And so began the long twentieth century of endless U.S. wars, covert and open, with a distinct revival of gun glorification and a recasting of the personalities of brutal pro-slavery guerrillas as outlaw heroes, the influence of which continues to spill over into the present.
FIVE
MYTH OF THE HUNTER
Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the United States are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white, which means that 61 percent of all adults who own guns are white men, and this group accounts for 31 percent of the total U.S. population. The top reason U.S. Americans give for owning a gun is for protection.1 What are the majority of white men so afraid of? Does anyone believe that centuries of racial and economic domination of the United States by white men have left no traces in our culture, views, or institutions? It’s not likely, given all the evidence to the contrary. The ongoing influence of this history is compounded by the lack of acknowledgment of the colonists’ savage violence across the continent that continued until the twentieth century, and the legacies of African slavery through such practices as convict leasing, legal segregation, rampant institutional racism, discrimination, police killings, mass surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration.
There is another historical paradigm that contributes to the white U.S. male’s affinity for firearms, namely, “The Hunter.” Norman Mailer characterized this type in his 1948 war novel, The Naked and the Dead:
SAM CROFT
THE HUNTER
A lean man of medium height but he held himself so erectly he appeared tall. His narrow triangular face was utterly without expression. There seemed nothing wasted in his hard small jaw, gaunt firm cheeks and straight short nose. His gelid eyes were very blue… . He hated weakness and he loved practically nothing. There was a crude uniformed vision in his soul but he was rarely conscious of it… .
His ancestors pushed and labored and strained, drove their oxen, sweated their women, and moved a thousand miles.
He pushed and labored inside himself and smoldered with an endless hatred.2
Many people in the United States who have not grown up with guns appear to think that the Second Amendment and gun rights are about hunting; they are mystified as to why a semiautomatic AR-15 or an assault rifle might be needed for hunting. But gun affinity isn’t about hunting, although it is related to the myth of the hunter.
Whereas white supremacy had been the working rationalization for British theft of Indigenous lands and for European enslavement of Africans, the bid for independence by what became the United States of America was more problematic. Democracy, equality, and equal rights do not fit well with genocide, settler colonialism, slavery, and empire. It was during the 1820s—the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s era of populist settler-democracy, called “The Age of Democracy” by many U.S. historians—that the unique U.S. origin narratives evolved reconciling rhetoric with reality. Novelist James Fenimore Cooper was among its initial scribes.
Cooper’s reinvention of the birth of the United States in his novel The Last of the Mohicans became and has remained the populist U.S. origin story. Herman Melville called Cooper “our national novelist.”3 Cooper was the wealthy son of a U.S. congressman, a land speculator who built Cooperstown, named after himself, in upstate New York, where James grew up, on land taken from the Haudenosaunee. His hometown was christened all-American with the establishment of the National Baseball Hall of Fame there during the Depression year of 1936. Expelled from Yale, Cooper did a stint in the U.S. Navy, then married and began writing. From 1823 to 1841, he published the five books in his Leatherstocking Tales series, beginning with The Pioneers, followed by The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. Each featured the character Natty Bumppo, also called variously, depending on his age, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, or Deerslayer. Bumppo is a British settler on land appropriated from the Delaware Nation and is buddies with its fictional Delaware leader Chingachgook (the “last Mohican” in the myth). Together the Leatherstocking Tales narrate the mythical forging of the new country from the 1754–63 French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans to the settlement of the plains by migrants traveling by wagon train from Kentucky and Tennessee. At the end of the saga, Bumppo dies a very old man on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, as he gazes east.
The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, was a best seller throughout the nineteenth century and has been in print continuously since. Two Hollywood movies were based on the story, the most recent made in 1992, the Columbus Quincentennial. Cooper devised a fictional counterpoint of celebration to the dark underbelly of the new American nation—the birth of something new and wondrous, literally, the U.S. American race, a new people born of the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European, not a biological merger but something more ephemeral, involving the disappearance of the Indian. In the novel, Cooper has the last of the “noble” and “pure” Natives die off, with the “last Mohican” handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the nativized settler, his adopted son. This convenient fantasy could be seen as quaint at best, were it not for its deadly staying power. Cooper had much to do with creating the U.S. origin myth that generations of historians and textbooks have dedicated themselves to rationalizing. In the process, he fortified the U.S. American exceptionalism that weaves through much of the literature produced in the United States (not only the writing of historians) and is parroted by anyone who wishes to excel in politics, the military, or academia—and even by poets, from Walt Whitman to the Beats of the 1950s. The late writer Wallace Stegner decried the devastation wrought by U.S. domination and destruction of Indigenous peoples, wildlife, and the land, but reinforced the idea of U.S. exceptionalism by reducing colonization to a twist of fate that produced some charming if confounding characteristics:
Ever since Daniel Boone took his first excursion over Cumberland Gap, Americans have been wanderers… . With a continent to take over and Manifest Destiny to goad us, we could not have avoided being footloose. The initial act of emigration from Europe, an act of extreme, deliberate disaffiliation, was the beginning of a national habit.
It should not be denied, either, that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Our folk heroes and our archetypal literary figures accurately reflect that side of us. Leatherstocking, Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of Moby Dick, all are orphans and wanderers; any of them could say, “Call me Ishmael.” The Lone Ranger has no dwelling place except the saddle.4
The publication of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales paralleled the presidency of Andrew Jackson. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century, the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of U.S. civil religion and nationalism—Americanism, white nationalism.
Behind the legend was a looming real-life figure, the archetype that inspired the stories, namely, Daniel Boone, an icon of U.S. settler colonialism. Boone’s life spanned nearly a century, 1734 to 1820, precisely the period covered in the Leatherstocking series. Boone was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on the edge of British settlement. He is an avatar of the moving colonial-Indigenous frontier. To the west lay “Indian Country,” claimed through the Doctrine of Discovery by both Britain and France but free of Europeans save for a few traders, trappers, and soldiers manning colonial outposts.
Daniel Boone died in 1820 in Missouri, a part of the vast territory acquired in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. When the Spanish opened Missouri in 1799 for foreigners to settle, the Boone family led the way. Yet, decades later, his body was taken for burial to Frankfort, Kentucky, the cultish covenant heart of the Ohio Country—Indian Country—for which the Revolution had been fought and in which he had been the trekker superhero, almost a deity.
Daniel Boone was recreated as a celebrity at age fifty in 1784, a year after the end of the War o
f Independence. Real estate speculator John Filson, seeking settlers to buy unceded land in the Ohio Country, although it was still densely populated with Native towns and farms, wrote and self-published The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, along with a map to guide the intruders. The book contained an appendix about Daniel Boone, purportedly written by Boone himself, but surely written by Filson, as Boone is not known to have ever written anything, although he was literate. That part of the book on Boone’s “adventures” subsequently was published as “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boone” in the American Magazine in 1787, then as a book. Thereby a star was born—the mythical hero, the hunter, the “Man Who Knows Indians,” as Richard Slotkin has described this U.S. American archetype:
The myth of the hunter that had grown up about the figure of Filson’s Daniel Boone provided a framework within which Americans attempted to define their cultural identity, social and political values, historical experience, and literary aspirations… . Daniel Boone, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson were heroes to the whole nation because their experiences had reference to many or all of these common experiences. “The Hunters of Kentucky,” a popular song that swept the nation in 1822–28, helped elect Andrew Jackson as President by associating him with Boone, the hero of the West.5
Yet the Leatherstocking’s positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion squatting, attacking, and colonizing the land and people of Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the mythological narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in sanitizing accountability for the atrocities related to genocide, and set the narrative pattern for future U.S. writers, poets, and historians.
What Daniel Boone, like George Washington, was up to was intruding upon sovereign Native land so as to covertly survey it and sell it to white settlers, who would then form themselves into militias to murder the families who had been living there for generations. Some were successful and grew rich and powerful, such as George Washington, while others, like Boone, never attained wealth, his land speculations resulting in bankruptcy. Regarding Boone’s hunting career, it was purely commercial; he killed animals not for food, but to sell their pelts for profit. Boone made a modest living as a market hunter. Annually, trekking alone or in small groups of other market hunters, he would go on “long hunts”—months-long expeditions into unceded Indian hunting grounds. Collecting hundreds of buck deer skins in the autumn, he would then trap beaver and otter for their valuable pelts over the winter. In the Spring, market hunters returned to sell their bounty to commercial fur traders. In this business, buckskins came to be known as “bucks,” originating the slang term for “dollar.”6 But the legend and lore that mushroomed around Daniel Boone advanced notions of the hero explorer and adventurous hunter, and were written over the fact that he was a merchant, a trader, a land speculator, and a failed businessman.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “No form of labor is harder than the chase, nor none so excellent as a training school for war… . A race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians… . Colonists fresh from the old world, no matter how thrifty, steady-going, and industrious, could not hold their own on the frontier; they had to settle where they were protected from the Indians by a living barrier of bold and self-reliant American borderers.” But Roosevelt warned of a class difference among these border militias, writing, “All qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accentuated in the life of the wilderness.”7 Of course, from his point of view, his kind—wealthy Anglo-Saxons—had all the good qualities.
Roosevelt was vice president of the United States when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; he became president at age forty-two, served out the rest of McKinley’s term, and was reelected. Roosevelt was already a national hero for having led the irregular volunteers to fight the Spanish in Cuba alongside regular U.S. Army soldiers and Marines. During the previous adult years of his life, Roosevelt forged a renewed myth of “The Hunter.”
Roosevelt was born in 1858 in New York City, son of a wealthy businessman and a wealthy socialite mother from Georgia, his father descended from the original Dutch settlers in New York. They were related to an upstate New York slave-trading family, the Schuylers, the family Alexander Hamilton married into, then came to manage the family’s slave trade.8 Roosevelt was a sickly asthmatic child who early on turned to strenuous physical activity to overcome his weakness. He seemed headed for a life in academia or law, tutored at home, then graduating from Harvard, then Columbia Law School, marrying into the wealthy Cabot Lodge family (whose wealth came from the Atlantic slave trade), researching and writing books, as well as traveling extensively. But early on, he was attracted to politics and later claimed that it was while in law school that he decided he wanted “to be one of the governing class.”9
Roosevelt’s first interest was naval power, about which he researched and published, gaining recognition as a naval historian. However, he became obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon conquest of what became the United States, and during the decade 1885 to 1894, published the seven-volume The Winning of the West. During that time, he purchased and operated a cattle ranch in North Dakota where he spent a good deal of time learning to be a rancher and trophy hunter; he wrote and published three books on hunting, proud that he had helped in the slaughter of the bison, the life sustenance of the Plains peoples. He even became a deputy sheriff and chased outlaws. He began to consider himself an heir to the hunter icons such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, another mythologized figure, who died at the Alamo.
In 1887, Roosevelt and his closest family friend and political ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, founded the Boone and Crockett Club for trophy hunters like themselves. The membership included politicians, professionals, and businessmen, as well the famous painters of the romanticized West, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington, and the popular Western novelist Owen Wister.10 Roosevelt was an early convert to “Social Darwinism,” leading to the racist pseudo-science of eugenics. In his view, all the darker peoples were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior, and distinguished himself from those “game butchers” who hunt and kill animals for profit or to eat. He identified with Cooper’s character Hawkeye and embraced the Boone myth, as men killed only to test and prove their manhood. Roosevelt’s hunting was for aristocrats, to revitalize the superior class of the species. Furthermore, he theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler “stock” that morphed into that superior species was composed of English, Scots-Irish, French Huguenots, German, and Dutch, all Protestants.11
However lowly and savage on Roosevelt’s scale, Native communities played a key role in his theory of the genesis of white supremacy. Roosevelt argued that the superior European was strengthened by not intermarrying with their defeated enemies, which would cause loss of vigor. Slotkin summarizes the genocidal violence inherent in the perspective: “American settlers must regain that vigor by repelling and exterminating their barbarians. Instead of biological exchange with savages of another race or folk, the Americans participate in a spiritual exchange, taking from the enemy certain abstract ideas or principle but accepting no admixture of blood.” The settlers must become “men who know Indians,” embracing the “savage” rules of warfare that it takes to destroy the enemy. But Roosevelt also drew inspiration from Native territorial sovereignty, particularly the Haudenosaunee and their insistence on maintaining their lands, providing a model for U.S. American nationalism.
Richard Slotkin views overseas U.S. imperialism, of which Theodore Roosevelt was a major booster and actor, as a “regeneration through violence,” or recovering the frontier spirit, becoming the hunter, the martial tradition that goes to the roo
t of the founding of the United States and continues today. The process of extension, both as doctrine and as violence, is ongoing, and does much to explain the continuing affinity for guns among those who identify with the masculinized and racialized white nationalist narratives of Americana, revering the Second Amendment as its crown jewel.
In a 2016 New York Times opinion piece on free trade agreements and deindustrialization in coal country, rural Kentucky writer and self-identified “Second Amendment person” Daniel Hayes makes a compelling point about the symbolism of possessing firearms: “In the heartland, these are people who feel they’ve been the victims of sustained economic violence at the hands of tyrannical governments of both parties. In 2008, Barack Obama’s notorious misstep got one thing right: Rural people will ‘cling’ to guns. Not because they are sad or misguided, but because it is the last right they feel they still have: a liberty at least, in place of opportunity.”12 After narrating the painful dysfunctional economic and social conditions in rural Kentucky, along with the de-peopling of the region, particularly the flight of youth, he continues, “Outsourcing and guns: These are the twin issues animating Trump voters in rural Kentucky. The two are linked and feed off each other; the only difference between them is that white rural voters see outsourcing as a losing battle, whereas protecting and expanding Second Amendment rights is the only policy they’ve been able to get politicians to move on. For that reason alone, it is totemic.”13
There’s a sense of victimization in the essay that’s prevalent among the descendants of the early Anglo settlers who were on the losing side of capitalist rapaciousness. When Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle,14 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Kentucky intellectuals and writers took notice and were outraged. The Kentucky Cycle is a collection of nine interconnected plays that requires nearly seven hours of stage time for its production and had premiered in Seattle, becoming the first Pulitzer drama award to go to a play that had not first opened in New York. The narrative follows one settler family and its descendants in eastern Kentucky’s Appalachia over a period of two hundred years, from first settlement in 1775 to 1975, during the waning days of being the center of the coal mining industry and the beginning of massive deindustrialization in the United States. Schenkkan stresses that the “land” itself is a major character.15 It is in this manner that he reflects on the violent expulsion of the Indigenous Cherokee farmers; the degradation of the land by commercial, albeit small-scale, slave-worked, monocrop agriculture; commercial cutting of the trees and killing (mostly by trapping) wildlife that caused erosion, destitution, and the exhaustion of the land; the inability of small operators to compete with the large slave-worked plantations and were forced to migrate to Missouri; and, after the Civil War, the introduction of underground coal mining, the demise of the industry, and massive unemployment. Schenkkan concludes the play with the War on Poverty and the Vista volunteer program for the jobless and hungry residents.
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