Blog Mirror: Sated Reflections on a full freezer, and when enough is good enough

 

Sated

Reflections on a full freezer, and when enough is good enough

Subsitance Hunter/Fisherman of the Week. Douglas Crowe

You probably have to be a lifelong, or at least a long time, resident of Wyoming to remember Crow now, but he was a great man.

Born in 1939, and passing away four years ago on Thanksgiving Day, Crowe was a local character who authored a slightly fictionalized account of his early years in the book A Growing Season. Born in Kansas, he came to Wyoming as a teenager with his family and was shipped off to the UC Ranch for summer work in an event which would end up defining the rest of his life, a fairly typical Wyoming story, really.

Crowe served in the U.S. Army, married upon his return, and the went to Casper College and UW to earn a PhD in Zoology in 1974.  From there he became a very significant wildlife manger for hte Wyoming Game and Fish, and ultimately served in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife and a host of southern African fish and game organizations.  He was dedicated to wildlife.

He was also a great author, although it only expressed itself in a handful of books.  A column in The Wyoming Wildlife, while he worked for the Wyoming Game and Fish, was the first thing I read it in every time it arrived.

Crowe was outspoken and folksy, but hugely intelligent and dedicated.  He epitomized wildlife management in Wyoming of his era and is greatly missed.

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.: 

Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

Farm in Louisiana, 1940.

A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry.  Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.

If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand.  It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.

The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time.  They were:

• Donald Davidson, from Tennessee, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian. He was also a segregationist.
• John Gould Fletcher, from Arkansas, poet and historian.  He was the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize
• Henry Blue Kline, a writer educated at Vanderbilt who taught at Tennessee, before ironically taking government employment for the rest of his life.
• Lyle H. Lanier, an experimental psychologist from Tennessee.
• Andrew Nelson Lytle,, also of Tennessee and also of Vanderbilt. a poet, novelist and essayist
• Herman Clarence Nixon, of Alabama and a political scientist.
• Frank Lawrence Owsley, also of Alabama and Vanderbilt. a historian
• John Crowe Ransom, of Tennessee and Vanderbilt poet, professor, essayist
• Allen Tate, poet, and of Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
• John Donald Wade, of Georgia, and a professor at Harvard and Columbia, biographer and essayist
• Robert Penn Warren, of Kentucky, and who was a university professor in a variety of universities, and a poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States
• Stark Young, of Mississippi, a novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright

What marks them is their monumental work, which was a Depression Era, anti-New Deal, strike against the modern world and capitalism. It is flawed, in that its view of the American South was highly romantic, and frankly they were not bothered by its inherent racism and manged to basically not even see it.  The work, while important, includes muted strain of Lost Cause yearning which are not admirable at all.  Indeed, it's hard not to notice that they didn't notice that the class that was hurt the most by New Deal farm policies were African American tenant farmers.

Still, as noted, there'rs no escaping this work.  It remains the magnum opus of American Agrarianism.

Blog Mirror: This Day in History: Chuck Mawhinney, Legendary Marine

This Day in History: Chuck Mawhinney, Legendary Marine

“My father was a Marine during World War II,” he later explained. “I started shooting at a very young age, and he taught me to shoot like the Marines taught him, so there wasn’t any big transition from hunting in Oregon to becoming a sniper.” 

I have no doubt this is true, uncomfortable truth for many that it may be.

Subsistance Hunter/Fisherman of the Week: Dick Proenneke

Dick Proenneke may be the ultimate modern subsistence hunter and fisherman in so far as the Western World is concerned.

Proenneke was born in Iowa in 1916.  His father was sort of a jack of all trades laborer, which is and was common to rural areas.  His father was also a veteran of World War One.  Dick followed in his father's footsteps prior to World War Two, leaving high school before graduation, something extremely common in that era (less than 50% of males graduated from high school prior to World War Two  He joined the Navy in World War Two and took up hiking around San Francisco while recovering from rheumatic fever contracted in the service.  Having the disease was life altering for him, as he became focused on his health.  He received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1945.

After the war he became a diesel mechanic, but his love of nature caused him to move to Oregon to work on a sheep ranch, and then to Shuyark Island, Alaska, in 1950.  From 1950 to 1968 he worked for a variety of employers, including the Navy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.  He moved to the wilderness in 1968, at age 52, the year that in many ways gave us the Post Post World War Two World we are now seeing collapse.  He lived there, as a single man, until 1999, when old age forced him out of the woods and to his brother's home in California.  He died in there in 2003, at age 86.  His cabin now belongs to the Park Service.

Proenneke loved photography and left an extensive filmed record of his life in Alaska.

There's a lot that can be gleaned from his life, some of which would probably be unwarranted, as every person's life is their own.  Having noted that, however, it should be noted that Proenneke is not the only person to live in this manner in Alaska's back wood, including up to the present.  So he's not fully unique, but rather his high intelligence and filmed record has made him known.

It's also notable, fwiw, that he was a single man.  Basically, if looked at carefully, his retreat to the woods came in his retirement, as he had very low expenses up until 1968, and had worked for the government for many years.  He never married, so he never had a family or responsibilities of that type.  Many of the men who live in wild Alaska have married into native families, so their circumstances are different.

Probably every young man who loves the outdoors has contemplated doing something like what Proenneke actually did, while omitted the decades of skilled labor as a single man that came before it.  And in reality, Proenneke, had lived over half his life as a working man with strong outdoor interests, rather than in the wilderness.  People really aren't meant to live the way he lived, in extreme isolation, save for a few.

Related Threads:

Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness

Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness part II

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, February 18, 1909. The first North American Conservation Conference.

Lex Anteinternet: Thursday, February 18, 1909. The first North Amer...: 

Thursday, February 18, 1909. The first North American Conservation Conference.

President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first North American Conservation Conference at the White House.  

The conference was between delegates of the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Oddly enough, Wallace Stegner was born on this day as well, in Lake Mills, Iowa.

Blog Mirror: Ranch owner: Corner crossing would erase billions in private property value

 My frank reaction is, "so what"?

Ranch owner: Corner crossing would erase billions in private property value

Almost all the land in Wyoming derives from one of the various homestead acts. Those weren't supposed to make people rich.  Indeed, one grandson of a homesteader once commented to me "it was a nice program for poor people.

Blog Mirror: Studies: Climate change, lake trout could impede Yellowstone Lake cutthroat recovery indefinitely

 

Studies: Climate change, lake trout could impede Yellowstone Lake cutthroat recovery indefinitely

Another lawsuit over wolves.

Ten entities intend to sue the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for not extending protection for wolves under the Endangered Species Act.

When wolves were first introduced, it was my opinion that wolves themselves would not be a problem in the Rocky Mountain West, but the people who surround them.  

That has proven to be correct.

Blog Mirror: Wolves get around.

 

Wolves get around.