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Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West by Karen R. Jones (review)

Strains of nostalgia laced the fin de siècle culture of late nineteenthcentury America. In the 1890s, economic depression and political unrest cast a shadow over the future of the republic, but fond memories of a triumphal past offered solace and reassurance. And well they might. In less than a century earlier, the United States expanded across a large continent and maintained its nationhood despite the challenges of distance and a destructive Civil War. With expansion came the acquisition of the American West, the backdrop for Epiphany in the Wilderness—the storied saga of the hunt, the hunter, and the hunted. In parsing the performance and the drama, Jones argues that the recounting of hunting events assumes a time-honored cultural ritual in the narrative of American history, the making of “the West as site of personal and social memory.” She declares, “The nineteenth century was irrevocably shaped by westward expansion, and in that story the hunter stood center stage,” citing confirmation from Turner’s nostalgic and bravado-laden 1893 frontier thesis that artifacts of American identity included “the hunting shirt and the pioneer cabin” (5). Epiphany in the Wilderness is a challenging and complicated work that employs theoretical underpinnings to highlight the importance of the hunting narrative to American cultural history. The seemingly straightforward story of the hunter type represented by the figure of Daniel Boone earlier in the trans-AppalachianWest became much more complicated and laden with meaning in the trans-Mississippi West. Clearly the choice of the word “epiphany” in the title—something that transcends—signals theorized constructions to follow, with references to Derrida’s deconstruction theory and the “actor network theory” of Callon and Latour all in play. Hunters and hunting in the nineteenth century assume three modes— subsistence, market, and sport—all of which treated the landscape of the American West as one of “appropriation and conquest.” In the case of the marketers, the destruction of buffalo was on an industrial scale that