Deer camp traditions chronicled

LEGENDARY DEER CAMPS, By Robert Wegner, Krause Publications, Iola, Wisc., $34.95.

William Faulkner’s first recollections of deer hunting detailed a mystical experience in which the famous author and the whitetail shared a common identity.

Theodore Roosevelt’s hunting expeditions allowed him to blend into the backdrop of the Dakota Badlands.

Aldo Leopold, a naturalist with the U.S. Forest Service in the early 1900s, was mystified by the whitetails he wrote about and stalked with his bow in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.

These and other hunters are brought to life in Robert Wegner’s book “Legendary Deer Camps” as the camaraderie and compassion shared by famous and ordinary hunters alike unfolds in each of Wegner’s 11 tales.

As with congressman and photographer George Shiras, the hunt for many of the men described was not so much about the firearm as the ability to find, the feeling of freedom, and the time with friends.

The tales Wegner shares in detailed and lighthearted language lends understanding to the deer camp traditions of 150 years ago. He explains how such traditions connect us to the past still.

Wegner points out how in Michigan in 1895, the first deer hunting license cost 50 cents, while today Ohio sees 300,000 deer hunters annually spending a total of $514 million.

Yet the reassuring message that unfolds through the 11 stories, which Wegner fashions from old journals, poems, articles and paintings, is that the deer camps of a century ago are not any different from deer camps today, because hunters are not any different.

Then, like now, they were seeking the simplicity found in nature, as Roosevelt wrote of his experience hunting from a canoe in 1893:

“There is pleasure in the mere buoyant gliding of the birch-bark canoe, with its curved bow and stern; nothing else that floats possesses such grace, such frail and delicate beauty, as this true craft of the wilderness, which is as much a creature of the wild woods as the deer themselves.”

The one distraction in Wegner’s book lies in what is omitted. The author, a historian with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, writes mostly about his home, with four of the stories from Wisconsin and eight from the Midwest. For a naturalist or hunter from the Northeast, “Legendary Deer Camps” offers a meaningful history lesson, but not of the history here. Beyond a brief description of Roosevelt’s time in Maine and the Adirondacks, it leaves you wondering what deer camps were like in this part of the country 100 years ago.

The Midwestern flavor of the book is overshadowed somewhat by the fact the stories of Roosevelt and Faulkner, the two most famous hunters in the book, offer insights that will please anyone. The tales of these hunters show they lived as simple outdoorsmen in their beloved deer camps – Roosevelt’s Tiffany & Co. scabbard aside.

If you can forgive the distracting Midwestern theme, “Legendary Deer Camps” shows how hunting traditions have long reaped rich relationships between nature and men, and what a great social equalizer deer camps have always been.

Deirdre Fleming covers outdoor sports and recreation for the NEWS.