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The Environmental Spectator
Wilderness Dreams
Growing up on diet of perfect magazines.
The digital age continues to put hard copy newspapers and magazines in a bad way. My mailbox is no longer stuffed with must-have subscriptions. Yet there was a time when even children read magazines, an amazing fact on its face.
To open the mailbox when I was a kid and see a fresh new issue of Field & Stream (F&S) was a small joy. I had a subscription to that premier Hook and Bullet, as I did to Outdoor Life (OL) and Fur-Fish-Game (FFG). In the days before cable nature television these magazines gave a kid growing up in the borderland of the outer suburbs of Gotham and the hinterlands of upstate New York a window into a sought-after wilder world. Throw in the novels of Jack London and Kenneth Roberts and that kid was adventure-struck.
F&S, founded in 1895, with a circulation today of one million, was the original gentleman’s sporting magazine. One famous contributor was the prolific Canadian Roderick Haig-Brown, whom I envied because he got paid to go fishing. OL (founded 1898; current circulation 800,000) in a 1930s heyday featured the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey, both obsessed fishermen. OL also had on staff the great Jack O’Connor — hunter and gun expert — who had the desirable job of wandering the world’s remote regions in search of big game, bagging it and writing well about it.
But the real keeper was FFG (1925; current circulation 116,000), though its production values compared to the previous two were rudimentary. Printed on cheap stock and at the time featuring a non-glossy photo format, FFG was essentially a trapper’s how-to manual, and ran stories about homesteading misanthropes living in remote cabins in Alaska or elsewhere. A typical photo showed a grizzled guy posing with the season’s take of pelts stretched on boards, or lining the outside wall of a cabin or barn. Scores of beavers, lynx, bobcats, muskrats, and foxes with their bushy tails. I planned to head to Alaska upon my high school graduation to live this life, though it didn’t quite happen that way. Today FFG is more in the mainstream F&S/OL magazine mold rather than a trapper’s bible.
The Hook and Bullet — along with exciting adventure fare — was also big on the how-to stuff. How to caulk a leaky canoe. How to start a fire in the rain. How to stalk a deer depending on landscape and weather conditions. How to catch bass on a hot day. How to train a hunting dog. Even how to properly fold a topography map.
But nowadays these publications are not your father’s Hook and Bullet. They all have a web presence designed to attract readers with such literal fare as recipes for gourmet game cooking, and a Green milieu of stories and videos about preserving prime hunting land and riparian (rivers and streams) areas. They’ve also by necessity become politically-active with pieces and blogs on 2nd Amendment rights, hunting rights, and in-general goings-on in Washington or the state capitals dealing with related pending legislation. PETA is a particularly demonized adversary.
I also had a subscription to National Geographic, an annually renewed Christmas gift from a relative. Its arrival every month meant that I would take an armchair journey to places both exotic and wild, though the tropical parts of the globe held no interest for me. I liked cold, snowy mountains and conifer-carpeted wilderness. One issue transported me to the North Pole on a snowmobile expedition; another to Yellowstone to study grizzly bears with the legendary wildlife researchers John and Frank Craighead.
National Geographic is famous for its photography, of course. The selection regimen obviously remains rigorous. But even in the non-digital 1960s the photos were known for their crisp lucidity. Before the advent of cable nature television, National Geographic offered the best medium as to what the Earth’s remote regions actually looked like. And the first uses of satellite shots were the antecedent of “Google Earth”.
Then there were the maps. Just about every issue provided one, usually related to one of the articles. I had piles of them, they fascinated me, and helped get me straight A’s in Geography. Alaska, Canada, the Rockies, the Himalayas. I memorized them: the mountains, the rivers, the tiny towns that in places such as Alaska were nothing more than outposts in the wilderness. But these microscopic municipalities were on the map. What did they look like? And who lived there?
A National Geographic article first led me West in 1975. Titled “Golden Ghosts of the Lost Sierra,” it sent me and two friends to the banks of the Middle Fork of the Feather River in Northern California for a month of camping and futile gold prospecting. Though I came home with empty pockets, I’d had the experience of seeing some of the American West for the first time.
So here I sit in Salmon, Idaho with the snowy Continental Divide visible from my bedroom window. Nice view. But I’ve seen it before.
About the Author
Bill Croke, formerly of Cody, Wyoming, is a writer in Salmon, Idaho.
Kitty| 12.28.10 @ 7:05AM
Great nostalgia piece. That last line sounds like you're getting restless.
Alan Brooks| 12.28.10 @ 6:36PM
Exactly: conservatism has been reduced to nostalgia and nothing more. You will shrink govt negligibly.
donserge| 12.28.10 @ 8:58AM
As a former writer for state and regional publications, who wrote about my personal fishing and hunting experiences, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a contributor. When I did participate in sports shows as a Maine sporting camp owner there was much satisfaction when someone came to my booth and said they read my monthly columns. Hunting and fishing magazines have always been a vehicle for the outdoors person to learn and, of course, fantacize. Good article.
Sam Vaughn| 12.28.10 @ 9:04AM
Long a reader of Readers Digest I "woke up" one day and realized the editorial staff had subtly changed. More and more stories were becoming subtle and not-so-subtle lectures on "green living" and political correctness. It is gone from my reading list to be replaced by American Spectator etc....
Kitty| 12.28.10 @ 9:53AM
I know what you mean. I've gotten Yankee magazine for decades. Even after they went green I continued to renew my subscription, primarily because it was a family tradition, one that was difficult to break. But no more. I'm letting my subscription lapse. Their increasingly blatant politics made it easy.
Big Leo| 12.28.10 @ 6:07PM
Amen to that. We'd gotten Yankee in our house since before WW2, and we finally gave up. It has become so politicized and whiney it was no longer fun.
As for National Geo, we haven't given up on that yet and have gotten it for a hundred years. However, we must have missed the name change to National Global Warming Magazine, since they alternate between articles on how AGW causes floods to how it causes droughts.
Rwcook| 12.28.10 @ 9:19PM
I feel the same way about Sunset magazine. The greener and more precious it gets the more it becomes a magazine my father would never pick up again. I would add Sports Afield to F&S as the two magazines I could not wait to arrive in my high school library each month.
jeffb| 12.28.10 @ 12:23PM
More and more magazines have gone this way as they have been swallowed by conglomerates. The editorial staff is no longer made up of actual people doing actual things but rather New Yorkers who have an imagined idea of how things are done in "fly-over country"
MOS was 71331| 12.28.10 @ 10:19AM
Don't forget Robert Ruark's "The Old Man and the Boy" which appeared regularly in "Field and Stream" in the 50s. I read F&S in the local library primarily for those articles.
Matt Morehouse| 12.28.10 @ 10:34AM
American Rifleman, the NRA publication used to be a lot better than it now is. I have been a subscriber since the early 60's and have most back issues.
Anyone want to buy them?
grant1863| 12.28.10 @ 11:00AM
Matt, put the back issues on ebay though I have some back issues from the 40's and 50's that I am slowly throwing away because there seems to be no market on ebay.
It seems OL is a shell of itself for people with very short attention spans, no article is more than 2 pages long.
Sporting Classics and Double Gun Journal may be 2 of the best ones right now. I'd be very interested in other's opinions about decent outdoor magazines.
Bob Grant| 12.28.10 @ 11:33AM
Try Gray's Sporting Journal which is the exact opposite of OL.
miforest| 12.28.10 @ 5:00PM
put them on gunbroker and they will sell.
Richard Baker| 12.28.10 @ 12:11PM
Ah, National Geographic. My brothers and our cousins liked the "educational" magazine that my Grandmother kept around her house in the '50s and '60s. It wasn't until the late 1990's, before she died, that we told her we liked them too because of the naked African women. She was shocked.
KyMouse| 12.28.10 @ 1:45PM
More often than not, National Geographic issues in recent years have made human beings to be the enemies of the earth. Yes, I'm all for taking care of "the environment," but article after article has made it seem as if we are trespassers in Eden.
Still, it has great photos. I've always loved the shot of lightning hitting a tree next to a farmhouse, circa 1993 or 1994.
cincinnaticl6| 12.28.10 @ 3:41PM
I subscribed to National Geographic for forty years. I cut it loose after I got tired of article after article on global warming and how man is destroying the earth. I also got tired of the constant articles on the mummies of Peru.
As the years went by I noticed that in the 90's and on more and more articles preached a leftist point of view. The tone of this once great magazine had changed. I love history and geography, but I don't need to pay for propaganda.
By the way, do you notice how their television channel is full of trash that would never have appeared in the magazine when it was on top?
mark| 12.28.10 @ 2:57PM
Outdoor pursuits have now become commercialized. We've got 4-wheelers, four-wheel drives, and recreational vehicles. We now have guys bragging on the best leases and the biggest designer bucks. Unethical people cheat to get those biggest bucks $$$$. Contrast to the "day:" More open land, or easier to obtain permission to hunt. Emphasis on woodsmanship skills defining what actually made good hunters. Less $$$ in goods aimed at hunting, and hunters. Things have not improved, and for the most part, I'm done with hunting and fishing. Fred Asbell was right when he denounced the commercialization of hunting.
WRJonas | 12.28.10 @ 4:47PM
What a great article . Being a city boy and then raised on a farm during the first Detroit "white flight" in the late 30's ;I thought the Outdoor Life articles by Jack O'Conner were fabulous. My brother and I trapped ,hunted and fished until we went in the service.
I can fondly recall now how we were influenced so much by OL and F&S.
Thanks Bill Croke for the terrific story
wade coot| 12.28.10 @ 4:58PM
I had the exact samen childhood you did! but I was in the midwest, and only left in my dreams.
Bent's Fort| 12.30.10 @ 11:46PM
Bill, if you are going to list Kenneth Roberts, you should include Bruce Lancaster too. I read and re-read both of their novels.
Mike| 5.27.11 @ 4:12AM
Thanks alot for sharing this with us, Ah, National Geographic. landscape canvas My brothers and our cousins liked the "educational" magazine that my Grandmother kept around her house in the '50s and '60s. It wasn't until the late 1990's, before she died, that we told her we liked them too because of the naked African women. She was shocked.