Ebook: The hunter’s game : poachers and conservationists in twentieth-century America

Louis Warren contends that these conflicts arose from deep social divisions and that the bitter history of conservation offers a new narrative for the history of the American West. At the heart of western - and American - history, Warren argues, is the transformation of many local resources, like wildlife, into "public goods," or "national commons."

The Hunter's Game reveals that early wildlife conservation was driven not by heroic idealism, but by the interests of recreational hunters and the tourist industry. As American wildlife populations declined at the end of the nineteenth century, elite, urban sportsmen began to lobby for game laws that would restrict the customary hunting practices of immigrants, Indians, and other local hunters.  Read more...