UC San Diego

After the Hunt connects technological developments in visual media to hunting practices and ecological changes in the American West as a result of the westward colonial project between 1860-1910. Looking beyond the genres of sporting or wildlife art, this dissertation addresses visual representations of animals that emerged out of the hunt—objects and images that celebrated (or hid) hunting as the point of departure for their subject-matter and materialization. Concerned with real animal bodies in the form of hunting trophies, taxidermy, and photography, this project demonstrates how reconstituted animals—like the living animals from which they derived—were not static objects or images. Rather, they circulated in various ways, physically moving from the west of the US to the east through exhibitions, souvenir photographs, publications, and tours. Chronologically, three case-study chapters demonstrate some of the complexities and contradictions of human-animal relations as, within a few decades, animals experienced colonial-caused ecological changes, violence and extermination, as well as protection and celebration through imagery and legislation. Chapter one traces the eradication of grizzly bears from California through the afterlife of Seth Kinman’s (1815-1888) presidential grizzly chair and the colonial agenda of hunting trophies. Second, a chapter dedicated to Martha Maxwell (1831-1881) reveals her place in the development of modern taxidermy and habitat dioramas as hunting/collecting became a practice of species conservation. The final chapter focuses on Stephen Leek’s (1858-1943) documentation of the colonial-caused elk famine in Wyoming, using photography as a way to promote the preservation of a species that became a tourist commodity. The work these figures produced demonstrates how individual human-animal encounters and bodily rearticulations after the hunt shaped public knowledge and understanding of animals on a national level during a pivotal moment in the emergence of conservation efforts at the turn of the century. Reflections on encountering animals in and outside the archive frame the project, illustrating the legacies of nineteenth-century representations of animals and how the animal experience of colonial environmental transformation is often erased or made invisible in settler-colonial depictions of human-animal encounters.