12/04© Ronald L. Moody (2004)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Watch A Hunter’s Wallet to Discover
What American Hunt Really Is

Hunters can sometimes be so much like all other people it will drive a well-wisher to distraction. Take the way they spend their money, for instance.

Most people who are able will donate some small sum to charity. Likewise, many hunters will put checks in the mail to “give something back” to wildlife conservation.

People are expected to pay taxes to support their government. Hunters also agreeably pay about six percent of the cost of guns and ammunition in a special tax for wildlife restoration and conservation education.

Hunters, like many others human identities, can be altruistic, even visionary, with their wallets. The blade also cuts the other way, however.

From near the beginning of our Euro-American society, wealthy hunters have considered it their rightful due to be able to buy a “quality hunting experience” by locking out hunters who lack wealth – even while lauding the ideal of individual liberty and equality.

In virtually every society on Earth, economic elites use their riches to obtain privileges they thus deny to people who lack disposable income. A few malcontents among the non-rich always protest, of course. On rare occasion they will organize and storm the Bastille or declare independence thus bringing down the whole social order for a fresh start. Such revolutions go stale over time, however, as “some pigs always become more equal than other pigs.” (To paraphrase George Orwell whose classic story, “Animal Farm,” is the primer for this process.)

Americans hunters always have been of at least two minds about who we really are. The situation would forever remain hopelessly confused if all we had to go by were our public words. Our modern heads are so stuffed with marketing myths and social illusions that reality must practically kill us before we can notice it. Fortunately we have a better measuring rod - money! An old saying speaks true – ‘to truly know a person observe their purse.’

American two-mindedness, and our propensity for self-delusion about that two-mindedness, is nowhere more sharply scribed in our history than in the new-world idea of ordinary citizens going hunting.

One side of our American mind knows the story of American frontier hunters. People from the common classes of European immigrants (many of whom simply brought old-world poaching skills to a new continent) got off the boat, obtained a few tools of woodcraft, and struck out into the dark forest to eke a living by selling hides, meat and fat from the wild abundance they found.

Their tradition produced icons such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional nimrod, Natty Bumpo. It was this culture of the frontier ‘free hunter’ that spawned the Revolutionary War legend, the frontier sharpshooter. More importantly, the uniquely American story of the frontier free hunter inspired Theodore Roosevelt and his peers who would, in turn, ignite the modern conservation revolution that now seems to be going stale today.

The Yankee notion that wildlife are owned in common by all people and that hunting is a democratic tradition to be available to all people regardless of means is a modern cultural product of those 17th Century European nimrods who walked into the forest and away from the social order of the English Puritan colonies 300 years ago.

But then there is the other side of the American hunting mind.

The thoughts of Puritan religious refugees who started several of the original New England colonies were not on ‘quality hunting experiences.’ Like the English lords who received royal charters to start the other colonies, their minds were on owning land, producing crops and making a profit. They were god-fearing people and agricultural productivity was a sure sign of God’s good will in their complex Calvinist theology.

Puritan leaders had complete contempt for the ‘free hunters’ described above. To leave the community of the church in order to live in a log cabin in the wilderness made such nimrods social and political outcasts in the eyes of the men who actually were writing the laws and setting up the new system of more-equal and less-equal people in the New World. Early colonial laws even made it legal for a farmer to seize the land of another colonist who was only using it for hunting purposes. That logic seems to be coming full circle today.

A second major idea adds contrast to this side of the American hunting mind. Coming straight off the boat from merry old England was the firm belief that personal liberty and individual empowerment could only be had through ownership of private property.

You can’t fault the new Americans for this notion. In the old country many of them had been possession less serfs on the estates of lords who owned everything. Their view of reality was stark. To be without right of property was to be without control of one’s own destiny. Of course the new United States did not turn into the agrarian democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. We became a nation of city slickers. It was, and is, in America’s cities that the real money is made.

This became a factor in the American hunt when affluent city men learned the frontier legend of Boone and Crockett and set out for the agricultural countryside to seek their own sport and manly adventure. These new urban hunters may have sought a wild legend but they were men of purse and property.

It didn’t take long after the Revolutionary War for them to start using their wallets to obtain ownership or control of exclusive hunting properties. By the early 1840’s members-only hunting clubs had sprung up around growing cities. Before the civil war exclusive wildfowling clubs along the Eastern Shore were becoming popular among city gentry. By the 1870’s many industrial tycoons owned large private shooting preserves in the Adirondack region.

Sooner or later the American hunting tradition of the free hunters was certain to reach terminal conflict with the ambition of the American propertied sporting elite. Only in the vast landscapes of the Rocky Mountain West did enough natural space remain for free hunting to survive the collision that came with closing of the frontier.

East of the Great Plains, generations have passed since private land that contains attractive populations of game have been widely open to public hunting. Ask enough questions of the local nimrods in any rural county and they’ll eventually admit that land started closing up when wealthy non-resident nimrods showed up willing to pay for ‘a quality hunting experience.’ The fate of free hunting in eastern woodlands was sealed when less affluent local hunters began paying for exclusive hunting rights to remaining lands.

None of this was as simple as this brief summary makes it appear. But the modern dilemma of American hunters trying to figure out who they really are, democratic free hunter or plutocratic sporting gentry, has its roots in these two sides of the national mind. As long as there was a frontier and unoccupied land, the free hunter had a westward escape route. But the frontier closed about the time Teddy Roosevelt became president and the issue would have been settled then, probably in favor of hunting as a private property right, had T.R. been a lesser man.

Teddy’s creation of vast public lands in National Forests, BLM, wildlife refuges and other designations re-opened a new frontier for the free hunter. But Roosevelt and the first generation of American conservation revolutionaries only started the struggle. They left unsolved the problem of deciding whom American hunters really are – a challenge that now is reaching crisis point in our living generation.

Talk among American hunters on the subject of democratic hunting versus a hunting plutocracy is extremely cheap. But watch the hunters’ purse. If the trend grows for hunters of modest means to imitate their richer role models by buying exclusive access to hunting lands, American hunters with leisure money will, once and forever, become more equal than American hunters without leisure money.

T.R.’s strategy of preserving large natural landscapes of public property for space in which hunting can be free remains effective today. Virtually any hunter will say they support keeping public lands and keeping them open to hunting. After talking out of that side of their mind, who they really are will be revealed if they open their purse to finance public land acquisition, law enforcement and scientific management.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com.

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