Acknowledgments
When I started exploratory research for this book and gave an initial conference presentation about it, I was pregnant with my first child. The book will appear in print as he is poised to graduate high school. Reaching the final stages of completing the manuscript, I wondered whether I should share this openly. I asked a graduate student if she thought the story would appear disheartening, or even slightly ridiculous, to aspiring academics or writers. Her response was not what I expected. To her, the idea that someone might keep at the same project for so long and see it through suggested dedication and tenacity. She was probably too polite to add insanity, but she helped me decide that it was worth going public, though neither as a cautionary tale nor a recommended option. Instead, looking back on this long road, I am struck by the fact that I have been as lucky as I was stubborn. And not alone.
Many people and organizations supported me, and my ability to keep working on this book, over the years, and I’m grateful for the chance to offer my long overdue thanks and recognition. Multiple sources provided me with crucial funding for research and writing. A Mellon Faculty Fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania aided research in the early stages. The ACLS-Oscar Handlin Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies supported a full year of focus on the project in 2010, just before Occupy Wall Street arrived to expand the chronology and scramble the analysis. Grants from various units at the University of Colorado Boulder supported new rounds of research, including an Associate Professor Growth Grant from the Leadership Education for Advancement & Promotion program in 2013, a Kayden Research Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2015, and a Travel Grant from the Graduate Committee for the Arts & Humanities in 2018. In addition, a Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Humanities and the Arts, combined with a university-supported semester of sabbatical, allowed major writing progress in 2016–17. Another Kayden Research Grant defrayed the costs of illustration, and the Department of History helped secure a subvention for the publication. Without any one of these sources of support, the finish line would have been even further away.
I had the great opportunity to present chunks of this project at conferences and invited seminars, all of which prodded my thinking in important ways. I appreciate the responses of commentators and fellow panelists at the American Society for Environmental History, American Studies Association, Organization of American Historians, and Western History Association. In particular, Kathleen Franz, Lawrence Glickman, John Kasson, Kevin Leonard, and Kathryn Morse provided memorable comments that stuck with me as I worked through tough spots. I was grateful also to have the chance to present works-in-progress with different groups of colleagues and students in the United States, Ireland, and Brazil. For these experiences, I want to thank Shane Bergin, Jorge Simoes De Sa Martins, Anne Fuchs, Robert Hoberman, Michelle Jolly, Sarah Krakoff, Margaret Miller, James C. O’Connell, Jed Purdy,
Conrad Edick Wright, and others who sponsored and contributed to these productive discussions, from which I emerged with new energy and perspectives on this work.
I appreciate the permission to include in this book revised versions of previously published material. Portions of chapter 3 appeared as “Wilderness Wives and Dishwashing Husbands: Comfort and the Domestic Arts of Camping Out, 1880–1910,” in the fall 2009 issue of Journal of Social History (vol. 43, no. 1). An essay for a 2010 anthology provided a critical space for me to think about urban camping, the results of which informed several spots throughout the book. It appeared as “Sleeping Outside: The Political Natures of Urban Camping,” in Cities and Nature in the American West, edited by Char Miller (Reno: University of Nevada Press). Finally, revised portions of an essay on the Occupy movement appear in chapter 6: “Bring Tent: The Occupy Movement and the Politics of Public Nature in America,” originally published in Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics, edited by Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Many thanks to Bob Lockhart and Penn Press for permission to republish this work, and even more for the support of that volume and the whole Third Nature endeavor.
Archivists, librarians, and staff provided invaluable assistance at multiple stages. I failed to record the names of every individual who helped me, but I remain deeply appreciative of and continually amazed at the work they all do to make the work of historians possible. Special gratitude to Lauren Bissonette at the Forest History Society; Peter Blodgett at the Henry E. Huntington Library; Frederick Carey, Thea Lindquist, and the whole Interlibrary Loan Department at the University of Colorado Boulder Library; Danielle Castronovo at California Academy of Sciences; Clare Come at Shenandoah National Park; Deborah Dandridge, Kathy Lafferty, and Letha Johnson at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; J. Wendel Cox, in the Western History/Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library; John Gookin, Diane Shoutis, and Shannon Rochelle at the National Outdoor Leadership School headquarters in Lander, Wyoming; Nicole Grady in the Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific; Jo Harmon, Jamie Kingman-Rice, and Nicholas Noyes at the Maine Historical Society; AnnaLee Pauls in Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University; Douglas Remley at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture; and lastly, the dedicated archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration, both in College Park, Maryland, and Denver, Colorado, especially Eric Bittner, Joseph Schwartz, and Cody White.
Undergraduate and graduate students in my environmental, cultural, and US history courses over the years have contributed in significant if sometimes intangible ways to my evolving thinking about the history of camping. Several have made valuable material contributions as well. Leigh Mesler at the University of Pennsylvania helped me compile my original database and copies of early recreational camping articles. At the University of Colorado Boulder, I am sincerely grateful for the assistance of Colin Church with research on the Green Book at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in the New York Public Library; Rebecca Kennedy de Lorenzini for mining the Barrows’ Family Papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard University; Sara Porterfield, for locating and burrowing into the Outward Bound file trailer in Leadville, Colorado; and Michael Weeks with collecting news and
commentary on Occupy Wall Street, even as it was unfolding. Lastly, Amelia Brackett Hogstad and Jason Hogstad performed heroic work tracking down image permissions and files, a daunting task at any time, made even more complicated than usual amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scholars of American culture and environment have been superb fellow travelers on this journey, providing inspiration, challenge, and friendship. I appreciate being able to learn from and share ideas with Carl Abbott, Erika Bsumek, Catherine Cocks, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Rachel Gross, John Herron, Sarah Igo, Danika Medak-Saltzman, Susan A. Miller, William Philpott, Sarah Schrank, and Terence Young. Not only has this book benefited greatly from the friendly dialogues and astute questions of these and other remarkable scholars, but they have also made the usual rounds of academic travels a genuine pleasure. I’m profoundly grateful I had the chance to let Hal Rothman know how much I valued his support and unsubtle nudges, and I wish he was still here to tell me what he really thought of the final product.
I was fortunate to find a home at CU Boulder, and even more so to find myself among such smart and generous colleagues. Thomas Andrews, Elizabeth Fenn, Paul Hammer, Martha Hanna, Vilja Hulden, Susan Kent, Patricia Limerick, Daryl Maeda, Kellie Matthews, Natalie Mendoza, Helmut Müller-Sievers, and David Shneer (who left us much too soon) have all contributed to and supported this project in different ways. I’m especially thankful for Paul Sutter and Marcia Yonemoto for long-running historical conversations, steadfast support, professional advice, and genuine comradeship through and beyond academic matters. No matter where I’ve plied my trade over the decades, Bill Deverell has been in my corner with guidance, empathy, and friendship. A better mentor would be nigh impossible to find in this business, or outside of it.
It has been my great privilege to work with Susan Ferber, Executive Editor at Oxford University Press. Her patience and counsel with this shape-shifting project at every stage of a process that took a dozen years to go from proposal to manuscript alone has been simply extraordinary. The book is so much better for her keen eye and sharp pen. I also owe a great debt to the reviewers for the Press, who gave so generously of their time to offer unusually detailed reports. Their careful readings and specific suggestions proved invaluable in the revision process, and improved key areas throughout the book. Everyone else at OUP provided great support in turning the manuscript into the book, particularly Jeremy Toynbee. I treasure my Boulder community, with special gratitude to Patricia and Sean, Marc, Jeanette, Jamie, Jill, Jim, John, Heather and Don, Kevin and Anna. You all keep me going and smiling in myriad ways. Tehya and Ken, Theresa, Noelle, and Cari have all done so from afar and going back many years. A host of friends, family, and colleagues pitched in generously during the final scramble and for their contributions, I am grateful to Michael for citation expertise, Jeff for the jacket photo, Mark for the timely sleuthing, Sarah and Sean for the coaching on legal matters, and Angus and Marcia for the skilled wordsmithing. Were it not for the constant encouragement, prodding, and brilliance of Marguerite Shaffer, this book might not exist in current, or perhaps any, form. Peggy never tired of talking about camping, reminding me to keep plugging away, or showing me how to see bolder implications. Nearly every page bears an imprint of her insights and our discussions, from the
gardens at the Huntington to her porch in Maine. I look forward to our continued collaborations and adventures in nature and culture.
My family has been so supportive across the ups and downs and sideways jogs of life and academia. I thank all of you, from across the corners of the country, for your love and support. Along with the whole Young-Auletta-Kropp-Gelles-Finkelstein-Glaros band, I deeply appreciate Edie and Michael for welcoming me and for the fellowship of historians and writers; my dad Al, and Leila, for unswerving faith and support; my sister Chloe, for sharing your courage, wisdom, and laughter, each at the exact right time; and, my mom, Gale, whose humming, clacking Selectric typewriter all those years ago reminds me of the satisfactions and absurdities of being a scholar/professor/mother, and who is still there to help me through those tricky days.
To my sons, Darby and Marlin, who have only ever had a mom working on a book, I thank you for your patience and your impatience, for all the happy reasons to close the computer and make the book wait just a little bit longer. You are, both and each of you, most wonderful humans.
And finally, I count myself lucky beyond measure to share this journey, and this life, with a marvelous partner. Noah, thank you for reading all the words, talking about all the tents, reciting all the things we get to do, sharing all the writer’s tears. This is for you, that we may we sit on the stoop watching the sunset, remember back to the time of writing the book, and then amble on together.
Introduction
A PUBLIC NATURE
In January 2012, Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service (NPS), took a seat at the witness table in a packed hearing room on Capitol Hill. He was there to speak on the subject of the inquiry: camping. Specifically, the House Oversight Committee on the District of Columbia wanted to know “who made the decision to allow indefinite camping” in McPherson Square, a park two miles north of where they sat, where 300-some protestors were encamped on National Park land. Jarvis faced the panel wearing the familiar olivegreen Park Ranger uniform, his flat-brimmed Smokey Bear hat on the table in front of him. He cleared his throat and began his testimony, declaring that “all 397 of America’s national parks, but especially the national parks in Washington, D.C., are places where citizens’ rights are guaranteed under our nation’s Constitution.” His short opening statement explained that both Park Service regulations and US Park Police enforcement approaches to First Amendment demonstrations prioritized this principle, alongside the need “to protect public health and safety.” Nowhere did Jarvis mention the word “camping.”
Trey Gowdy, House member from South Carolina and chair of the hearing, immediately challenged Jarvis’s premise, arguing that Washington enjoyed no special privileges when it came to the Constitution. “There are no more First Amendment rights in this town than there are in any other city, town, hamlet in this country.” The question he posed in the very next sentence, however, pressed Jarvis on the camping point: “So define camping for me, because you say it’s prohibited. Tell me what it is. . . . What is the definition of camping?”
This seemed like a trick question. Everyone knows what camping is. Pack up the car and hit the road in search of a shady spot in the great outdoors. After wrestling the poles and rain fly into place, unzip the tent and unroll the sleeping bags. As stars peek out in the clear skies above, sit around the campfire with friends or family and roast some marshmallows. Whether or not you like spending your leisure time in this fashion, the scene is instantly recognizable as camping in America. There are, of course, variations on the theme. Through-hikers backpacking the Appalachian Trail or retirees taking the Winnebago out for an adventure on the open road. Kids with flashlights in the backyard or glampers enjoying gourmet meals under canvas. But no matter the type, to camp means to abandon one’s indoor home, voluntarily and temporarily, for outdoor recreation. Why do it? Many would say they camp to find respite from the stress and grind of modern life or to enjoy the beauty of nature. Others might camp to connect with people or to seek a thrilling encounter with the wild. Whatever the reason, the definition of camping doesn’t seem tricky or controversial. Americans expect the government to provide basic campsite infrastructure a picnic table, a parking spot for the car, and a place for the fire for a modest fee in nearly every corner of the country. Why would the head of the National Park Service need to define camping? It seems obvious. Jarvis, however, did not have the luxury of relying upon this presumptive definition. He
found himself on the hot seat in the early days of 2012, well into the nationwide campaign of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Protestors had been occupying McPherson Square for three months by that point. Its dozens of tents formed one of the movement’s last and longest standing sites of protest, and they were frustrating Trey Gowdy to no end. While Jarvis had repeatedly called it a demonstration, to several committee members it looked as if protesters were camping. Gowdy insisted on a definition that would explain this situation, because, he said “I need to go back to South Carolina and tell everyone who wants to spend the summer in one of our parks what camping is and what it is not. So, define camping for me, juxtaposed with a 24-hour vigil, because you seem inclined to draw a distinction and I can’t draw a distinction.”1 Occupy threw prevailing assumptions about camping into disarray.
Jarvis tried to clarify. Occupy was engaged in a political action for which camping served as a means, as opposed to the recreational pursuit in which camping was the end in itself. Unsatisfied, some representatives pressed him to identify the most fundamental feature of camping, rather than the motivating factor. Jarvis boiled this down to “sleeping or preparing to sleep” outdoors. He might have quoted the National Park Service regulation for Capital Region parks that defined camping as “the use of park land for living accommodation purposes such as sleeping activities, or making preparations to sleep (including the laying down of bedding for the purpose of sleeping) or storing personal belongings, or making any fire, or using any tents or shelter or other structure or vehicle for sleeping or doing any digging or earth breaking.”2 This legalistic description reduces camping to something that seems purely functional, virtually devoid of any of its pleasing qualities. According to this definition, Occupy was in fact camping. Protestors were sleeping, preparing to sleep, and using tents for sleeping, actions that were expressly prohibited at McPherson Square. Jarvis insisted, however, that they were equally engaged in First Amendment expressions through a 24-hour vigil, actions that were explicitly permitted there. For him, protecting these rights superseded prosecuting scofflaw campers.
Occupiers themselves argued vehemently that they were not camping at all, holding tightly to a definition of their action as peaceable assembly to petition the government for redress of grievances. While they framed their protest as the opposite of recreational camping, it was the camping that made Occupy stand out. The tents allowed protestors to take over urban spaces for weeks at a time, driving city, campus, and federal officials to utter distraction. As one reporter described it, what made Occupy Wall Street so memorable and challenging was this sense of “permanence,” a grip on space only made possible by the tents and sleeping bags. “These were not drop-in protests, pop-up rallies. These people came, and they came with Coleman camp stoves.”3 Since when did Coleman camp stoves signal serious protest? More typically they conjured pancake breakfasts and temporary recreation, not political discourse and long-term struggle.
Of course, prolonged camping in urban spaces usually implied something else entirely. People experiencing homelessness camp out all the time, without seeking the attention Occupiers hoped to receive. For those without housing, living outdoors is neither a recreational choice nor a political message. Encampments of people without homes to go back to have become familiar features of public spaces and city politics, further complicating any simple definition of camping. Advocates for the unsheltered often focus their efforts on
finding ways for people to avoid having to camp. Urban officials and Congressional representatives have worked to shut down both homeless and Occupy encampments. At the same time, state and federal agencies, not to mention the outdoor industry, have consistently encouraged Americans to go on camping vacations and rejuvenate themselves in the great outdoors.
In the heart of the nation’s capital rather than out among its natural wonders, Jonathan Jarvis, Trey Gowdy, Occupy protestors, and members of Congress slowly seemed to realize that defining camping in American culture and history was far more complicated than it appeared. What does it mean to camp, and why does it matter? These are the core questions animating this book. By exploring the shifting meanings of camping through the last century and a half, it argues that this activity was (and remains) key to how Americans think about their relationships to nature, the nation, and each other. When writers and historians have approached these questions, they have tended to focus on the recreational side of the story, separate from political or functional versions. These narratives locate what it means to camp in the quest for experience in nature, where the desires for “roughing it” reveal Americans’ misgivings about modern life or justifications for leisure. They also examine camping as a form of tourism or one among many outdoor pursuits, alongside fishing or hunting, for example. Within this defined category camping developed multiple forms, waxing and waning in popularity over the decades.4 Accounting for these shifts deepens understandings of the classic picture of recreational camping, yet cannot resolve the conundrums generated at McPherson Square.
Different social contexts can offer alternate perspectives on camping and outdoor recreation. The establishment of conservation-minded regulations in the late nineteenth century, for example, accompanied a first wave of camping enthusiasts. This indicated not just new affinities for nature, but also how those approaches privileged the choices and leisure of white, upper-class urbanites at the expense of nonwhite, lower-class, and rural uses of natural resources.5 In a different vein, scholars of architecture and design have examined camps as built environments and found consistencies across wide-ranging circumstances. These studies draw provocative, often unsettling links between extremely varied camps not ordinarily found in the same conversation, such as the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada. These experiments use “camp” as a ripe interpretive tool and pose challenging questions about how people “make places and homes in these itinerant times,” though they intentionally resist drawing unified conclusions.6
If these approaches confirm that a simple definition of camping is no longer possible, a mushrooming list of camps offers little help in connecting such divergent contexts. What do we do with the inescapable realization that camping has run the gamut of possible meanings, never solely representing recreational choice, social marginality, or political expression? How can it be simultaneously a vacation option, a design for unstable futures, and a refuge of last resort? If neither motivation (i.e., recreation) nor appearance (i.e., something one does with tents) resolve what camping means as a whole or why it mattered enough to spark heated Congressional debate, then surely it is necessary to grapple with how these forms developed in relation to each other.
This book employs a pair of concepts that bring a substantial subset of camping practices
into greater focus, at least for US history. The first is “public nature,” defined as both outdoor spaces and ideas about those spaces as settings where people work out relationships to nature, nation, and each other. Such spaces might range from vast tracts of land identified for possible future settlement and clearly designated national preserves to roadside areas with unclear jurisdiction and small parks amidst crowded cityscapes. This book focuses less on the collection of particular spaces that make up public nature, or their physical characteristics, than on the way Americans have understood the existence and significance of public access to the outdoors. Getting out into nature has often appeared to be a way to escape the central struggles of the nation’s history. The labels applied to these spaces put them at a remove: the hinterlands, the backcountry, the wilderness.7 Yet thinking about the relationship between multiple forms of camping and varied outdoor spaces suggests that public nature serves instead as a critical forum at the center of American culture and politics. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans have laid claim to public nature, often through forms of camping and with assertions of belonging, obligation, identity, and visibility.
These uses of public nature lead to the other useful framework that can shed further light on the meanings of camping: the social contract. Generations of Americans have worked out, and continued to rework, the terms of the nation’s social contract the set of beliefs and structures that establish what citizens and the government owe to each other. Ideas about the social contract were baked into the founding of the United States itself, and from the start public nature was key to those negotiations. English philosopher John Locke outlined the essential contours in the late seventeenth century. For him, as for many of the nation’s framers, the social contract revolved around the notion of property.8 The very purpose of government, or even the reason for forming a community at all, was to ensure that individuals had confidence in the security of their property. Government maintained peaceful order and acted for the public good by protecting a citizen’s property from encroachments by others and from government itself.9
What Locke and the founders meant by property was somewhat different than it might sound. Neither land alone nor a list of personal items, property emerged when a person took something out of its natural state and applied labor to improve it. If someone cut down a tree for timber to build a house, this action removed the tree from the public reserve of nature and made it private property. When farmers planted seeds in the earth, they mixed their labor with the land and thereby created their own property. This labor turned what had previously been a resource held in common for the whole community into a parcel one individual could call their own. The process of creating agricultural property was fundamental to the AngloAmerican vision of this social contract, and the North American continent appeared to contain a great deal of fertile land in the state of nature awaiting the touch of human labor. Locke’s formula was enticing: “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.”10
Thomas Jefferson understood this framework as central to the political culture of the new United States. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) he observed that “we have an immensity of land courting” aspiring farmers and hoped all citizens would take up the plow and cultivate it. With a characteristic flourish, he declared that “those who labor in the earth
are the chosen people of God,” who reaped not just crops but “substantial and genuine virtue.”11 Individuals and government alike sought to acquire and organize land to foster the creation of property with this mission in mind. In this agrarian version of the social contract, citizens held up their end by laboring to create farm property, which contributed to the nation’s virtue and economy. The government reciprocated not only by protecting property and but also by fostering access to ever more land. This concept contained several contradictions and consequences. Among others, it sidestepped the glaring fact of the enslavement of a large portion of the agricultural labor force. Moreover, it underwrote the conquest and removal of Indigenous people from their land, claiming eligible sites of public nature to convert to property. Enabled by these mechanisms, the idea of access to land and the ability to work and own it became a bedrock of American identity.12
Neither John Locke nor Thomas Jefferson were likely to have gone camping in a way that we might recognize. They probably slept outside at some point, but the activity would not have carried the same meanings that it would for later generations. Nonetheless, the agrarian social contract and concept of public nature that emerged from their era would come to shape how subsequent generations understood camping. From an economic standpoint the early republic never fully realized Jefferson’s agrarian dream, abuzz from the start with trade and commodity production alongside farming. The role of government and the character of property would evolve as well, as agriculture could not always guarantee economic stability or civic standing. As early as the Constitutional Convention, James Madison worried about “future times [when] a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but any other sort of property.”13 What was the fate of a social contract based on mixing one’s labor with nature, when that effort no longer produced the property necessary to sustain it?
As the growth of industrial capitalism and urban centers began to shift the US economy and population even further away from the farm, the government, land reformers, and agrarian dreamers tried to forestall this fate. The nineteenth century saw waves of agricultural improvement efforts, pushes for westward expansion and conquest, and public land distribution schemes, culminating perhaps in the Homestead Act an audacious attempt to reconfirm the agrarian basis of the republic in the midst of a Civil War. The 1862 Act kept up the pressure to open up Native lands for agricultural purposes and for non-native settlers to convert it to property by dint of their labor. The government remained in the business of distributing land from its store of public nature for individual enterprise, agrarian or otherwise.14
The concept of public nature, however, began to shift amidst calls for going “back to the land,” which started as early as the 1840s. Publications in this genre, including Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), suggested growing unease with the dislocating experiences of urban industrial life. Thoreau’s memoir of two years of cabin life outside Concord, Massachusetts, was little noticed at the time, but the back-to-the-land impulse took off before long. As popular New England essayist Donald Grant Mitchell reminded Americans in 1863, “God, and nature, and sunshine, have not gone by; nor yet the trees, and the flowers, or green turf, or a thousand kindred charms, which the humblest farmer has in his keeping” and which remained for all Americans to reclaim.15
Back-to-the-land movements peaked in the first decades of the twentieth century, just as the nation became for the first time a majority urban society.16 Unable to turn back the clock on urban-industrialism, Americans began to seek alternate connections to land and nature. Between 1910 and 1920 agriculture ceased to be the most common occupation for Americans, surpassed for the first time by manufacturing.17 Despite or perhaps because of such demographic trends, beliefs in the importance of rural life persisted, while also evolving alongside the changing nation. The government’s interest in securing tracts of public nature endured but expanded beyond the distribution model to include protecting natural resources, particularly forested areas and spectacular landscapes. While this broadening definition of nature’s purpose did not slow the process of dispossessing Indigenous inhabitants of their land, farming itself did not keep pace.18 It seemed the fewer farmers there were, the greater the attachment to rural ideals and the outdoor life became. Only a handful among those harboring dreams of going back to the land pursued full-time rural life. But the idea grew in popularity because it held out a vision of regaining individual control in the volatile new world that industrialism brought into being cyclical financial panics, economic vulnerability, erosion of independent work. Working one’s own land, one’s own property, suggested a vision of simplicity and control. While never a practical societywide response to those national transformations, it continued to hold cultural relevance by proffering a remedy for feelings of disorientation and insecurity.19
Many were drawn to the “simple life” and “arts and crafts” movements, where rural life might produce not farm goods but private contentment, with “moral, emotional, and spiritual benefits” for the individual. Time spent in the outdoors, engaged in simple tasks, away from the hurly-burly of urban life, could help recapture a sense of equilibrium and independence of mind, if not of pocketbook. Moreover, those who pursued the simple life could question the new urban industrial order in historically resonant ways, but without forsaking modern life wholesale.20
Acknowledging that tilling the soil and owning property were not the only ways to get in “touch with the real and vital things of this life” continued this trend, which would ultimately bring camping into this conversation about public nature. Truman A. DeWeese, a journalist and advertising professional, had little experience in agriculture and less interest in making a serious argument for Americans to return to farming. But his 1913 book The Bend in the Road made the case that such rewards were also available by simply spending “a good part of each year in the country.” It couldn’t be done just by looking at “scenery” by “riding through the country in an automobile,” whatever “mental or spiritual elation” that provided. But if “the city man” could “find a place where he can finish well-loved tasks in the deep space of the silent hills,” then he would experience all the benefits of rural life health, happiness, and “rare contentment.” While DeWeese wrote of spending his summer on an abandoned farm, camping shared similar characteristics.21 More than driving through scenery, but less of a commitment to agriculture as a full-time occupation, campers could live simply in the country, if temporarily, and perform some kind of labor in nature, if only symbolically.
As a popular pursuit unto itself, camping arose alongside back-to-the-land movements in the decades after the Civil War. Like DeWeese, campers echoed the appeals of the old
agrarian formula, but gave it a modern twist. Rather than mixing labor with land, campers blended leisure with nature, and in that sense they approached the outdoors as consumers, rather than hopeful producers. Much of the story of camping emerges from this long transition toward an urban industrial consumer culture, a significant and well-chronicled transformation in American life. Consumer culture was not an altogether new phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, but attention to its effects intensified. In his influential Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to explain why people began to flaunt their possessions and leisure time. A person’s ability to take a hiatus from labor or to acquire more personal goods became a new way to demonstrate status. This leisure-centered approach contrasted with, and would eventually supplant, labor-based agrarianism, but it did not immediately coalesce into a new social contract. It initially took hold, as Veblen suggested, among a certain elite class before expanding across society.22 This is true of campers as well, since Americans from the upper classes were among the early adopters of recreational camping.
The gradual shift toward a consumer culture shaped the recreational ethos of camping, with its obvious performance of outdoor leisure.23 But early recreational camping was different from other forms of consumption like shopping at a department store or from the conspicuous leisure of taking a Grand Tour of Europe. By maintaining some ties to older agrarian ideals, and taking up temporary quarters in the outdoors, campers prototyped a new set of uses for public nature. Access to common land remained important, even in the move away from agriculture. For many Americans who remained suspicious of the newfangled indulgence in leisure and consumption, camping and outdoor recreation seemed to blend these modern practices with time-honored agrarian values. Anxieties about the effects of modernity on American culture thus did not so much drive campers to “rough it” in the woods as allow them to express and assuage those worries in distinctly modern fashion.24
At the turn of the twentieth century, worries over the perilous implications of the wholesale embrace of urban industrial consumer culture were amplified by the emerging realization that “nature” was under threat. Modern development encroached upon the nation’s vast reserves of natural resources and spectacular landscapes. The establishment of the US Forest Service in 1905 and the National Park Service in 1916 codified what was by then a generation of advocacy on the part of private citizens, like John Muir, and government efforts, notably led by President Theodore Roosevelt, to forestall private destruction. Conservation of forests, rivers, and wildlife as “public goods,” held in common trust by and for the people, expanded government authority and national meaning in these spaces.25 Camping and outdoor recreation weren’t the sole factors driving these endeavors, but they did help to articulate parts of the justification for preserving these spaces as public nature. Roosevelt, for example, hoped that these lands could serve as a place for citizens to resist both the “base spirit of gain” and the appeal of “a life of slothful ease” by testing their strength and building their character through “natural outdoor play” and “wisely used leisure.”26
Though mindful of the critique of commercialism, the National Park Service understood its purpose in modern terms. Its founding legislation mandated a dual mission: “to promote and regulate the use of Federal areas . . . to provide for the enjoyment” of its landscapes and
to preserve them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Alongside preservation, early NPS leaders eagerly took up the charge to promote Americans’enjoyment of the parks, encouraging visitors, and activities like camping, with advertising techniques drawn directly from new consumer industries.27 Herein lay the seeds for a new social contract, with the government starting to take on responsibilities to provide for citizens’ outdoor leisure. The new recreational ethos of mixing leisure with nature anchored the appeal and underwrote the steady growth of camping in the decades that followed.
By the 1930s, federally sponsored camping exemplified a new social contract that was coalescing as heir to the faded agrarian one. The New Deal era solidified a distinctly different relationship between citizens and the government, and camping showcased the updated role for public nature. Campground designer and Forest Service plant pathologist Emilio Meinecke conjured a kind of campers’ republic, a social contract wherein citizens had “a right to a form of recreation” that offers a chance “to live more simply and closer to nature.” Governmental obligations included, on the one hand, “protection of the physical material” and “the essential spirit of the out of doors,” and on the other, public access, safety, “assured peace” and “enjoyment of the people.” Camping allowed Americans both to be “guests of the nation” and to claim “part ownership” by establishing a “temporary home” on a “one hundred thirty millionth” share of public nature.28 Bestowing a sense of “ownership,” camping and the outdoor recreational ethos became an implicit right of citizenship, if not all Americans had equal access to it. Public nature thus continued to serve as grounds for negotiating the nation’s social contract, even as its expected uses, and users, continued to shift.
This overview illustrates how notions of public nature and the social contract can uncover a more complex history of camping. In part, it suggests a way to bring a broader spectrum of campers into the discussion. Whether the tents of Occupy and people experiencing homelessness in this century, or the encampments of tramps and protestors from the last, nonrecreational camping provides a critical context for the rise of the campers’ republic and its subsequent fortunes. Accordingly, this book emphasizes the complex interplay of recreational, political, and functional camping. Even with this wider framework, camping remains only one aspect of how Americans have encountered the outdoors, contemplated nature, or expected government service. There are limits to what camping can tell us. Still, looking at camping through these lenses does offer insight into the nation’s evolving social contract and the ongoing significance of public nature within it.
The book begins by looking at camping practices amid the disorienting shift from an agrarian society to an urban industrial one. Part One examines the Civil War era and its aftermath, from the 1850s to the 1890s, as the practice of camping began to gain meaning beyond the utilitarian. Chapter 1 considers Union soldiers’ and veterans’ attempts to make sense of their military camping experiences. Both for individuals, like Maine infantryman John Mead Gould, and for national veterans’ organizations, like the Grand Army of the Republic, camping served as an important way to understand the legacy of the war. Soldiers’ memories fostered nostalgia and camaraderie, while also providing a platform from which to advocate for a social contract in which veterans became exemplars of the nation. Chapter 2 follows the early travels of John Muir to get a glimpse of the highly mobile landscape of the
decades that followed the war, particularly in the South and West. Before he rose to fame as the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir walked the country’s roads alongside transient laborers, newly freed African Americans, and Native peoples.29 He alternately knocked on strangers’ doors, slept outside in fear of disease and alligators, and herded sheep in Sierra meadows. These experiences shaped Muir’s seminal perspectives on wilderness, which in turn influenced changing views of public nature, including recreational and nonrecreational campers alike in the late nineteenth century.
Part Two traces the birth of the modern recreational ethos between the 1880s and 1940s. Chapter 3 delves into the stories of early leisure camping enthusiasts, largely found among the elite classes, and what they hoped to find by venturing into the outdoors. The numerous stories in proliferating outdoor magazines and guidebooks suggest that rather than being a strictly masculine endeavor, women and families were key to the practice, as campers imagined themselves making temporary homes in the wilderness. They did not have the woods to themselves, however, as the phenomena of tramps, hoboes, and itinerant workers grew during the same era, both in numerical terms and in public alarm about what their seeming rootlessness might portend for the nation. Chapter 4 focuses on how federal agencies responded to the simultaneous growth of recreational camping popularized among the middle class by the mass production of the automobile in the 1920s and the challenge of new waves of transients and protestors during the Great Depression. By the 1940s citizens were claiming rights of access to or, in the case of African Americans, protesting exclusion from this public camping landscape.
Part Three assesses the rising dominance of recreational camping, along with its increasing complexity and consequences, in the decades that followed World War II. Chapter 5 looks at how youth who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shaped new forms of camping to support interests in self-discovery, countercultural values, and environmental awareness. Leaders and participants of the National Outdoor Leadership School, launched in 1965, promoted backcountry styles of camping that fostered younger peoples’ critiques of modern society even as they generated new markets for high-tech outdoor gear. Chapter 6 brings the story back to the Occupy movement and its antecedents particularly a series of political encampments in the nation’s capital since the late 1960s. While for many Occupy seemed unprecedented, earlier actions that used camping to protest poverty, racism, the Vietnam War, and homelessness reveal new perspectives on public nature, including some voiced by Supreme Court justices. As Occupy tried to use camping to expand political dialogue, the sharp expansion of unsheltered people camping out in urban spaces, rising to the level of an acute crisis in certain areas, raised the stakes for negotiations over access to public nature and the terms of the social contract.
The epilogue briefly surveys the twenty-first-century landscape of camping a dizzying continuum encompassing glamping and adventure styles as well as new streams of mobile laborers, from campground hosts to Amazon’s CamperForce. Meanwhile, outdoor recreation became key to new claims about human biological needs to spend time enjoying nature. Recreational camping came to promise a good return on private investment in terms of family health and personal well-being, more so than democratic access to public nature. The parallel rise of this justification for leisure camping and the intensifying homeless crisis
both thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic strongly suggests that the social contract may again be in transition. Public nature, and camping as a method of claiming it, remains a potent forum for these renegotiations.
This book does not attempt to offer an encyclopedic treatment of camping. Trying to include every significant factor even in the history of recreational camping would have been counterproductive, not to mention impossible. That some forms or moments get short shrift here scouting, sleepaway camps, World War II, RVs and van life, for example does not mean that they have not been important to the historical development of camping or the experience of individual campers. The selective focus highlights key episodes that provide perspective on how Americans understand access to the outdoors as key to the nation’s social contract and that represent significant turning points and figures within it. Further, this book does not attempt to offer a thoroughgoing history of homelessness or protest movements, which are available elsewhere. Instead, it dips into those histories when they collide with the discourse and practice of camping or highlight contests over public nature.
One particular area of exclusion is worth mentioning. Incarceration camps, concentration camps, prison camps, detention camps, and refugee camps are, by and large, not part of this story. While examining these involuntary camps, or why they are called “camps” even when not deploying tents, is worthwhile in its own right, that analysis is not an aim of this book. The campers who appear in these pages include those who resort to sleeping outside under some form of duress, but their practices remain distinct from the powerful coercion or organized violence that spawned those sites. For example, although political factors certainly drove the World War II incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans in guarded camplike outposts scattered across Western states, they were of an entirely different order than the politics that surrounded Occupy Wall Street. The stories of refugees share some commonalities with those who dwell in homeless tent cities, but the camping of tramps, hoboes, and vagrants posed questions about the nation’s public nature in the way that refugee camps, perhaps until quite recently, have not. This book does consider several borderline cases, such as Union army camps and “contraband” camps of Black Americans fleeing slavery during the Civil War, in relation to the range of meanings Americans assigned to the act of sleeping outside. However, inasmuch as possible, this book keeps the focus on intentional (or even accidental) camping as opposed to forced camps.
This choice reinforces the book’s key questions: What does it mean to camp, and why does it matter? And it serves as a reminder of how the recreational mode of camping represents a particular historical development rather than a universal need to “get back to nature.” That Americans have come to prize some forms and places for sleeping outside, while marginalizing and criminalizing others, illustrates how camping embodies certain facets of ongoing national dilemmas. Does sleeping outside promise bodily health or reveal personal weakness? Should tents indicate transience or persistence, leisure or poverty, consumer comfort or political protest? Do encampments warn of social disorder, encourage civic participation, or exemplify the public good? While recreational camping sometimes masquerades as universal, the one form of camping that is without politics, it too arose from a specific outlook and moment in American history. Its development both excluded some Americans and encapsulated a vision of the social contract where citizens could expect their
government to provide access to the outdoors for the public good.
To say that recreational camping is a product of history does not mean that people who enjoy it have been duped into falsely believing they are connecting with nature. Many people, myself included, do find genuine connections while camping in the outdoors to the natural world, to other people, to their inner selves. That capaciousness is in part what gives those outdoor spaces and beliefs about public nature their potency. They hold out the possibility for connectedness beyond our political or economic worlds, even if these places and ideas have been wholly shaped by them. While there’s nothing “natural” about the standard issue campsite, with its picnic table, parking spot, and fire ring, it remains a tool for outdoor experience. When we see this set-up as supporting one particular practice among several possibilities for making claims on public nature, camping might complicate our classic mental images. By focusing on that complexity, rather than defining it out, camping can tell us a great deal about the shifting grounds of nature and national belonging in American history.
Comrades and Campfires
Three decades after the Civil War ended, General William Tecumseh Sherman recalled a memorable scene from the Union army’s campaign: the evening campfire. “Imagine a group of intelligent soldiers after night the march done supper over, and things put away for an early start a clear sky above and a bright fire beneath, you have the perfection of human comfort and the most perfect incentive to good fellowship.” It was a resonant image, a treasured moment removed from the brutality of battle. Yet Sherman, whose earlier Memoirs mounted a righteous defense of the “calculated cruelty” required to win the war, was not indulging in any simple nostalgia or sentimentalism. For him, the significance lay in reviving this ritual for modern purposes. He believed it was still important for “the men who ‘saved the Union’ to . . . meet often at camp-fires; sing their old songs . . . [and] always cultivate the comradeship begotten of war.” Younger generations ought to witness and draw wisdom from these “modern ‘camp-fires,’ ” where veterans gathered as “comrades absolutely on equal footing, regardless of former rank, yet subject to self-imposed discipline.”1 While these images bore scant resemblance to the military hierarchy and discipline in actual army camps, the veterans’ campfire suggested a symbolic and idealized microcosm for a nation wrestling with new challenges.
The longing for this vision stemmed from the tensions and transformations of the postwar era as much as it reflected any specific experiences of the war. Amid the dislocations that accompanied the enormous growth of American cities, the campfire suggested a simple, rustic outdoor practice, a hallmark of a lost simpler time. Sherman’s particular vision, moreover, conjured a sense of equality among citizens, born of an earlier agrarian ideal, when contemporary evidence pointed to growing divides between wealth and poverty. And yet it was not purely backward-looking. This campfire highlighted the emerging figure of “the veteran” as a model citizen, who could in Sherman’s words, separate “the true from the false, the brave from the timid, the earnest from the doubtful.”2 The Union veteran embodied the expansion of federal power and continental dominion that followed victory, even while echoing the idealized republic that came before it. Veterans thus came to serve as bellwethers for a nation and a social contract in transformation. It mattered that they did so from camp.
Soldiers, of course, camped as a matter of necessity and obligation. Starting in the Spring of 1861, hundreds of thousands of American men found themselves living in army camps. Neither the numbers nor the experience of sleeping outside made their camping meaningful in the way Sherman was promoting. The Civil War was hardly the first mass camping episode in recent memory. The Overland Trail saw 300,000 people travel west and sleep under the stars for months at a time in the 1830s and 1840s. The California Gold Rush brought thousands more campers to the Sierra Nevada. Moreover, religious “camp meetings”
were widespread throughout the early nineteenth century, especially during the Second Great Awakening; the Cane Revival in Kentucky in 1801 drew upward of 20,000 people to its grounds.3 The significance of Civil War camps lay in what the survivors did when they returned. Veterans shared not only the experience of camping during the war, but importantly, access to a rapidly expanding mass press and a heightened political role to disseminate their memories and imbue them with meaning. While Civil War soldiers made up the biggest wave of mass public camping yet, far more Americans would read and hear about their experiences in the decades that followed.
The reworking of wartime camp experiences in print allowed meaning to emerge from what was, in most cases, an involuntary and regimented endeavor, if not outright drudgery. In the postwar era, veterans went beyond wistful recollections and willingly chose to camp again. Camping became a popular method for reunion, a wholly voluntary practice that fostered veteran identity, fraternal order, national belonging, and political power. In the process, camp became something quite different. Union veterans’ organizations and public remembrance privileged certain aspects of camp life as a way of making sense of the war, obscuring both its past unpleasantries and the present problems.
The history of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) demonstrates how camp became a key tool for building veteran identity. With 400,000 members by 1890, the GAR was the largest and most powerful organization for Union veterans. While other veterans’ groups existed, including societies for officers like the Union League and regimental associations, the GAR recruited veterans on a national level, regardless of rank or unit. Moreover, it sought to blend remembrance with advocacy, particularly for its signature issue of federal veterans’ pensions, which candidates for elected office opposed at their peril. The organization used camping to advance this effort on multiple levels, but most notably in its annual gatherings called “National Encampments.” These GAR reunions rotated to a different city each year, from Maine to California, from the early 1870s into the 1930s. Not only did the bulk of the veterans camp out in tents during the event, but the public performance of the rituals of camp the hardtack and coffee, the sitting round the campfire also became signature activities that evoked the ideal Army camp. Sherman’s reverie, in fact, emerged during his attendance at the 1888 National Encampment in Columbus, Ohio. The modern campfires he had in mind were, in fact, the “Camp-Fires of the G.A.R.,” as he titled the article. The combined effect of its social and political efforts made the GAR, as one historian has suggested, key to establishing the significance of the “Union veteran in the newly restored Union and, at a deeper level, a story about the new Union itself.”4
Confederate soldiers slept outside just as much, but they had much less influence in the first few decades after the war. Confederate veterans could not belong to the GAR, and had less access, at least initially, to the claims of ideal citizens or to the media and national politics. The United Confederate Veterans would become an influential veterans’ organization in the South, but it emphasized the mythology of the Lost Cause and separateness from the victorious Union more than the egalitarian camaraderie of camp. As the decades went on the GAR would play a vital role in braiding these threads of memory together, in ways that prioritized sectional reconciliation over Union victory and retreated from commitments to Black freedom. The romantic nationalism and revival of militarism of
the 1890s began to allow Confederate veterans into a mythology reorganized around the blue-gray brotherhood. Though the Lost Cause captured the nation’s imagination by the opening of the twentieth century, capitalizing on the Union’s “won cause” remained a major focus in the decades between.5 The GAR’s constant refrain that “they saved the Union” gave northern veterans a special basis on which to claim a meaningful place in an otherwise topsyturvy postwar nation.
One Union veteran, John Mead Gould (1839–1930), illuminates the ways camping and veteran identity intertwined in life after the war. A bank teller from Portland, Maine, Gould served in three Union army regiments between April 1861 and March 1866, engaged in multiple battles, including Antietam, and rose to the rank of Major. After a brief interlude as a carpetbagger-entrepreneur, Gould returned to Portland and his job at the bank, where he would work for the rest of his life. His extensive diary detailed many nights spent camping, as soldier and veteran, and with friends and family.6 He also joined the outpouring of veterans’ narratives that appeared in print after the war, publishing both the definitive regimental history of his units, the Maine 1st-10th-29th, and an early recreational camping guidebook: How to Camp Out: Hints for Camping and Walking (1877). The camping guidebook was not intended for soldiers or veterans explicitly they already knew how to camp. Rather, he hoped to pass along the knowledge and meaning of camp to a new generation, for new purposes. It offered a set of social instructions, gleaned from the perspective of a veteran, about how to emulate that “group of intelligent soldiers,” gathered around the campfire, as “comrades absolutely on equal footing,” in a world where expectations of work, success, and citizenship were shifting under their feet.
While Gould clearly cannot speak for all soldiers or all veterans, his perspectives offer insight into the role of camping, as it moved from an involuntary and functional necessity in the Union army to a symbolic and voluntary activity among veterans in the tumultuous postwar era.7 Gould and the GAR together offer a glimpse of the development of camping beyond its associations with outdoor recreation or desires for wilderness. Instead, they point to the shared etymological roots of “camp” and “campaign,” which both contain military origins. From archaic associations as the field of combat, camp came to indicate the site that soldiers dwelled and defended, before it acquired a more a general meaning. Campaign referenced a series of military operations before its connection with politics. The intertwined nature of camps and campaigns in this story of Union army veterans both echoes the significance of soldiers and warfare to the concept of camping and points toward its evolution as a political vehicle.
Camping thus became a mechanism to make new kinds of claims on the nation through public nature, just as older methods for securing property became less and less reliable. It became increasingly clear in the years after the Civil War that whatever unevenness had characterized the agrarian social contract in the past, it was now fraying badly. While large numbers of Americans still chased the agrarian dream, the goal of a stable family farm often became out of reach amid the economic turmoil of the late nineteenth century. A particular form of camping gained a new purpose by helping to elevate the veteran as a model citizen for the new era and the next generation. With the nation’s social contract undergoing a bumpy transition, modern campfires became a meaningful use for public nature.
