On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection by Mary Dartt

Abstract

Reviewed by: On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection by Mary Dartt Erica Hannickel Mary Dartt, On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection. Edited with introduction by Julie McCown. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2021. [Originally published 1878–79.] 246 pp. Paper, $27.95; e-book, $22.95. Scholars at the intersections of western American literature and history, women’s literature, animal studies, gun culture, environmental studies, and World’s Fair history have long awaited an accessible, well-annotated reissue of On the Plains and Among the Peaks for use in research and the classroom. The book traces Martha Maxwell’s life as the “Colorado Huntress” and taxidermist, famous for natural history installations placing animals in their reconstructed environments—a revelation for the age—and most significantly displayed at the Philadelphia International Centennial Exposition of 1876. There are many additional reasons to take another look at the primary text, originally published in 1878–79. Two of them are the editor’s thoughtful introduction to the book, including biographical sketches of Martha Maxwell and her biographer and half-sister Mary Dartt, as well as McCown’s excellent historical and literary footnotes throughout. Reading the book with McCown as guide makes for a rich experience—one of the most surprising elements is the care with which Dartt is treated as narrator. We come away realizing that this text is not just an important historical document about Maxwell but equally prescient as a literary artifact by Dartt— quite close as sisters in the far West, but women who clearly had [End Page 91] different priorities and passions in life. In this way, the book gives much-needed additional texture to nineteenth-century women’s expertise in natural history and American literary and artistic canons. At the same time we see Dartt’s soaring descriptions of Colorado predating our most lauded poetry about the Rockies by two decades, and Maxwell’s acuity in how her “work would symbolically and materially affect society’s attitudes and behaviors toward women in general” (14–15). Both women were well aware of the national stage they were on and yet clearly used it to different effect. We might set historically competing descriptions of Maxwell— the hunter-housewife, lady-amazon, white-Native American—as a challenge to midcentury American culture: she was both too smart and too violent for the public to know what to do with her (with the exception that they were keen to buy a lot of postcards of her petite figure among large taxidermied mammals). And yet, Dartt continues to place Maxwell within the company of famous male artists, ornithologists, and authors of the age. Describing an “excursion party” she attended with Maxwell in Colorado, these often lasting between three days and three weeks, Dartt writes: Don’t let any one [sic] innocently imagine these were basket picnics, where everybody rode out in fresh dresses and blue ribbons at nine in the morning, partook of sandwiches, cold chicken, champagne and ice-cream, on rustic seats in a grove, and returned in good order to their usual domiciles at night. If any one [sic] has such an idea lingering around that word, excursion, I advise its banishment as soon as possible. (95) Throughout we find Dartt referencing Albert Bierstadt, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau, and John James Audubon in relation to Maxwell. (A slightly longer scope must add big-game hunter Teddy Roosevelt to the list.) Yet the conditions in which these men worked were quite different from Maxwell’s. Her taxidermy serving as her family’s primary income for decades, Maxwell performed her best work on pared-down hunting excursions at altitude—no other adults present, very few supplies carried—yet we find out late in the book that her young daughter [End Page 92] Mabel, born in 1857, was often in tow. Think about that: would there have been a Bierstadt, Bryant, Thoreau, Audubon, or Roosevelt had they also been caring for a small child alone in their peak years? Dartt offers the question more provocatively: “What, amid such an awful passion-burst of nature, is...