It is easy to sentimentalize subsistence hunting, even while acknowl-
edging the desperation young Audie Murphy and many boys and men like
him took to the task. Subsistence hunters killed to supply essential protein
and hides for themselves and their kin. They used what they took, and they
took no more than they needed. Many must have prayed for good fortune
rather than the prey’s forgiveness, like their native predecessors on these
landscapes. But subsistence hunters seem altogether justified and honor-
able, and public memory has smiled on them. The boy or man alone, with
one ball or bullet, out to feed himself and kin is a great trope that ennobles
the American poor and working classes.
During the s, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings created such a late-
nineteenth-century hunter, her fictional Penny Baxter, modeling him after
a composite of men she knew in northern Florida. Desperate as Penny
often was, he was principled in his relationship with animals, notably in
his refusal to employ cruel leg traps, like the neighboring Forresters. Penny
thought animals ought to have an even chance, at least, and in this respect
he closely resembles elite European and American ‘‘sportsmen.’’ Penny
actually sympathized with his nemesis, Ole Slewfoot, the marauding,
human-hating bear, because of the trap disfigurement that gave him his
name. But because Slewfoot threatened human subsistence in the ham-
mocks, he had to die—albeit cleanly and humanely. Penny’s ultimate manly
accomplishment was his dispatch of the bear in this hard and personal
way, and his reward (in addition to poor Slewfoot’s hide, meat, and oil) was
approval and admiration by his community—even the Forresters. Such ad-
miration would live on, too, doubtlessly. For in fiction and in vast historical
experience, hunting makes stories that last longer than the men and ani-
mals featured.^4
The problem with the sentimental portrait of subsistence hunters is that
—while doubtlessly true here and there—lonely necessity and economic
use of animals does not capture the more important context of hunting.
This was social: hunting as pleasurable entertainment for men singly but
especially in groups, as an essential venue for the socialization of boys, and
not least important, as that inexhaustible wellspring of stories both pica-
resque and epic. One cannot underestimate the necessities and pleasures
of the table. Yet hunting should be viewed as but one aspect (albeit an im-
portant one) of men’s relationship with animals in general and with one
another.
Grady McWhiney, historian of antebellum cracker culture, devotes little
space to hunting but rightly subsumes the subject within an encompass-