‘My Winchester spoke to her’: Crafting Montana as a hunter’s paradise, c.1870-1910

This article considers the construction of the Northern Rockies as a hunter’s paradise in the latter years of the nineteenth century. It explores the crafting of the region as a game utopia by a cadre of hunter?tourists, whose writings of what I term “fictionalized reality” celebrated the Rockies as an American Serengeti for sports and a realm of pioneer exoticism. Significantly, it argues that hunting became far more than an exercise in imperial tourism, instead representing a regenerative mechanism through which the sportsman emerged from the game trail, firstly as an exemplar of American masculinity, and secondly, as a fully?fledged westerner. Stories of nature red in tooth and the “hunter?hero” thus effectively obscured the political and economic realities of frontier assimilation to present the West as one vast playground for entertainment, adventuring and honorable violence. The article discusses the engagement between hunter and hunted, taking in themes of western tourism, codes of manhood, nature appreciation, gun?play, and the gaze, before concluding with an analysis of how the “storied past” of hunting literature, photography, and taxidermy broadcast a strident identity for the Northern Rockies that persists to this day.