W.J. Astore
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Last night, I watched season six, episode three of “The Crown." The show follows the triumphs and travails of the British royal family, with last night’s ending being especially poignant as it re-created the events leading to the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris.
A side plot of the episode was Prince William’s first stag kill while hunting in Scotland. After William shoots his first stag, his guide smears the blood from the animal on William’s face. A royal rite of passage, if you will. It made me recall a paper I wrote way back in 1982 on the roles and methods of hunting in antebellum America in which I recounted a similar scene of “blooding.”
I researched my paper in a lot of old hunting books and journals kept at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. The result was a thesis of about 25-pages. Roughly twenty years later, I cut it down and sent the version below to an outdoor magazine (I think “Field & Stream”) and got this terse note: Not for us. Back into the drawer it went.
With hunting season in full swing, and with Prince William’s blooding on my mind, here’s my old cutdown article. Hope you enjoy it.
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William Faulkner famously observed that the past is not only not dead, it is not even past. Hunting as a form of sport and recreation in America has a rich past whose history still informs present-day attitudes. Of course, hunting in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s was different from today in that it was considered to be a thoroughly masculine pursuit. Yet many of the benefits of hunting cited by sporting magazines and books from 150 years ago still resonate for contemporary hunters—male and female.
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