But for his dog: Companion Animals in American Frontier Narratives

Abstract

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the West” ——Frederick Jackson Turner In his study of the growing middle-class interest in hunting in the early national period, historian Daniel Herman identifies popular figurations of Daniel Boone as particularly adept at harnessing anxieties about masculinity and self-possession and consequently driving an interest in rural sports. Herman argues that these representations of Boone and his life on the frontier, flourishing during a period of urban growth, presented the therapeutic potential of an arduous lifestyle and mastery of nature, an “unfettered autonomy” that found its keenest expression in paintings, poems, and prose describing the famous frontiersman (Hunting 100). Herman’s study pays close attention to the frontier trappings that these representations describe, such as Boone's famous buckskin clothing and Kentucky rifle, because they serve as prescriptions for an interested audience. But in attending to the material culture that surrounded, produced, and reproduced Boone, Herman also passes over an important element in these representations that this essay will pause to reconsider: the dog. Analyzing the elements of the Boone hagiography, the images and texts that made the man into “America's first mass culture hero,” Herman produces this blind spot in presenting William Allan’s 1839 portrait (“Other Daniel Boone” 432). The historian sees this painting as evidence of popular reverence for “self-possession,” and captions the image, “Boone poses in Byronic fashion, a chivalrous figure alone, but for his dog, in a sinister cave-like wilderness” ( 431–32) (see fig. 1).1 In this small moment, Herman provides us with an important and enduring contradiction, naming the heroic state of isolation via an exception so small it does not affect the primary idea of “alone.” It is in the “but for his dog,” a presence that is quickly passed over and never again mentioned, that I locate an opening to reevaluate precisely that idea of individual autonomy that frontier narratives contributed to so decisively in the rapidly expanding republic.