman in the South (1908), he voiced their post-Darwinian view that the lives of all wild animals necessarily end in tragedy: It is the inexorable law of Nature that all living creatures prey upon one another. By beak, talons, and claw the fight was commenced, and it will only end when this world is no more. To say that sporting is a cruel pastime is to ignore the fact that all fin, fur, and feathers batten upon one another, and if the rifle or gun did not end their days, they would be killed anyway (11).
Perhaps because of their frank acceptance of natural laws that posits death as the perquisite for life and rebirth, and perhaps because of the growing urban population s increasing distance from the realities of the rural landscape, nonhunters, and most literary critics, have disdained and misunderstood hunting narratives. In the nineteenth-century South, the serious sporting essay nevertheless played a central cultural role that expressed southerners views of themselves as extensions of a living environment to which they felt closely bound. For these men and women, hunting provided a way to reenter the natural world and to feel what Bruce Dickson has called an otherwise inexpressible sense of what it meant to be a part of something as awesome as nature (273). In my earlier Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative (2002), I argued that those persons who practice field sports responsibly are among the most compassionate and sensitive aficionados of the natural world, not only because they regret its wholesale exploitation, but also because their engagement with the land and its game has enabled them to reenter the primitive unity of nature and man [and to] comprehend something of man s felt responsibility to his surroundings-to the elements of the natural world as well as to his human peers (xiv-xv). As Archibald Rutledge concluded in the final pages of An American Hunter (1937), sport hunting is perfectly compatible with the deepest and most genuine love of nature (144). While few of the writers in the twenty-two selections reprinted here articulate these truths in formal terminology, the portrayals of their sporting heroes in perfect rapport with their environment go far beyond any technical explanation in illustrating these themes. More than anything else, the present collection reveals that the return to nature through the hunt offers one of the surest pathways to a positive environmental awareness that draws on the intricate complexities of nature for spiritual regeneration.
Tacitly affirming the universality of a sporting code that valued the nation s natural resources for reasons other than their material worth, northern novelists have also portrayed the contempt that serious hunters and fishermen had for wanton environmental exploitation. In The Pioneers (1823), no less a literary figure than James Fenimore Cooper contrasted Leather-stocking s conservative ethos against the profit-minded townspeople. Squarely aligned with the tenets of good sportsmanship advocated by the present collection s contributors, Natty criticizes his neighbors for their slaughter of the wild pigeons as wasteful to kill twenty and eat one, warning them, like a modern-day Jeremiah, that the Lord won t see the waste of his creatures for nothing, and right will be done to the pigeons, as well as others, by-and-by (246). Natty continues in the following chapter by denouncing the townspeople s profligate netting of the lake s bass as sinful and wasty to catch more than can be eat (266).
Others approached the natural world differently. Although Henry David Thoreau did not originate writing about nature in American, he was one of the earliest to link environmental and social concerns. In Walden (1854), Thoreau explicitly set his retreat to Walden Pond within the growing controversy over chattel slavery, and his attempt to escape the negative effects of ambition, indebtedness, and drudgery resonates within the context of this larger social problem. Two decades later American environmental activism found another, more deliberate champion in John Muir, a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt and fellow disciple of the need to preserve the nation s wilderness treasures. Muir s The Yosemite (1912) did much to initiate a tradition of environmental activism by passionately denouncing plans to flood the Hetch Hetchy valley in California in order to create a water reservoir for the city of San Francisco. Although Cooper, Thoreau, and Muir were not primarily concerned with field sports, they shared with the authors in this volume