Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-04, Section: A, page: 1423.

Directors: Howard Lamar; William Cronon.

This dissertation analyzes the impact of the conservation movement on rural whites and Indians, the communities most directly affected by the movement's rise in the late nineteenth century. Weaving together examples from three locales--the Adirondack mountains of northern New York, Yellowstone Park in northwestern Wyoming, and Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona--the narrative emphasizes the legal dimensions of conservation, especially the criminalization of hunting, foraging, and other environmental practices. Country people, this study reveals, frequently contested these changes, which they viewed as assaults on longstanding rural customs. The result was widespread poaching, arson, squatting, and timber stealing on conservation lands across the American countryside. This study reassesses the character of these crimes, using them to shed fresh light on the moral universe of non-elite rural folk and to recreate the complex matrix of beliefs concerning work, gender relations, tradition, and community that shaped these people's conceptions of the natural world.

The dissertation thus has two larger goals. First, it attempts to nudge the field of environmental history beyond a focus on such well-known thinkers as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot and towards a consideration of Indians, poor whites, and other subaltern peoples. Second, it endeavors to place the history of the American West in a broader context by drawing parallels to the eastern United States as well as to Africa, Asia, and Europe, where, much as it did in the U.S., the conservation movement played a central role in state building and market forming.