Ep. 18: From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The American West — Ep. 18 “From Safari American-Style to the Boone & Crockett Club”

Host: MeatEater Podcast Team
Guest/Presenter: Dan Flores
Date: December 30, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores the evolution of hunting culture in the American West, from elite “safari American-style” expeditions of European nobles to the birth of the Boone & Crockett Club—a pivotal organization in North American conservation. Dan Flores, historian and writer, details the moral, social, and ecological context of 19th-century animal slaughter, contrasting aristocratic trophy hunts with American market hunting, and ultimately examining the origins and impact of conservation-minded sport hunting.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Elite Field Sports and the “American Safari”

[01:19–17:09]

• European elite field sports were about adventure, trophies, social status, and indulging in power over nature.
• The American West offered “prairie fever”—an almost feverish allure to Europeans, especially because of its abundance of charismatic megafauna like bison and grizzlies.
• Notable figures like Sir St. George Gore and Sir William Drummond Stewart imported the African safari ethos to the West—lavish hunting parties, luxury gear, and no moral restraint.

Notable Quote:

• “Field sports were all about adventure and trophies in far flung places…another way for men with means to express their status and the social power they had.” — Dan Flores, [04:10]

• Expeditions entailed massive logistical operations (50+ servants, multiple wagons, tons of ammunition).

• Gore’s infamous 1850s campaign slaughtered staggering numbers—over 4,000 buffalo, 105 bears, and thousands of other animals, shocking both Native and non-Native observers.

Notable Quote:

• “Success was measured in body counts, and almost no one in recorded history matched Gore’s bloodlust.” — Dan Flores, [11:40]

• Even at the time, some guides and party members recoiled at the scale of destruction, experiencing “horror as a tumbling ocean of buffalo blood.”

2. The Market Hunt and Accelerating Slaughter

[20:23–44:32]

• As railroads expanded, so did access—turning wildlife into commodities for distant markets.
• Western towns like Bozeman became hubs for shipping tonnes of skins, horns, and meat eastward; the 1870s saw tens of thousands of elk, deer, pronghorn, and bighorns collectively killed in single seasons.
• The first U.S. national park, Yellowstone (1872), initially focused on preserving land, not wildlife—but slaughter continued largely unchecked.
• Market hunting was so ingrained it was compared to other American freedoms, almost a “franchise” right.
• Despite laws and efforts, even game wardens faced lethal opposition as they tried to enforce new restrictions.

Notable Quote:

• “Nothing like it has ever been known in the history of the fur trade, the paper marveled.” — Dan Flores, relaying a contemporary account of the market hunt’s scale, [31:20]

3. The Shift Toward Conservation — The Boone & Crockett Club

[45:30–59:00]

• Amid this devastation, figures like Theodore Roosevelt & George Bird Grinnell recognized the pending extinction of American wildlife.
• In 1887, Roosevelt convened elite friends to form the Boone & Crockett Club, aiming to preserve game for sport hunting and to foster ethical hunting values.
• The club’s early efforts:
  • Supported Army intervention to stop poaching in Yellowstone and national parks.
  • Advocated the revolutionary idea that some federal lands should remain public rather than privatized.
  • Influenced landmark legislation (like the Lacey Act of 1900) to curb commercial exploitation.

Notable Quote:

• “The only way to preserve the manly sport was to save America’s animals.” — Dan Flores, [54:13]

• Early sport hunting ethics (fair chase, restraint, empathy for animals) emerged, influenced by both European models and new Darwinian ideas of humans’ kinship with animals.

Notable Quote:

• “It’s in a good measure based on a respect for the animals themselves … we and the beasts are kin.” — Dan Flores, [56:31], quoting Ernest Thompson Seton

4. Reflections: Anarchy, Heritage, and the Narrow Escape

[45:30–59:00 Discussion]

• Modern hunters tend to view the late 19th-century conservation era as their “origin story,” but Flores stresses that previous decades were defined more by anarchy than heritage.
• The prevailing attitude before conservation: freedom to kill for profit or pleasure, with little concern for posterity.
• The paradigm shift to conservation was contentious, dividing rural and urban constituencies and overturning deeply held notions of American freedom.
• Conservation’s roots are entangled with class and privilege, as well as utilitarian desire to ensure huntable populations remain.

Notable Quote:

• “It was class warfare around this idea, particularly to try to stop the market hunt, which had been going on since the 1620s. … Americans thought of this freedom to kill wild animals for money as part of the American franchise.” — Dan Flores, [50:21]

• Only the rise of organizations like the Boone & Crockett Club, and the activism of figures like Roosevelt and Grinnell, prevented total ecological collapse "just in time."

Notable Quote:

• “We righted the ship at almost the last moment… but these stories from earlier are pretty disturbing.” — Dan Flores, [48:57]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “What did posterity ever do for me?” — Cornelius Vanderbilt, quoted by Dan Flores when discussing 19th-century attitudes toward future generations’ rights, [07:00]
• “If you had no moral conscience about what you were doing, it was exhilarating. ... But as the adrenaline ebbed ... there was not a living creature to be seen. Everything seemed dull, dead quiet, unutterably sad and melancholy.” — Windham Thomas Windham Quinn, 4th Earl of Dunraven, as quoted by Dan Flores, [41:30]
• “This episode about the elites operating without a conscience of any kind because they can, combined with the market hunt... doesn’t look as if 50 years out there’s going to be a resolution... it looks like we’re going to end up with nothing left.” — Dan Flores, [51:05]
• "It was almost... out of nowhere, but somehow they managed to put this together and bring a halt to what was happening." — Dan Flores, on the formation and impact of the Boone & Crockett Club, [52:33]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 01:19 – Dan Flores introduces the historical context, European hunting traditions, and the arrival of “American safari.”
• 06:00–13:00 – Stories of Sir William Drummond Stewart and Sir St. George Gore: excess, logistics, and unprecedented slaughter.
• 20:23–31:00 – The rise of market hunting and the unchecked destruction around Yellowstone and the plains.
• 45:30–50:21 – Discussion of heritage vs. history, anarchy of the frontier, and the shock of 19th-century slaughter.
• 50:21–56:31 – Struggles around early conservation: Boone & Crockett formation, resistance, and the rural–urban divide.
• 56:31–59:00 – The birth of sport hunting ethics, Darwin’s influence, and emerging empathy for wild animals.

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Memorable Moments

• Gore’s downfall: Gore so angered local tribes by his senseless slaughter that the Lakotas confiscated his arms and possessions, sending him away naked and symbolically stripped of power. [~16:00]
• Dunraven’s realization: The thrill of an elk chase—and the subsequent “oppressive silence”—presages the ecological loss coming for “all wild America.” [41:30]

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Tone and Style

Flores brings a historian’s depth, combining literary flair with clear-eyed moral perspective. He relays both awe and lament, threading stories of outsized characters with critical commentary on the sobering cost of heedless exploitation. The dialogue with the host adds contemporary hunter context and reflection, anchoring the episode’s deep history in today’s conservation debates.

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Conclusion

Episode 18 of The American West with Dan Flores gives listeners a sweeping narrative about how American attitudes toward wildlife transformed from destructive license to the roots of conservation ethics, showcasing both the darkness of unrestrained human appetite and the “coup” that saved countless species. For those unfamiliar with this chapter in history, Flores’s storytelling and analysis spotlight both the loss and the hard-won victories behind the landscapes and hunting traditions of today.

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Transcript

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

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[Brent]

Oh oh oh.

[Dan Flores]

O'Reilly, you need parts. O'Reilly Auto Parts has parts. Need them fast. We've got fast. No matter what you need. We have thousands of professional parts people doing their part to make sure you have it. Product availability just one part that makes O'Reilly stand apart. The professional parts people. Auto parts. Killing wildlife for money was rivaled by safari hunts and destroying much of the West's original wildlife. But organizations like the Boone and Crockett Club intervene just in time. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine. Where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply [e-mail] Enjoy responsibly. From safari, American style to the Boone and Crockett Club. Five years before Charles Darwin's blockbuster On the Origin of Species rocked the world with its implication that like all earthly life, we humans were part of an evolutionary tree branching out of the planet's distant past. In America, one of Darwin's countrymen was entering history for a very different reason. While Darwin was writing, Sir St George Gore was setting up camp on the banks of the West's Powder river in search of world class field sports. Having already tried East Africa Balding 53 year old Gore was now embarking on a two year safari, American style. Since the 1500s, hunting had been a kind of masculine cult pastime among European elites. The American working classes killed animals for food or for money. But Old World elites saw shooting animals differently. Field sports were all about adventure and trophies in far flung places and experiences the nobility viewed as a special privilege of their class and another way for men with means to express their status and the social power they had. For those with the money to push these experiences to the hilt, technology and the colonial age vastly expanded the geographic possibilities for field sports. The last wild places on earth, plus far more exotic animals than those still remaining in Europe were now within reach. Fieldsports was in truth a sort of beginning for what became 20th century sport hunting. In contrast with the American market hunt, the European fieldsports experience was to some degree reflective about the pursuit of animals and certainly more interested in their natural history. On the other hand, morality about the chase or empathy towards animal life, even as Darwin's insights were about to rock the world were missing in action. Conservation itself was as yet an unimagined idea in Western society. As for the rights of posterity of future generations to experience an unmarred America, as Gilded Age corporate titan Cornelius Vanderbilt quipped, what did posterity ever do for me in African America? Where societal regulations didn't yet stand in the way of human nature? A philosophy like this afforded European elites as much impulsiveness over the life and death of animals as they wished to indulge. And indulgence is exactly what brought Sir St. George Gore to darkest America in the 1850s. Gore was the eighth Baronet of Manor Gore in County Donegal, Ireland, sitting by the fire in their castles. And he and others like him had read Lewis and Clark, James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman and Brit mountain man Frederick Ruxton's books. They'd gone to see George Catlin's Indian exhibitions and they developed an obsession. Buffalo, grizzly bears and elk were larger, more charismatic and more dangerous creatures than foxes or partridges on the moors of the British Isles. In America, the only restrictions on behavior involved avoiding getting mauled, stampeded or captured by native people. An American safari implied complete freedom in the world because it was the grasslands east of the Rockies with their teeming herds of big animals that drew them. Gore and others called a fascination with the west and its animals prairie fever. To be sure, Gore wasn't the first Old World aristocrat to take his kill lust to Americ. British adventurer Sir William Drummond Stewart had commenced Luxurious guided field sports in the West. At the same time, the early 1830s that William Cornwallis Harris was swashbuckling through his own hunts in South Africa. Although the Swahili word safari didn't enter English until the 1850s as a result of Sir Richard Burton's books, all the elements of these hunts are recognizable to anyone who's seen the film out of Africa or Red Hemingway's the Snows of Kilimanjaro. Robert Redford's white hunter Dennis Finch Hatton in Out of Africa wasn't some singular figure in Kenya. In both Africa and America, local guides who knew the land, the habits of the animals and could communicate with the indigenous people were essential to success. The hunt also needed numbers, parties large enough to give pause to whatever natives one encountered, whether Masai, Zulus or Lakotas. The natives very well might not be thrilled to see wildlife destroyed in their homelands. On his initial hunt in 1833-1835, William Drummond Stewart had traveled with various parties of the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. Shooting animals from Colorado to Wyoming and back again with William Sublette and Kit Carson as his guides. With that experience, in 1836, Stewart launched his own expedition and established a template for those who followed. He brought two wagon loads of rare liquors, fine cigars, wines, brandy, whiskey, along with a companion at least one observer referred to as a handsome young English blood. He was actually the wealthy German adventurer, Herr Cylin. Stewart and Cylin tended together and had all their needs met by servants who cooked their meals and served their drinks, broke their camps, cleaned their firearms and caped out their trophies. The next year, 1837, Stewart invited new Orleans painter Alfred Jacob Miller, like Cylin, more than a decade younger than Stewart, along to record their adventures. This time he and his companion camped in an expansive rug strewn green striped tent the size of a yurt. The writer Bernard DeVoto characterized Stuart's few surviving letters as brimming with what DeVoto called mysterious longings and melancholies, romantic passions, unhappiness and frustration. He passed off Stuart's oddities as upbringing and a longing for military action. Some of Stuart's party were not so sure that's what was going on. A decade before Gore's Powder river safari, Stuart had made one more western trip, refining the American safari model even further. In 1843, now 47 years old, he journeyed once more to the Wind River Mountains. Although most of the hunting took place on the return trip along the North Platte River. One day on the Platte, they saw what Stewart estimated were 50,000 buffalo, which they shot into from daybreak till nightfall. That was just the advance swarm. A few days later, a mass steward estimated the at a million animals descended on them and completely enveloped them. The din and dust were beyond all experience. At night they had to deflect the immense living mass from their camp with bonfires. Stuart's party was in the midst of this incredible expression of Western life for two full days. Although Stuart never did so, several members of the trip later expressed remorse over what they called the many murders we had committed among the poor brutes of the prairie. What one referred to later with a shiver of horror as a tumbling ocean of buffalo blood. So here, 10 years later, was Sir St. George Gore, setting up in the Powder river country on a trip that cost him $100,000 in an age when entire states barely had annual budgets that size. In Gore's case, his entourage included a staff of 50 secretaries, stewards, cooks, flymakers, dog tenders, hunters, servants, along with imported foods and wines and an extensive library. The scale of his assault on the west had his caravan of six wagons, 21 carts, a dozen yokes of oxen, 50 dogs, 40 mules and 112 fine hunting horses stringing out for well over two miles across the plains. This was glamping at its most indulgent. Gore's personal wagons held a brass bed, a steel bathtub, and more pointedly, 75 firearms and 3 tons of ammunition. Having alienated white hunter Henry Chatillon so thoroughly that he abandoned the expedition at Fort Laramie, Gore found a new guide in mountain man Jim Bridger. For the most part, Bridger and the other guides, white and Indian, seemed to like Gore well enough, or at least were intrigued by his obsession with the West's animals. But they did have to listen to him read aloud from the classics by firelight at night, only to find themselves sitting around camp until nearly noon every day while he slept in what made a 19th century safari, either the African or American version was not just servants, hot cuisine on fine china, or companions who could at least tolerate Shakespeare fieldsports, safaris were blood sports. Success was measured in body counts, and almost no one in recorded history was matched Gore's bloodlust. Although George Gordon Cumming, on safari in South Africa in the 1840s, was a possible rival on the Powder river in 1855. Gore ended animals existence as if they their pain, their lives were meaningless except to serve as convenient life targets for the nobleman's personal sadistic needs. Some of the animals fed the party, true enough, although Gore could have taken his entire entourage to dinner in St. Louis every evening for less. This was mass death administered for pleasure. It interests me that it bore every resemblance to the mass slaughter of gazelles disoriented in a storm by a pack of hyenas that biologist Hans Krupp would come upon and make famous in science a century later. Gore was indulging an ancient predatory impulse that among hyenas Cruk would call surplus killing, perpetrated either by British elites or hyenas. It was never moral. Indeed, there's no perspective from which you can make Gore's western safari look even partially defensible. He religiously kept kill totals, ultimately extinguishing the lives of of more than 4,000 buffaloes and 105 bears. The bulk of those grizzlies he also tallied in his game book pronghorns, elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, all the great wolves Bridger could find for him, the totals running into the thousands. A few animals like coyotes, he regarded as merely targets for practice, so generously spared them account. Ultimately, Gore slaughtered so many animals that the crows and Lakotas found out about this man who shot animals down for no reason they could ascertain. They complained to their agents, who warned Gore's party that his bloodbath might well invite attack. Such selfish, pointless destruction was politically incorrect even in the 1850s, and more than just the threat of native fury ultimately ended it. Apparently the Lakotas finally confronted Gore's party and confiscated all their guns and their clothes for good measure. In a small degree of Justice, Sir St George Gore, 8th Baronet of Manor Gore, appears to have had to walk naked out of the Black Hills and be rescued by a band of Indians and friendly to the whites. While Gore was taking out whole ecologies along the Powder river and other European prairie fever, tourists like Russia's Grand Duke Alexei were planning their own safaris. The dukes aimed at the animals of the Nebraska and Colorado plains. In 1871 and 72, ministers and journalists were spilling vast amounts of ink and argument over Darwinian evolution. Some of it was even witty. One critic demanded to be shown a bed of oysters evolving into the British parliament. Another reviewer wrote that if we humans were, after all, related to dogs and cats and not that much advance beyond them, then we needed to make every animal out to be as fine a fellow as possible. But in the wild, wild west, with no restrictions on human nature, there was still money to be made from killing wild animals, no matter what fine fellows they might be. There was also fieldsports, safari fun to be had. And both these trumped any philosophical debate intellectuals might be having about humanity's own animal origins. This was one area where working class Westerners and European elites agreed even if we were more like animals than we'd thought, other animals hadn't invented guns. We had.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

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[Brent]

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[Dan Flores]

The Elite Fieldsports assault on the west assumed an American form with fastidious adventures like the Kansas Pacific Railroad's offer that paying customers could shoot down Western animals out the windows of their trains. Meanwhile, the market wipeout of charismatic animals west of the Mississippi continued to a few of the ancient Western natives. Wolves, coyotes and wild horses would join passenger pigeons, giant woodpeckers, native parrots and straggle alive into the 20th century. But by 1890 there were five transcontinental railroads from the Midwest to the Pacific, and everywhere a rail line reached, animals died by the hundreds of thousands. Europe remained a market, but so did the United States, whose population had grown from a little more than 5 million in 1800 to 63 million by 1890. Like the bacteria in some petri dish experiment, when uncontrolled by any introduced check, will devour the contents of their dish until every particle is gone. Humans seemed intent to on erasing every wild species available to us, thanks to the efforts of a trio of Park Service historians who assemble firsthand accounts of this story, the market slaughter of the West's last big animals is documented better on the Yellowstone Plateau than anywhere else. Yellowstone had ceased to be just another part of America in 1872, when Congress withdrew from private homesteading a block of 2 million acres of federal land to create the world's first national park. Making Yellowstone a wildlife park never came up in the debates, but the question did surface about whether Congress should allow the pursuit of game and fish for gain or profit. Remarkably, the consensus was that there ought to be no hunting in the park at all, let alone market hunting, for fear of an entire destruction of the area's wild animals this federal ban on market hunting in the world's first national park was an unprecedented move on the part of the US government. Straddling the Rockies Continental Divide, the Yellowstone Plateau was the central place setting of an enormous ecology of island mountains rising out of the vast grassland deserts of the northern West. It was one of the most wildlife rich regions in North America, a kind of Kentucky of the west, containing all the charismatic animals and birds that had made John James Audubon swoon over the upper Missouri country. The descriptions of abundance are legion and they attach to almost every western animal imaginable. The trapper Osborne Russell, who in the 1830s explored and wrote about the plateau as a garden of the world, told of thousands of mountain sheep in the surrounding ranges. An account later seconded by a camper near present Gardner in 1866, who wrote that you could see thousands and thousands of mountain sheep all fat as pigs. We never went over 100 yards from camp to kill a sheep. You couldn't look anywhere without seeing sheep. There were grizzlies everywhere too. Russell wrote that because of all the wild plums and cherries, grizzlies were more numerous here than anywhere else in the mountains. I've frequently seen seven or eight standing about the clumps of cherry bushes on their hind legs, merely casting a sidelong glance at intruding humans. Because of its vast elk herds, the the crow name for the Yellowstone river was Elk River. Millions of pronghorns thronged the nearby plains too, with hundreds of thousands migrating in advance of big winter storms, their rumps resembling nothing so much as a lake driven to foamy whitecaps by a hard wind. Army Corps explorer W.F. rannells wrote in 1860 of the immense number of wolves. As for bison, when the US proclaimed the existence of the park, there were still probably 4 million of them on the northern plains. Russell's compatriot in the beaver trapping business, Warren Ferris, offered one way to imagine them in the mine. Immense herds of bison in every direction were galloping over the prairie like vast squadrons of cavalry. But it seemed that no sooner had America discovered Yellowstone than market hunters calibrated their compass for the very spot. The Paradise Valley. Carved during glacial times by the Yellowstone river as it exits the park became the early staging ground for market and safari hunters around both the Yellowstone Plateau and and nearby planes. In 1872, the year the park came into being, the Butler Brothers ranch there made an initial pelt shipment to New York of 301 elk, 555 wolves and 250 deer and antelope skins. By 1870, the nearby town of Bozeman was emerging as one of the important shipping points. The market hunt seeming to strike many early Bozeman residents as an attractive mode of obtaining a living, as one of them put it. One group in Bozeman reported a wage of $350aman for a winter's work of killing and skinning. Then things started getting serious. In 1874, Bozeman market hunters were hip hop deep in the big bonanza. That year they shipped out 48 tons of elk skins, 42 tons of deer skins, 17 tons of pronghorn skins and 760 pounds of bighorn skins. In numbers of actual dead animals. That translated to 7700 Elk, 2212,000 pronghorns and 200 bighorns. The killers shot pregnant females and left murdered animals to rot when they couldn't deal with them. In the case of elk wasting 300 to 500 pounds of meat for every animal killed. That 1874 killing orgy had a significant effect on wildlife, as the next year the taken elk skins was down to fewer than 15 tons and deer and pronghorn skins together dropped to 17 tons. But wolves 1,680 skins, coyotes 520 and bears 225 made up for the falling ungulate numbers. By June of that year, Bozeman had shipped out $60,000 in animal parts, a sum that translates to roughly 1.6 million today. At the request of their chiefs, the next year the nearby Crow agency moved to ban non Indians from trapping, hunting or wolfing within the boundaries of the Crow reservation. Midwesterner Philetus Norris, a former trapper himself who had risen to the rank of colonel in the Civil war, became the second superintendent of Yellowstone park in 1877. Norris quickly conveyed the idea back east that the region around the park possessed a world class abundance of animals and that they were fearless of and easily slaughtered by man, as he put it. Norris estimated that from 1875 to 1877, market poachers could killed 7,000 elk within the park's boundaries, then poisoned the discarded carcasses with strychnine for a second harvest of wolves and coyotes. The hunter mountaineers, as he called them, or a small but despicable class of prowlers, told him that so long as the government stood aside, they planned to continue doing exactly as they wished. So the outrages went on. In 1881, the Sioux City Journal described a steamboat called the Terry descending the Missouri, so draped with products from the Market hunt that saved the smokestack and pilot house. The boat appeared as a floating mounded island of skins transferred to trains. The winners take of hides coming down just this way. One river filled 350 boxcars. Nothing like it has ever been known in the history of the fur trade, the paper marveled. In the plains country not far from Yellowstone, bison were now entirely gone. Pronghorns were down to a few wild bands. There were still some bighorns in elk. But as if to imply how fragile even those survivors were, in the winter of 1884, a group said to consist of guides and Cowboys shot down 1500 elk within sight of Mammoth Hot Springs, horrifying the park's tourists. In an effort to protect what was left, Phil Sheridan approached Forest and Stream magazine to publicize his proposal to increase the size of the park to include nearby valleys and and plains where animals migrated in winter. So, as he put it, the noble game of the Rocky Mountains might find a retreat from skin hunters. But the park's size really wasn't going to make any difference so long as no one seemed serious about stopping such horrors. By then, tourists visiting Yellowstone rarely saw animals anymore. The few bison were invisible cougars rare grizzlies uncommon and poisoned, and now bountied by the tens of thousands, wolves and coyotes went unseen and unheard. The destruction of virtually all the large wild animals across the entire region was the most important event in brand new Yellowstone National Park's young history, save establishing the park itself. Born to a New York family of the patrician class three years before the outbreak of the Civil War, with a southern mother for whom the whole war reconstruction thing was conversationally off limits, Theodore Roosevelt early settled on nature as a suitable dinner topic at Harvard. Roosevelt first wanted to study natural history, but he had long hoped to be a writer. And by the end of his time in college he had discovered history, which turned out to be a way to explore and hunt and collect in the imagination. This led him into a multi year project writing what he would call the Winning of the west, in which he conceived frontier hunters as the true heroes of the whole colonial process. Roosevelt's book came out at almost exactly the same time that the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner used Darwinian ideas to argue in a famous essay that the American wilderness had turned Europeans into a sort of Homo americanus, a new and exceptional people forged by their relationship with nature. Roosevelt's and Turner's ideas shape and promote prefigured many of the developments around American animals and wilderness for the next six decades. But the wild world around him was changing so rapidly that first the future president had to figure out how to save the animals that had made the country the frontier adventureland he believed it to be. This was a battle his friend, author George Bird Grinnell, had been fighting for in the pages of his magazine Forest and Stream, and with organizations that he had founded, like the Audubon Society. Shocked by what he had witnessed in the west from his two ranches in North Dakota in December of 1887, Roosevelt invited Grinnell and 10 other friends, all wealthy northeastern elites with economic and philosophical underpinnings little different than the nobility class from Europe, to launch an organization Roosevelt named after his two favorite frontier hunters. He called it the Boone and Crockett Club. The difference between the 1850s and the late 1880s, though, had become blindingly obvious, whether via working class people killing animals for money or a leech without a conscience who shot down animals en masse for pleasure. By the 1880s, wildlife in America was evaporating before people's eyes without a monumental change. Soon, the ancient bestiary Old Worlders had found in America 250 years earlier could easily be lost. Entirely distinct from the market hunt related to the field sports, but more adaptable. Sport hunting as an idea had first emerged in the 1840s with the writings of an English immigrant named William Herbert. Herbert insisted that what had made Brits the great imperialists were was a hunting tradition among upper class men. In Herbert's view, hunting was a noble recreation that kept men from succumbing to a threat from within, namely the creeping feminization of modern life for men in cities. Herbert recommended a return to the virtues of colonial hunters, but with the aspirations of an upper class with a conscience. In his view, most rural hunters were pot hunters at best, meaning they hunted for food at worst, they were market hunters and neither knew nor cared anything about the natural history of the animals they shot. But middle class hunters could emulate the elite European model and endeavor to understand animal science. As sport hunters, they could look on animals benevolently, with empathy, not as a means to easy cash. They could engage in morally superior behavior, practicing so called fair chase, refraining from shooting, nursing females or their young. They can even observe the laws the states and territories were frantically passing to regulate and halt the destruction of wild animals. Restrictions like these were a hard sell to many Americans, especially in rural parts of the country. Rural and immigrant hunters who wanted to keep killing animals for food and money clashed now almost yearly with the new sport hunters, most of them from the cities who increasingly saw hunting as a weekend recreation. Roosevelt's Boone and Crockett Club was washed then in the blood of William Herbert's philosophy. Its initial roster of 100 full time members and 50 associates came from the right class. All were prominent, all were easterners, all were all urban. They were also all men. There were celebrity painters and writers like Albert Bierstadt and Owen Worcester, Military heroes such as Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh Sherman. Prominent scientists like Clarence King. Animals did figure into the club's constitution as its primary purpose was to work for the preservation of the large game of this country, and a second one was to assist in enforcing the existing laws promoting natural history. Science was there too, but the core of the club was hunting. To be a member, one had to have pursued and shot three different species of that large game with a rifle. Indeed, firearms, especially the rifle, figured as prominently in the constitution as as the animals themselves. The very first of the Boone and Crockett's bylaws made clear the club's purpose was manly sport. With the rifle, that coin had two sides. The only way to preserve the manly sport was to save America's animals. In its first two decades, the Boone and Crockett Club moved heaven and earth to rescue some of the country's disappearing wildlife. Its efforts began when the club became a force supporting the US Army's role in ending poaching and market hunting in Yellowstone and other early national parks. It continued when the club advocated on behalf of a wholly new idea in America, rather than seeing the General Land Office continue to privatize every square inch of federal land through the homestead acts and giveaways. To encourage rail lines and other infrastructure, the club supported the federal government retaining important parts of its western landscape as public lands. And urged on by Grinnell, the Boone and Crockett Club promoted yet another unprecedented step for the federal government, the passage of the Lacey act in 1900 to curb the market hunt that had made American animals commodity resources for three centuries. William Hornady, with a state university degree not quite elite enough to be invited into the club, was then writing a book called Our Vanishing Wildlife, which included these lines. Here is an inexorable law of nature to which there are no exceptions. No wild species of bird, mammal, reptile or fish can withstand exploitation for commercial purposes. These were revolutionary steps for a country steeped in Adam Smith economics, John Stuart Mill freedoms and the anarchy of the wild wild West. The public lands idea was so truly revolutionary that I'll devote a coming episode to how that happened. But ending the market slaughter of wildlife was equally a watershed. Shooting, trapping and netting animals and birds for profit had been central to Americanism since colonial times. But by the end of the 19th century, its role in wrecking the natural world had grown impossible. Impossible to ignore. As for safari fieldsports, at least in America, these kinds of massacres sank under the weight of their own excesses. Windham Thomas Windham Quinn, 4th Earl of Dunraven, was an example of a fieldsport elite who was sensitive enough to sit beside a fire in the 1870s and and pen a premonition of the future. On this particular day, he and his guides had run their horses into a huge herd of elk. If you had no moral conscience about what you were doing, it was exhilarating. This elk running is perfectly magnificent, he wrote. We gallop after them like maniacs, cutting them off till we get in the midst of them when we shoot all that we can. But as the adrenaline ebbed, Dunraven experienced an odd ennui. At the end of the shooting, he'd gotten a glimpse of the future. He tried to fight it off, but he knew it was real. In a second, it was all gone. There was not a living creature to be seen. And the oppressive silence was was unbroken by the faintest sound. I looked all around the horizon. Not a sign of life. Everything seemed dull, dead quiet, unutterably sad and melancholy. Dunraven knew what he had just participated in simply couldn't stand. Or else that oppressive silence was coming for all wild America.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

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[Brent]

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[Podcast Host]

So Dan, I think today's Hunters look back to sort of the 1880s, 1890s, as sort of the origin story of our pastime, our culture as hunters. And it gets fuzzier when you go back further than that because as you explain here, there's certain, like, missing cultural elements that simply are absent.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

In that, in those earlier decades. And so when you go, when you start to think about, you know, heritage versus history and sort of how we explain who we are today by looking back at the past, there's not really, there's not really an obvious, like, forerunner in the 1850s, 1840s.

[Dan Flores]

No, no, there's not. I mean, so I, I wanted to tell this story or these stories about people like William Drummond Stewart and Sir St. George Gore because they, I think, illustrate a kind of a classic of the really the anarchy of the so called western frontier. What we have referred to, still referred to as the wild, wild West. When everything was wide open, you could, I mean, if you were interested in freedom, this was it. You could, you were free to do whatever human nature compels you to do. And when you look back at those stories, even at the time they were disturbing and particularly now, they're pretty remarkably disturbing. I mean, what you see is human nature equipped humans equipped with modern technology, at least in terms of firearms that are capable of, of taking out large animals and people with the ability to spend a lot of money and go to exotic places where there are no regulations whatsoever on what you can do. And the result is some of the things that happened in the American west from the 1830s really through the safaris didn't really end until the 1880s. And I mean, I only told the stories of two or three or four of the people who were involved. There were many more of them. I mean, this was happening on a fairly regular basis. And of course, as I try to point out, this is before the idea of conservation ever emerges. It's before anyone is thinking about posterity, you know, which is why I wanted to use that Cornelius Vanderbilt line, you know, what the hell did posterity ever do for me? I mean, that's kind of the sense that many of the people have then. And, and so what they do, of course, is those people alive then indulging in the kind of, really kind of sadistic sort of killing that they did. I mean, they ended up robbing those of us down the timeline from being able to experience something of that world. So it's kind of, to me, it's a distortion, disturbing lesson out of history. And we finally, we righted the ship Kind of at the last, almost the last moment when it could be righted. But, boy, these stories from earlier are pretty, pretty disturbing. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And, and I think one aspect of the story that you touch on in this episode is that, like, when we talk about Theodore Roosevelt and like, what he did with establishing public lands, establishing national forests, like, we, we easily recognize that as it was controversial at the time and he had a lot of adversaries and enemies.

[Dan Flores]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

We don't often talk about how early efforts to curtail this type of slaughter was equally.

[Dan Flores]

Equally resistant.

[Podcast Host]

Equally resistant. Yeah. And, you know, you read books like Louis Warren's and there's game wardens, the first game wardens are getting killed. And, and it's, it's very much an urban, rural divide here. And we look to TR as sort of the everyman. You know, hunters today at least look towards him as sort of the everyman, every, like, champion of the common man. But a lot of what he was doing even then was controversial at the time.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, it was. And you know, and as you said, it was class warfare around this idea, particularly to try to stop the market hunt, which had been going on since the 1620s. I mean, we have been, we've been doing this in America forever. And you know, in my, my book Wild New World, one of the things that I wanted to, to do at regular intervals, and it wasn't hard because the material was, was there, was to demonstrate how Americans thought of this freedom to kill wild animals for money as a part of the American franchise. I mean, it was like men having the right to vote. I mean, they just believe that this was something that went with being an American. You got to go out and kill animals as many as you want. And if you happen to live in the rural countryside, and of course, huge numbers of Americans did, the majority population lived in rural America up until the 1920s. A lot of people thought this was a way to enter the cash economy. I mean, if the modern world was being ruled by cash money, this was one of the ways to get it. You just laid waste to whatever particular animals happened to be within reach. And so, yeah, this particular episode about the elites operating without a conscience of any kind because they can, combined with the market hunt, which is a kind of a working class phenomenon. I mean, when you look at that at, say in the 1850s, it doesn't look as if 50 years out there's going to be a resolution of this, it looks like from two different angles from the market hunt on the part of rural people and this kind of conscienceless exploitation of nature on the part of elites that we're going to end up with nothing left. And so Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell and, you know, and the Boone and Crockett Club, I mean, it was almost. You kind of look at it in history as almost out of nowhere, but somehow they managed to put this together and bring a halt to what was happening.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it almost strikes me as sort of like a coup. You know, it's a small group of very powerful, influential people who sort of flip the world. Flip the world on its head, in a sense. And they're in such positions of power.

[Dan Flores]

That.

[Podcast Host]

The world follows along very quickly. And. And I think, you know, obviously people who read about the history of hunting in this country are more informed than the general public. But the Boone and Crockett Club has this reputation as being most commonly associated with its record book. But if you look at conservation laws from its founding up through the 20s, 30s, Ford, I mean, it's. They have a hand in everything. And especially in that turn of the century moment, I mean, they're the prime mover behind the scenes getting. Getting things done in terms of the Lacy act and other landmark legislation like that.

[Dan Flores]

Well, I mean, I. I remember that when we were both at the University of Montana, I mean, you were working on the Boone and Crockett Club for, for a good bit. And I know you've read an enormous amount of the. The original documents from that organization, but yeah, it was, you know, we don't think of it so much today in these terms, but it was one of the key environmental or conservation progressive organizations back at the turn of the 20th century, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and its focus. Obviously there were other government agencies that focused on things like timber and on water, but this one particularly, which was not of government, focused on wildlife, you know, and you have to say, I mean, one of the reasons they did is because they wanted to continue to be able to hunt. They wanted to have animals that were still out there. And so, you know, it's. It's. Looking back, it's. And I'll do this in some later episodes, it's easy to kind of critique this early sort of wildlife rescue as well. What we were interested in was things that we wanted to hunt and we didn't have much interest in. We didn't know anything about ecologies. We weren't interested in predators and things like that except to get rid of them. And so that obviously allows for other sort of historical forces to play out in the future. But it was critical for the Boone and Crockett Club to emerge when it did, because things were really looking bad. I mean, we had gotten. We had gotten bison down to the point where it was really sketchy about whether the genetic diversity was sufficient to rescue them. And we were getting animals like pronghorns down to the point, some sources say 5,000, only 5,000 left, some 7,000. But down to numbers where you start worrying about genetic diversity to be able to save things. I mean, that's one of, of course, the real issues and endangered species rescue is that you can't let things get down to the point where the genetic diversity is so small that the animals are not able to really survive in a healthy way into the future. And we were getting close to that with a lot of things at the turn of the 20th century.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And I think one of the interesting aspects about the Boone and Crockett story is this idea of sportsmanship and a new. I mean, it's really what it is is a restraint, self imposed restraint that then gets written into law in a lot of ways. But this is the creation of something very new. It's not just sort of the winning out of one side versus the other. It's a very new cultural movement.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, it is. And you know, and it's, you have to say, it's in a good measure based on a respect for the animals themselves and a kind of a growing empathy and ability. And I think, you know, this is the Darwinian age, for one thing. And I, I think that, that Darwin's ideas probably were. Were in the minds of a great many of these people and that helped produce a kind of an emerging empathy for other, other species that hadn't been there before. I mean, you certainly don't see it when St. George Gore is on the Powder river in the 1850s. He seemed to have no compassion or empathy whatsoever. And so I think the Darwinian age helps cultivate some of that. This sense that the nature writers of the time in the early 20th century were trying to cultivate that, you know, we are and the beasts are kin. That was Ernest Thompson Seton's famous line in his books, we and the beasts are kin. So that I think played some role in producing a whole new way that the Boone and Crockett Club managed to get its ideas out into the world.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And I think one of the interesting things here too is like TR himself goes through these, goes through a change. Right. It's not, it's that you see this change in the policy and the, the private sector, the public sector. But it, it begins with, in a lot of cases, individual sort of realizations or conversions, if you will, to a new way of looking at the world.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah, and I, I think TR is one. I think George Bird Grinnell, you know, is another. He's just a critical figure in this age. William Temple Hornaday, you know, is another one. I mean, these guys came from, you know, Hornaday came from a different kind of background than people like Grinnell and Roosevelt did. But he too was undergoing this kind of transformation. And so it's really interesting historically to look back at that and see these people began to alter their sense of, of what they needed to do to make the natural world survive into the future.

[Podcast Host]

Well, Dan, thanks.

[Dan Flores]

Yeah. Fun to talk.

[Podcast Host]

Foreign.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

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[Dan Flores]

All.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

This is that classic HBCU vibe. Non stop action.

[Brent]

The band is rocking and the crowd lit.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

Chance echo drum beat everybody showing that school pride.

[Brent]

A game like this.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

Yeah, it calls for an ice cold Coca Cola. Ah, crisp and refreshing. That's a game changer right there.

[Dan Flores]

Mmm. Yeah, that taste always hits the right note.

[Brent]

Just like the band at halftime.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

And just like that, we're back at it.

[Dan Flores]

Passionate fans, school colors everywhere.

[Brent]

And in ice cream, cold Coca Cola.

[Dan Flores]

That's a winning combo.

[Hunter Brand Spokesperson]

No matter the sport, no matter the yard. Everybody knows fan work is thirsty work. So grab a Coca Cola and keep that HBCU pride going.

[Dan Flores]

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