Wrestling Teddy Bears: Wilderness Masculinity as Invented Tradition in the Pacific Northwest
[1]An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch meeting in Vancouver, on 10 August 2001. I am grateful to Heather Streets and Bill Robbins for their comments on that version of the paper. Sue Armitage, Tina Loo, and Val Plumwood also offered valuable suggestions at various stages. I also wish to acknowledge Karen Routledge, who hunted down a number of British Columbia newspaper articles that were central to the writing of this paper.
"The wilderness masters the colonist"
-Frederick Jackson Turner
1 On a dismal bear hunt in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt was frustrated. After three days of walking, climbing, and riding in the wilds of Mississippi, his party had not come across a single bear. On the fourth day, the local guides and their dogs finally found an old bear, which they chased until the bedraggled creature could run no more. The dogs attacked and injured the bear, and the guides tied it to a tree before calling for the President. Here, at last, was a bear for him to shoot. Ever the quintessential sportsman, however, Roosevelt saw no sport in slaughtering the old and restrained beast, though he did order that it be put down and put out of its misery. The story might well have ended there, but for the media attention Roosevelt's response received, which resulted in the creation of the teddy bear as children's icon and added to the mystique of Roosevelt as the archetypal representation of American masculinity, already firmly entrenched after his heroism during the Spanish-American War. The political cartoonist Clifford Berryman heard of this story and drew the now-famous cartoon of Roosevelt refusing to kill the bear. Interestingly, Berryman's first cartoon depicted a full-grown bear with a rope around its neck looking rather sorry for itself. Subsequent images of the bear turned it into an innocent cub, which further enhanced Roosevelt's rejection of the kill as any kind of challenge.
2 In refusing to shoot the restrained bear, Roosevelt was adhering to his own principles of the strenuous life that advocated that hard work of body and mind was the only way to guarantee the survival of the potent and virile attributes of the American, white race. He was also contributing to the propagation of American tradition by imposing the principles of the strenuous life into the invented conception of Americanism and its relationship to its natural environment. Historical geographers have explored the notion of invented tradition in the United States, arguing that mythmaking occurs after a region has been colonized. They suggest that the popular American notion of pristine wilderness is an example of this invented tradition insofar as it exaggerates the extent of the American conquest and downplays non-American influences on the landscape. The invented tradition presented America as "a succession of imagined environments which have been conceived as far more difficult for settlers to conquer than they ever were in reality" (Bowden 20). By insisting that North America was uninhabited prior to European contact, the new Americans became conquering heroes and pioneers of mythical or superhuman proportions, taming the wilderness and transforming it into the Jeffersonian or yeoman farmer ideal, as portrayed by the nineteenth century landscape artist, Thomas Cole. The geographer M. J. Bowden listed four types of invented traditions. The first were instant traditions invented by political and religious leaders. The second were invented by literary and artistic elites, whose messages seeped deliberately but informally into the mainstream. The third also came from above but settled as fact in the mainstream memory. The last type of invented tradition dealt with long held notions that were given form or substance by leaders or heroes who created grand metaphors for the nation. Bowden suggested that the predominant era of American mythmaking was the middle and late nineteenth century, but we might extend that era to include at least the beginning of the twentieth century and the ubiquity of Theodore Roosevelt's influence on all four of these types of invented traditions. Regardless of how we might date the creation or establishment of the major American invented traditions, however, we might properly recognize its rhetorical significance as a means of manufacturing consent or acquiring a hegemonic pull over the central tenets of the nation's popular culture. This is a theme that could benefit from further historical investigation.
3 At the turn of the last century, the tale-end of the great period of invented tradition, Americanism was steeped in or preoccupied with the rediscovery of American masculinity - displaced by Civil War and the economic depression and uncertainty of the Gilded Age - the closing of the frontier, and a growing appreciation of outdoor recreation. The result was division over the expansionist tendencies of proponents for war against Spain, continued labor resentment, and a reinvigorated surge of white supremacy. This paper follows an unorthodox avenue to investigate these themes and tensions. In exploring instances of turn-of-the-last-century human encounters with bears in hand-to-hand combat in the Pacific Northwest, I mean to demonstrate that notions of the frontier and environmental determinism constructed a new, wilderness masculinity distinct from changing expressions of urban masculinity. The idea for a paper about wrestling with bears in the wilderness was inspired more than fifteen years ago. I spent my summers during high school working as a camp counselor at a forestry camp north of Squamish, British Columbia. After growing up on the stories of "Mighty Men" in European mythology - Odysseus, Heracles, and King Arthur - and reading superhero comic books in my urban, middle class environment, meeting a real-live Beowulf at Evans Lake taught me that these archetypes of rugged masculinity were somehow more than - and yet nothing more than - mere mythological constructions. Andy was an experienced outdoorsman, who had had several encounters with bears. According to camp legend, not only had he wrestled with several bears, he had even killed a bear with his own hands. Such stories would have remained campfire tales, had I not witnessed on a couple of occasions his chasing bears from the camp. Now, Andy was not a violent person with veins in his teeth and he did not go out of his way to harm bears or nature, but his experiences in the wild definitely shaped our perceptions of him.
4 Andy's wilderness environment was central to his image as bear-wrestler. Similarly, both social and geographical contexts of the American West shaped new, Progressive-era ideas about wilderness and masculinity. As Andy's encounters with bears made for lively stories around the campfire, late nineteenth and early twentieth century wilderness adventures were exceptionally well-received, as evidenced by the popularity of the writings of Jack London, William T. Hornaday, and countless books and articles written by adventurers and sportsmen. Further examples of this new masculine, wilderness colonialism - living in the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt's professed "strenuous life" - included a series of urban newspaper articles that reported stories of men wrestling with bears in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. These chance encounters and the heroic accounts that they inspired clearly adhere to the principles of what Val Plumwood has called "the masculinist monster myth," an inherent part of the master narrative (Plumwood, "Prey I" 40).[2]An abridged version of this essay also exists. See Plumwood, "Prey II". Recognition of these cultural constructions in recent histories is emblematic of a greater social awareness among scholars, but significantly detrimental to inherited notions of the master narrative, that grand scheme or model that represents or symbolizes the relentless development of free institutions and the expansion of political liberty. Too often, the master narrative - born out of narrow-minded, homogeneous consensus many generations earlier - is based on ideal rather than historical reality; it is, moreover, often oppressive and suppressive, imposing a hegemonic mastery over the non-white, the non-male, and the non-middle or upper classes. That the master narrative should claim to consider - yet largely ignore - these minorities strikes at the very root of the historiographical problem it represents. It is not until very recently that historians have started to question or debate the value of the (or any) master narrative. For an interesting critique of the master narrative, see Huggins. In wilderness, man is the underdog against wild and savage brutes; his victory heralds yet another example of the progress of civilization and, therefore, the supremacy of the white male. During the Progressive era, these examples of bear-wrestling in the bush reaffirmed a sense of masculine identity that was strongly tempered by the nature of the landscape; only in the wilderness - distanced from "civilization" - was the expression of this primitive virility generally accepted.[3]"Civilized" forms of violence were either still accepted or had become institutionalized during this period. The Progressive era was a period during which soldiers were still heroic and wars glorious. Furthermore, boxing during this period became a "manly art." The distinction between acceptable, civilized, and ordered forms of violence and primitive, wild, and disordered forms finds its roots in the environment in which it takes place. For the association between war and heroism, see Dawson. For boxing as manly art, see Gorn. This epic struggle with the unknown or unfamiliar is intriguing, however, precisely because of its "uncivilized" setting. It is further indicative of a reversal in the manly mystique that had previously symbolized an appreciation for the strategic and mental acuity of nineteenth century manhood. Wrestling with bears represents a more primitive pre-industrial - almost Jacksonian - form of masculinity based on brute physical strength.
5 While considerable scholarship has examined the significance of race and class in the construction of masculinity, I propose that the natural environment plays a similarly significant role and that the interplay between race, class, and nature is central to any kind of gender construction. While scholars have emphasized global competition, economic fluctuations, and social crises as catalysts for the reconsideration or restructuring of notions of masculinity, very few have developed in a sustained way the influence of wild nature on these constructions.[4]See as exception Draper. My contribution in this paper, then, is to address the problem of the environment's relative absence from theories of gender. Using stories of bear-wrestling as a means of locating contact points between the two existing historiographies, I challenge gender and environmental historians to bridge the gap between their fields of research and broaden their parameters to include more comprehensive and connected understandings of nature and gender.[5]One of the major criticisms of environmental history is that it has proven itself unable to incorporate women and the study of gender into its narratives. The reason for this stems from the initial purpose of history and responses to the ultimate question in history: what is the relationship between culture and society? Environmental historians respond "nature," whereas gender historians answer "gender." Such divergent responses, however, should not preclude greater confluence of the two deviating positions. For criticisms of environmental history from a women's history perspective, see Scharff.