“Half Man, Half Wildcat”: Itinerancy and the Myth of Frontier Manhood in the United States’ Lake Region

Abstract

Reexamining the history of the lumberjack ’ s frontier, especially through an environmental history perspective, which understands the forest not merely as a site of human endeavor but as a central historical actor, offers a deep, complex seam for future research. This essay, examining that frontier through the lenses of the history of masculinity and history of memory, begins to pick open a single stitch. 1 Doing so reopens what Thomas Cox saw as the frontier moment — the moment of white colonization and the height of forest extraction from the Indigenous lands in the Northwoods of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan — and allows us to understand it as the height of a period of cultural turmoil. The purposeful twentieth-century mythmaking surrounding late-nineteenth century lumberjacks in the Northwoods of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan served to obscure how contested, unsettled, and dynamic the period of intense frontier lumbering was. Large-scale lumbering brought into con fl ict a diverse set of seemingly incompatible masculinities. White la-borers ’ itinerancy, following lines of supply and extraction between the Northwoods and settled towns, put lumberjacks into direct contact with Anishinaabe populations and the burgeoning middle classes of the Mid-western plains towns. Each of these points of contact was marked by violence as well as racialized and gendered disgust — either for the jacks by bourgeois settlers, or by the jacks toward Anishinaabe men.