Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Introduction: The Hidden History of American Conservation

PART ONE: Forest: The Adirondacks

1. The Re-creation of Nature
2. Public Property and Private Parks
3. Working-Class Wilderness

PART TWO: Mountain: Yellowstone

4. Nature and Nation
5. Fort Yellowstone
6. Modes of Poaching and Production

PART THREE Desert: The Grand Canyon
7. The Havasupai Problem
8. Farewell Song

Epilogue: Landscapes of Memory and Myth
Chronology of American Conservation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Karl Jacoby is the Robert J. Carney Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

“Jacoby crafts a sympathetic portrait of the classes without the means to support their claims to the natural world, while dismantling some of the stereotypes and larger myths that have long enveloped the conservation movement.”—The Oregonian

"An unsettling study of early conservation, one that reminds readers that battles to save nature were also battles to colonize places and peoples…. This is an excellent and timely book."—Joseph Taylor III, Journal of American History

"A well-conceived, solidly researched, and clearly written work with important conclusions but even richer possibilities. Anyone interested in environmental history or the contributions it can make to other fields in our discipline ought to read it. Anyone interested in important questions and methods in environmental history has to study it carefully."—Thomas Dunlap, Reviews in American History

"This insightful and lucid book combines social with environmental history, enriching both. . . . Timely, eloquent, and provocative, Crimes against Nature illuminates contemporary struggles, especially in the West, over our environment."—Alan Taylor, author of William Cooper's Town

"A compelling new interpretation of early conservation history in the United States. . . . Powerfully argued and beautifully written, this book could hardly be more relevant to the environmental challenges we face today."—William Cronon, author of Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

"What a powerful and yet subtle tale of the fraught encounter between the conservationists' desire to 'engineer' wilderness with the property regime of the modern state and the unique, local, 'moral ecologies' of those who resisted! Rarely has this level of originality, close reasoning, and historical texture been brought into such harmony while preserving the whiff of lived experience."—James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State

2001 Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association
co-winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history for 2001, American Society for Environmental History