Great article. I used to know quite a few of those “4Runner Environmentalists”. It is unfortunate that they are a dying breed. They were a varied lot that broke stereotypes from environmentalist cowboys, Democrats with massive gun collections, and weed smoking Republicans to Libertarians who distrust corporate power. They tended to be fiercely independent and distrustful of the government and corporations. Right now most of those that are left consider themselves politically homeless. One more thing about them that I find rather amusing. They understood that if you want to protect the environment, you get a bunch of old cowboys, hunters, fishermen, forest rangers, and outdoorsmen together and put them on it, instead of a city boy yuppie right out of college.
Jason Highley
2 years ago
Excellent piece. This is why I read Unherd. Going to snatch up some of these writings immediately.
Totally agree. I’ve already ordered “Across the Wide Missouri” and I also found “A Survivor’s Recollections of the Whitman Massacre” by Matilda Sager, one of the orphaned Sager sisters mentioned in the piece.
I would recommend checking out True West Magazine. It is a publication by old west history buff for old west history buffs. They have also been publishing for over six decades and now have a digital archive of every issue going back to 1952.
Good article. But many of the valuable truths are actually standard local culture in Western states where natives and mining history are present.
Colin MacDonald
2 years ago
Reminds of what happens in parts of the Scottish Highlands, where overfunded environmental charities in concert with government agencies generally get in the way of local’s attempts to scratch a living. Read Ian Mitchell’s “Isles of the West” for an idea of what goes on there. The antics of the RSPB are particularly bad. And read “Isles of the North” to see how the more bolshie folks of western Norway have resisted the incursions of the Green Blob.
Allison Barrows
2 years ago
“He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.” That “but” is rather telling, isn’t it? I suppose it would be too much to hope for a sentence like this: He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.
maybe he wanted to underline the stereotypical dichotomy between the two?
Aaron James
2 years ago
This book is great to get the feel of the Rendezvous, and is just an excellent book.
”Scotsman in Buckskin: Sir William Drummond Stewart and the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade” by Mary Reed Porter
In a rather badly thought out few years of my life I lived the sort of Mountain life, living in remote camps making my living off the North, and Far North, bush. There was still a pretty remarkable world still hanging on out there in the remote places where the misfits who are drawn to nature, and repelled by normal society, make their precarious living off the forests and remote lands.
It is a world still tinged with the same qualities, a pale shadow maybe, but remaining, of men (and it is mostly men by a large percent) who always have found their way out to remote lands – an unusual kind, ones whose main trait is the inability to have anyone telling them what to do.
The scene out there in it is one I can recall so clearly; this kind of barely visible people eking their way out in remote camps, mostly solitary, very rugged, very harsh life, who have some comradery, some very scattered sense of community. It is odd, like say the solitary creatures in the wild – they all can see each other, know each other in meeting or passing, but are largely invisible to any not of their ilk. You know immeadeately who is real, and who is just pretend, who is a visitor in the bush who thinks they know it – but are just tourists, and who is actually one of them.
When you do become of the bush people you can see the network, the others, the odd life’s out there – and they see you, like it is some alternate reality you are in, looking out you see the real world, but those who live in the real world do not really see you; you have become an outsider and are off in some other world.
The sad thing is modern age is gobbling up the wild places at an ever accelerating rate. California has taken Idaho and Montana…… GPS and more and more outdoor hobbyists (who think they are outdoors men) are taking the remote places… and that kind is disappearing I would suspect.
Nice writing. But not all exiles from California to the Intermountain West are there to import post WWII Californication. Many are true Westerners, recognizable by their respect for the land, more than for any government. Mother Nature is an incorruptible judge.
William MacDougall
2 years ago
A confused review of what sounds like a confused book. Nearly all of the deaths mentioned were from European disease, inevitable once Columbus came to America; nothing to do with capitalism. The other evils appear to come from indigenous practices like Indian slavery and from large corporations, which is not synonymous with free enterprise capitalism, and often caused by government action. An individual trapper going to the wilderness to collect pelts and returning to markets to sell them would appear to be the ultimate in free enterprise capitalism.
I didn’t find the review confusing but I agree with your observations regarding the spread of disease into new environments and the nature of indigenous practices. “This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”
And I was surprised to read this sentiment that describes the fallacy of historical presentism. When combined with moral presentism we have the scourge of the rape and pillage of history for contemporary political activism – usually in race marxism and sometimes in feminist marxism.
Deborah H
2 years ago
I agree with the other commenters. Excellent article. As a Mayflower descendent with a 400 year history of ancestors in Plymouth and Chatham, Mass, I learned something new about American history here! I will be getting this book “Across the Wide Missouri” and fancy myself a Green-neck.
Oh! Goodie goodie!….an opportunity to let everyone know that I am a Mayflower decendent!
Bret Larson
2 years ago
Humans produce industry, its how they survive and flourish. People who are good at it share the industry around so those who help provide it continue that support. Some people dont like other peoples industry, you know, over there.
That is as long as they have their needs taken care of.
Justin Binks
2 years ago
Jason Manning covers the fur trade of the time in his very enjoyable books about the West.
David Yetter
2 years ago
Are we sure it wasn’t the Federal Government in the form of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service that destroyed the American West. The conflict between the Bundy family, attempting to exercise their traditional open-range grazing rights, and the BLM which had usurped them was much in the news when it happened. It was a cause célèbre with the American right, and not just the “far-right”, as an example of government overreach.
Great article. I used to know quite a few of those “4Runner Environmentalists”. It is unfortunate that they are a dying breed. They were a varied lot that broke stereotypes from environmentalist cowboys, Democrats with massive gun collections, and weed smoking Republicans to Libertarians who distrust corporate power. They tended to be fiercely independent and distrustful of the government and corporations. Right now most of those that are left consider themselves politically homeless. One more thing about them that I find rather amusing. They understood that if you want to protect the environment, you get a bunch of old cowboys, hunters, fishermen, forest rangers, and outdoorsmen together and put them on it, instead of a city boy yuppie right out of college.
Excellent piece. This is why I read Unherd. Going to snatch up some of these writings immediately.
Totally agree. I’ve already ordered “Across the Wide Missouri” and I also found “A Survivor’s Recollections of the Whitman Massacre” by Matilda Sager, one of the orphaned Sager sisters mentioned in the piece.
you could also try Mountain Men by Vardis Fisher and Robert Bunkers biography of John Johnson, “Crow Killer”
Thanks.
I would recommend checking out True West Magazine. It is a publication by old west history buff for old west history buffs. They have also been publishing for over six decades and now have a digital archive of every issue going back to 1952.
Good article. But many of the valuable truths are actually standard local culture in Western states where natives and mining history are present.
Reminds of what happens in parts of the Scottish Highlands, where overfunded environmental charities in concert with government agencies generally get in the way of local’s attempts to scratch a living. Read Ian Mitchell’s “Isles of the West” for an idea of what goes on there. The antics of the RSPB are particularly bad. And read “Isles of the North” to see how the more bolshie folks of western Norway have resisted the incursions of the Green Blob.
“He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.” That “but” is rather telling, isn’t it? I suppose it would be too much to hope for a sentence like this: He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, urbane and unabashedly sophisticated.
Spot on. To be fair to the author, I suspect he’d agree with your sentiment.
maybe he wanted to underline the stereotypical dichotomy between the two?
This book is great to get the feel of the Rendezvous, and is just an excellent book.
”Scotsman in Buckskin: Sir William Drummond Stewart and the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade” by Mary Reed Porter
In a rather badly thought out few years of my life I lived the sort of Mountain life, living in remote camps making my living off the North, and Far North, bush. There was still a pretty remarkable world still hanging on out there in the remote places where the misfits who are drawn to nature, and repelled by normal society, make their precarious living off the forests and remote lands.
It is a world still tinged with the same qualities, a pale shadow maybe, but remaining, of men (and it is mostly men by a large percent) who always have found their way out to remote lands – an unusual kind, ones whose main trait is the inability to have anyone telling them what to do.
The scene out there in it is one I can recall so clearly; this kind of barely visible people eking their way out in remote camps, mostly solitary, very rugged, very harsh life, who have some comradery, some very scattered sense of community. It is odd, like say the solitary creatures in the wild – they all can see each other, know each other in meeting or passing, but are largely invisible to any not of their ilk. You know immeadeately who is real, and who is just pretend, who is a visitor in the bush who thinks they know it – but are just tourists, and who is actually one of them.
When you do become of the bush people you can see the network, the others, the odd life’s out there – and they see you, like it is some alternate reality you are in, looking out you see the real world, but those who live in the real world do not really see you; you have become an outsider and are off in some other world.
The sad thing is modern age is gobbling up the wild places at an ever accelerating rate. California has taken Idaho and Montana…… GPS and more and more outdoor hobbyists (who think they are outdoors men) are taking the remote places… and that kind is disappearing I would suspect.
Nice writing. But not all exiles from California to the Intermountain West are there to import post WWII Californication. Many are true Westerners, recognizable by their respect for the land, more than for any government. Mother Nature is an incorruptible judge.
A confused review of what sounds like a confused book. Nearly all of the deaths mentioned were from European disease, inevitable once Columbus came to America; nothing to do with capitalism. The other evils appear to come from indigenous practices like Indian slavery and from large corporations, which is not synonymous with free enterprise capitalism, and often caused by government action. An individual trapper going to the wilderness to collect pelts and returning to markets to sell them would appear to be the ultimate in free enterprise capitalism.
I didn’t find the review confusing but I agree with your observations regarding the spread of disease into new environments and the nature of indigenous practices.
“This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”
And I was surprised to read this sentiment that describes the fallacy of historical presentism. When combined with moral presentism we have the scourge of the rape and pillage of history for contemporary political activism – usually in race marxism and sometimes in feminist marxism.
I agree with the other commenters. Excellent article. As a Mayflower descendent with a 400 year history of ancestors in Plymouth and Chatham, Mass, I learned something new about American history here! I will be getting this book “Across the Wide Missouri” and fancy myself a Green-neck.
Oh! Goodie goodie!….an opportunity to let everyone know that I am a Mayflower decendent!
Humans produce industry, its how they survive and flourish. People who are good at it share the industry around so those who help provide it continue that support.
Some people dont like other peoples industry, you know, over there.
That is as long as they have their needs taken care of.
Jason Manning covers the fur trade of the time in his very enjoyable books about the West.
Are we sure it wasn’t the Federal Government in the form of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service that destroyed the American West. The conflict between the Bundy family, attempting to exercise their traditional open-range grazing rights, and the BLM which had usurped them was much in the news when it happened. It was a cause célèbre with the American right, and not just the “far-right”, as an example of government overreach.