Of Moose and Men:
Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939

Tina Loo

This article examines gender formation. It argues that big game hunting in British Columbia constituted its practitioners as masculine and bourgeois, while simultaneously racializing and sexualizing them. The same activity also constructed an alternative masculinity for aboriginal guides, one inspired by the Trickster figure and centered on deception rather than confrontation.

This essay on hunting begins not outdoors, but in, with this photograph of H. O. Bell-Irving, a prominent British Columbia industrialist and head of one of the province's wealthiest and most influential families. Here we have the stereotypical image of the hunter surrounded by the emblems of his conquests: trophy heads, horns, and pelts. It's a picture of a particular kind of male power and virility; a portrait of what I will call bourgeois masculinity.     H. O. Bell-Irving, British columbia Industrialist, in his den. Photo courtesy of Elizabeth O. Kiely, Private Collection.	1
Though our eyes are drawn to them first, the hunting trophies are not the only insignia of bourgeois masculinity in this room, for it also contains a paper-laden desk, pens, and books. These were the weapons the hunter brandished in the battles that took place in a different jungle; that of work. In fact, what's striking about this photograph is the juxtaposition of private and public spheres of play and work, of animal and human worlds, and the interpenetration of wilderness and civilization: rooms like these were, after all, called "dens."	2
Dens like this one were distinctively masculine spaces, and in their construction lie clues to gender formation, the broad subject of this essay.1 Bell-Irving's den was the product of his many hunting trips, expeditions that were one of the central practices of gender for men like him.2 From the late-nineteenth century to the Second World War, big game hunting was an important activity through which masculinity was made. But as the historians of leisure and recreation remind us, the games people played and how and where they played them often signaled much more than gender. Hunting for big game in British Columbia marked its practitioners as masculine and bourgeois, while simultaneously ascribing a racial and sexual identity to them. In the first part of the essay, I show how such a masculinity was formed through sports hunting, arguing that big game hunters defined themselves as skilled, self-reliant, self-controlled, chivalrous risk-takers in relation to the animals they stalked, the environment through which they pursued them, and the other men who helped make it possible.	. . .