Image from William Temple Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife, 1913
Vanishing America
Species Extinction, Racial Peril, and the Origins of Conservation
In the early 1830s, famed Western painter George Catlin sat in the shade of a wagon, squinted out over the sun-parched Southern Plains, and sketched furiously. The scene he sought to capture was fleeting. Amidst a cacophony of thundering hooves, and a haze of dust, a band of mounted Indians dashed in and around a herd of buffalo, unleashing arrows into their snorting, furious prey. A heaving sea of shaggy black fur extended to the horizon, but as one colossal beast after another fell tumbling to the ground, Catlin recognized that the hunters would soon sate their needs, bringing the awesome spectacle to a close.
Catlin worried that he might not have another opportunity to capture this iconic chase, for he believed that both the Indians and the buffalo they hunted faced impending extinction. Nearly a decade later, while taking his paintings and some Indian curios on a tour of Europe in a failed bid to win aristocratic patronage, the painter recounted his Western adventures in a published narrative, which he framed as a series of letters written from camp. He concluded the first of his two volumes with a letter contemplating the melancholy fate of Native Americans and the American bison.
With Euro-American settlers pushing ever westward, bringing with them agriculture, commerce and industry, Catlin saw only one hope for the Plains’ original human and animal inhabitants: “a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes.” Catlin zealously promoted the idea. “What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages!” he proclaimed. “A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!” For the painter, Indians were a part of the vanishing Western landscape, every bit as natural and wild as buffalo and elk.
Modern readers might scoff at Catlin’s suggestion that Native Americans could only endure within a park stocked with game. Yet, through his writings, the painter revealed a great deal about the history of American understandings of and responses to extinction. Indeed, for as long as Americans have pondered the extirpation of species, they have contemplated the annihilation of races, and in many instances, onlookers have drawn parallels between wildlife declension and racial decline. As a result, scholars looking back on the nation’s conservation history will find that, in surprising ways, efforts to preserve wilderness have often been entangled with deeper racial anxieties.
In Vanishing America, I explore a key transition in American environmental and racial thought. Prior to the late nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans generally viewed themselves as bearers of civilization. While they perceived their own success as foreordained, they associated Indians with wilderness, and often maintained that both must make way for the inevitable march of progress. Pre-Gilded Age white Americans frequently denied that species extinction was occurring, or rationalized it as an inevitable corollary of progress. As the turn of the century approached, however, whites came to see themselves as an imperiled race, and increasingly identified with the nation’s dwindling wildlife. Fearing that “over-civilization” endangered them in the same way “progress” threatened Indians, white elites developed the preservationist arguments that laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement. By identifying the social, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental factors that propelled this transition, I both expose the racial anxieties underlying modern environmentalism, and carve out a place for the environment in the history of American race relations.
(Harvard University Press, 2016)
Catlin worried that he might not have another opportunity to capture this iconic chase, for he believed that both the Indians and the buffalo they hunted faced impending extinction. Nearly a decade later, while taking his paintings and some Indian curios on a tour of Europe in a failed bid to win aristocratic patronage, the painter recounted his Western adventures in a published narrative, which he framed as a series of letters written from camp. He concluded the first of his two volumes with a letter contemplating the melancholy fate of Native Americans and the American bison.
With Euro-American settlers pushing ever westward, bringing with them agriculture, commerce and industry, Catlin saw only one hope for the Plains’ original human and animal inhabitants: “a magnificent park, where the world could see for ages to come, the native Indian in his classic attire, galloping his wild horse, with sinewy bow, and shield and lance, amid the fleeting herds of elks and buffaloes.” Catlin zealously promoted the idea. “What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world, in future ages!” he proclaimed. “A nation’s Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!” For the painter, Indians were a part of the vanishing Western landscape, every bit as natural and wild as buffalo and elk.
Modern readers might scoff at Catlin’s suggestion that Native Americans could only endure within a park stocked with game. Yet, through his writings, the painter revealed a great deal about the history of American understandings of and responses to extinction. Indeed, for as long as Americans have pondered the extirpation of species, they have contemplated the annihilation of races, and in many instances, onlookers have drawn parallels between wildlife declension and racial decline. As a result, scholars looking back on the nation’s conservation history will find that, in surprising ways, efforts to preserve wilderness have often been entangled with deeper racial anxieties.
In Vanishing America, I explore a key transition in American environmental and racial thought. Prior to the late nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans generally viewed themselves as bearers of civilization. While they perceived their own success as foreordained, they associated Indians with wilderness, and often maintained that both must make way for the inevitable march of progress. Pre-Gilded Age white Americans frequently denied that species extinction was occurring, or rationalized it as an inevitable corollary of progress. As the turn of the century approached, however, whites came to see themselves as an imperiled race, and increasingly identified with the nation’s dwindling wildlife. Fearing that “over-civilization” endangered them in the same way “progress” threatened Indians, white elites developed the preservationist arguments that laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement. By identifying the social, cultural, economic, demographic, and environmental factors that propelled this transition, I both expose the racial anxieties underlying modern environmentalism, and carve out a place for the environment in the history of American race relations.
(Harvard University Press, 2016)
