Karen R. Jones

From Big Bad Wolf to Ecological Hero: Canis Lupus and the Culture(s) of Nature in the American–Canadian West

From devil incarnate to ecological saint, Canis lupus, the gray wolf, has proved an object of intense fascination for the North American imagination. This essay plots changing attitudes toward wolves in four national parks along the Rocky Mountains with a view to exploring ideas about wilderness, conservation policy, animal crossings, and the frontier. Yellowstone and Glacier in the United States and Banff and Jasper in Canada witnessed first the deliberate extermination and then the canonization of wolves in a little over a century. Choosing to follow the contours of the Rockies rather than the latitudes of the nation-state, I compare shifting policy and cultures of nature across boundaries, pointing to the value of transnational perspectives on the history of the American–Canadian West and the necessity of a borderlands approach when studying an animal prone to roaming across our political demarcations.

‘Lady Wildcats and Wild Women’: Hunting, Gender and the Politics of Show(wo)manship in the Nineteenth century American West

Drawing on codes of Victorian manhood, hunting narratives on the nineteenth century West typically broadcast a hegemonic vision of “hunter heroes”—survivalists, skilled in woodcraft, armed with sharp-shooting skills and a penchant for adventuring. Such men collectively advanced the expansionist ambitions of the American nation in assimilating landscapes and animals while maintaining a gentlemanly moral code. According to this teleology, the frontier was conquered by independent and vigorous frontiersmen, paragons of American manifest destiny and masculinity as exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody. Significantly, as this article contends, alongside the masculine “hunter-hero” of the plains and mountains, women emerged as willing and competent participants in shooting adventures and also embraced the thrill of the chase. They also hunted for reasons of environmental subsistence, the securing of meat an essential part of the mechanics of household economics. Some saw hunting as a hearty recreational activity that assisted their sense of belonging in terms of selfhood, space and community. As I argue, here, the allure of the West and its associations with adventuring, strenuous activity and escapism held appeal for some women as well as men. Moreover, in the domain of performance, theatre and storytelling, ideas of the “lady adventurer” and the “armed western woman” gained sizeable popular currency.

'The Lungs of the City': Green Space, Public Health and Bodily Metaphor in the Landscape of Urban Park History

New machinery, factory systems and a burgeoning population made the nineteenth century the era of the city. It also represented the coming of age of the city park. Across Europe and North America, elite spaces were opened to public access and new areas dedicated as ‘parks for the people.’ This paper offers a brief tour of green spaces across three iconic metropolitan sites – London, Paris and New York - to consider how the axioms of recreation, industrial modernity and public health operated in specific urban contexts. Of particular note is the fact that park planners embraced an holistic vision, often articulated via bodily metaphors, that incorporated both social and environmental aspects: thus behind apparently nostalgic visions for a pre-industrial bucolic greenery lay irrefutably modern approaches to urban planning that presaged twenty and twenty-first century holistic experiments in garden cities and ‘living homes.’ Also central to this study is the idea of the park as a liminal space and an eminently readable landscape: an evolving site of translation, negotiation and transformation that highlights the fertile ground of cross-disciplinary study and the benefits of a complex ecological history that involves close examination of place, action and imagery.

The story of Comanche: horsepower, heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.

The Greening of London, 1920–2000

holidays (highlighting that labourers frequently chose to take days off). Nonetheless, one is often left wanting more from the analysis and indeed a series of graphs and charts presenting some basic statistics (figures 13–18) are perhaps not analysed as thoroughly as one might have hoped. The second part of the transcription— a mere 106 pages by comparison— records the fortnightly payments for materials and piecework. Again it provides a mass of raw data. The first entry, ‘paid to Roger Brownyng ffor cariage off 20 tonns of Rag from Maidston to Savoye, le tonn cariage 10d’ (299), is typical of the vast majority of the entries in the account and like the lists of names and wages will be a valuable source for economic historians and those seeking to understand London as a trading hub. Amongst the routine payments for materials however are small details that bring the architecture of the buildings to life and may be the greatest source of joy for many readers. They range from the mundane but illuminating, such as the payments in January and March 1514 for ‘prykks’ to mount on the walls to discourage crows from roosting (306 & 328) or the frequent payments for shiny tinned door hinges — reminding us of the aesthetic richness of this type of building — to the very grand. In the latter category are payments for angels in stone and timber to support and garnish the hammerbeam roof of the hospital, for example, ‘paid to Robert Grymbolt, Bernard Rowland and oder ffor making off 48 angels of Tymber ffor pendents in the hospytall Rooffe’ (337). Stanford’s discussion of such details however highlights that she is not comfortable writing about early Tudor architecture since she unconvincingly likens the angel roof of the Savoy Hospital to the ceiling of the chapel at Hampton Court Palace rather than to the more obvious examples found in churches around the country andmost recently surveyed byMark Rimmer for The Angel Roofs of East Anglia (Cambridge: 2015). Elsewhere a description of Eltham Palace as a ‘notable survival’ of Henrician architecture (1 n.1) only serves to heighten this impression. This is perhaps not surprising since Stanford’s previous works have largely focused on commemoration of the dead in Strasbourg and Paris and indeed it is where her analysis concentrates on the charitable function of the Savoy that she is at her strongest. Despite minor criticisms about Stanford’s analysis, this is an excellent and valuable edition of a manuscript that will be of interest to architectural, economic, social and London historians alike and will inevitably provide the foundation for much profitable reanalysis. However, while it is to be celebrated that there are still publishers who are willing to distribute this type of book one is left wondering whether material of this scale and complexity would not be better suited and more easily analysed by a digital resource rather than in this traditional print format.

The Rhinoceros and the Chatham Railway: Taxidermy and the Production of Animal Presence in the "Great Indoors”

This article considers the practice of taxidermy and its relationship to the ‘golden age’ of big game hunting, the science of natural history and the dramaturgical codes of empire by looking at the collecting exploits of one man, Major Percy Powell-Cotton (1866–1940), and his attempts to preserve the spoils of the hunt in the ‘great indoors’. As various scholars have pointed out, taxidermy offers up a vivid and striking ‘afterlife’ of the animal with a unique (and some might say unsavoury) ability to elucidate our environmental and cultural relations with other species. As such, the reanimated animals of empire, posed on the walls of the country estate or arrested in museum cases, represent valuable historical artefacts ripe for unstitching. Drawing on the work of Garry Marvin, Sam Alberti and Merle Patchett, this article stalks Powell-Cottons taxidermic project across various sites of capture, production and display (what I call necrogeographies) to illuminate the sinuous contours of imperial natural history and the stories of pursuit, production and performance lurking beneath the skin of the reanimated animal.