Introduction

1According to 2020’s Outdoor Participation Report, recreational camping is the fifth most popular outdoor activity in the USA, with nearly 42 million Americans participating at least once during the year. Approximately three-quarters of these enthusiasts enjoy automobile and Recreational Vehicle (RV) camping while most of the others backpack; only a handful engage in packhorse camping. Participants are diverse, but the majority of campers remain Whites (Outdoor Foundation, 2020). Despite camping’s popularity in the USA, few scholars explored its long history until recently. Initial research, which began in the late 1960s, treated camping as incidental to larger issues, but with the rise of the new millennium, scholars began to focus on camping itself and on a range of social, cultural and technological issues specific to it (Schmitt, 1990 [1969]; Belasco, 1979; Lofgren, 1999; White, 2000; Hailey, 2008; Rugh, 2008; Finney, 2014; Hogue, 2016; White, 2016; Young, 2017; and Young, 2021). This article seeks to better understand why this form of outdoor recreation arose in nineteenth century America and diffused over the next century. It employs an historical-geographic methodology that utilizes texts and imagery, including popular books, magazines and additional periodicals as well as advertisements, government documents and other primary sources. The article links geographic shifts in settlement patterns to social-technological changes and to geographic imaginaries, i.e., “taken-for-granted spatial orderings of the world” (Gregory, 2009, p. 282). It does so by connecting three intersecting trends that shaped American camping as a leisure activity and forged outdoor spaces that, “set apart from the mundane world for the [campers], are in part spaces of the imaginary, of fantasy, and dreaming” (Salazar, 2012, p. 876). Contrasting “urban” with “natural,” this bipolar perception valorized places and practices that derived “not only from the cognitive operations of reason but also from structures of feeling” produced and shared by generations of campers and camping institutions (Gregory, 2009, p. 282).

2The three trends were, first, campers lived in an everyday world that was undergoing modernization. The cities where they resided grew larger, more complex and polluted, and less green. In response, some urban residents embraced camping, which allowed them to temporarily retreat from their urban lives into imagined “natural” places that allegedly counteracted a world that too often left them tired, tense and alienated. Second, camping restored and refreshed because it was a form of pilgrimage where the pilgrims exited their everyday world into a transformative place to “rough it” and be renewed. Finally, camping was an antimodern reaction to a modernizing world, but it nonetheless remained subject to modernization. Camping “gear” diversified, becoming lighter, more specialized and more easily transported as manufacturers sought to reduce camping’s roughness and enhance sales. At the same time, national park and similar destination managers modified campgrounds in order to make them more rational, predictable and domesticated. These three trends—modernization, pilgrimage and technological change—quietly fashioned the emergence and growth of camping and its places.

Modern and Antimodern

3Camping is neither new nor unique to the United States. Its practice is trans-cultural and ancient, but it emerged as an American form of recreation after the Civil War that ended in 1865. Beginning in the northeast, industrialization, urbanization and a variety of social changes swept through the country, accompanied by a decades-long, mass migration towards America’s cities. In 1860, just under 20 percent of the population lived in urban areas, but in 1920, the total urban population exceeded 50 percent for the first time (The Statistical History of the United States, 1965, p. 14). In cities Americans found enhanced civil liberties, more employment options, improved leisure amenities and a whole host of other attractive opportunities. However, they were also assaulted by smoke, noise, crowding, shifting social relations, production schedules, pervasive regulation and more. A tension emerged as many found America’s cities to be confusing and alienating yet attractive. Yearning for a sense of belonging and connection in the cacophony of modern urban life, some embraced camping, which from its outset, was antimodern.

4Modernity is “a process by which society constantly renews itself” and generally refers to the historical period when capitalism, industrialization, rationalization and related institutions transformed existing, relatively traditional societies into “modern” ones (Delanty, 2007, p. 3068). Beginning around 1500 C.E., modernization unfolded slowly for several centuries, but the pace accelerated during the nineteenth century, prompting a growing awareness among modernizing peoples that they lived in a time of revolutionary change while remembering more premodern times (Berman, 1982). It was at this moment of rising awareness that recreational camping appeared in America. An expression of modernity and shaped by modern institutions, it is nonetheless premodern in its sentiment and the nature it reveres.

5The American response to modernity took many antimodern forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a significant portion aligned with the contemporary Romantic Movement. While the movement had diverse expressions, it can be broadly recognized by a rejection of rationalism, a regard for history and a focus on perception and beauty, particularly that of nature. Moreover, the movement embraced the belief that a group of people’s character or nationality grew organically and emerged over a long period of time. Romanticism, however, was not exclusively antimodern. It contributed to the growth of democracies, to a belief in progress and to the more open societies that are common features of modern life. Nonetheless, antimodernists frequently drew on the conventions of Romanticism in their struggles with modernity’s advance (Barzun, 1961).

6Romantic antimodernism was strongly felt in America during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but one type of place—the city and urban life—attracted a great deal of attention. Cities had been present in America from early colonial days, but even then, they were often viewed skeptically. In 1787’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had argued that the ideal society would flourish where the economy was agricultural and the settlements small and dispersed. Invoking a geographic contrast, Jefferson promulgated a valorized rural-urban imaginary that regarded the former as healthy and positive while casting the latter as damaging and negative. Farmers, he insisted, were the backbone of America. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposite (sic) for substantial and genuine virtue.” Manufacturing and cities, in contrast, were sources of vice. Drawing a particularly repulsive word picture, Jefferson suggested that “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body” (Jefferson, 1829, p. 171-173). Condemning cities as politically destructive, he encouraged their residents to move back to the land in order to farm. In a rejection of urban life lay the roots of the republican nation, urged Jefferson. After the Civil War, the rapid growth and increasing complexity of modern cities compounded Americans’ discomfort with them, but its expression took a new turn. Late nineteenth century Romantic antimodernists only rarely mentioned farming and they were not adamantly opposed to cities. Instead, they tended to be ambivalent because urban life resulted in both benefits and costs. Consequently, even as Romantic antimodernists denounced many aspects of urban life, they praised efforts to get back to nature through art, natural history, gardening, national parks, travel and more because these compensated for and counteracted the trials of urban life (Lears, 1981; Lees, 1985; Bender, 1987; Schmitt, 1990; Jones and Wills, 2005).

7The nature-loving antimodernism of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was shaped by writers, painters, landscape architects and others, but one of the most influential was John Ruskin. Renowned in England and America as an art critic and moral crusader, his Modern Painters of 1846 provided a theoretical framework for Romantic antimodernists’ embrace of nature. In particular, Ruskin argued that truth, beauty and the divine were inseparably linked together. If something was beautiful, insisted Ruskin, it must express the divine, which was inherently good. Therefore, travel out of ugly, industrializing cities and into attractive natural places or viewing landscape paintings true to nature were beneficial (Stein, 1967; Lears, 1981).

8Ruskin’s voluminous writings on nature, art and society stirred a range of Romantic antimodernist practices in America, including political movements, historic preservation organizations and the broad field of urban planning. Andrew Jackson Downing, an influential and early proponent of urban parks, suburbanization and landscape gardening, considered Ruskin a “favorite author” (Schuyler, 1996, p. 136). Downing, in his turn, encouraged a young Frederick Law Olmsted, future designer of New York City’s Central Park and numerous other sites, and the author of the Yosemite Park Commission’s seminal 1865 report. Olmsted came to regard Ruskin as a “mentor” and one of “the real prophets” (Roper, 1973, p. 40, 72). Ruskin’s influence in America can also be detected in such American landscape painters as Frederick Edwin Church and William James Stillman, and the transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (Novak, 1995; Dyson, 2014; Schlett, 2015).

9Less well known, but equally representative of the period’s embrace of Romantic antimodernism was Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850), which was a contemplation of domestic life and the shifting natural landscape about her home. Organized around the seasons, the book embeds the elements of her domestic life into nature’s cycles. In many ways she offered a fairly conservative take on women’s lives, but she also drew on nature as a source for moral education. Like Church, Downing and Thoreau, Cooper contributed to the slow awakening of middle-class Americans to Romantic antimodernism and to the attractiveness and value of the nation’s wilder lands (Norwood, 1993; Sackman, 2003).

10By the late 1840s, one geographically anchored expression of Romantic antimodernism had begun to stand out for urban Americans—the wild areas of New York state’s Adirondack Mountains. One early traveler to the region was Joel T. Headley. A professional writer, his 1849 book, The Adirondack; Or, Life in the Woods began to weave an imaginary of this place by word-painting his mountain climbing and boating adventures. For instance, he described his entrance into the region in attractive and evocative language. “At length, just as the heavy drops began to fall, we emerged into a little valley, in which nestled a rude village, the meadows of which seemed to be one mass of phosphorescence. The fire flies hung in countless numbers over the surface, forming almost a solid body of light. The effect was indescribable; all around was Egyptian darkness, except that single level spot on which the incessant flashes made a constant, yet ever tremulous light” (p. 17). Headley had taken to the wilds because he feared urban life was destroying him and, in line with Ruskin, that nature could redeem. “I believe,” declared Headley, “that every man degenerates without frequent communion with nature… A single tree standing alone, and waving all day long… is to me fuller of meaning and instruction than the crowded mart or gorgeously built town” (p. 168). Headley’s book was followed by several similar accounts by other authors and by a widely reported Adirondack event, “The Philosophers’ Camp” of 1858. Described by the New York Times as a “congregation of philosophers, savans, authors, artists, and ordinary human beings,” this camping trip by some of America’s most famous (and urban dwelling) individuals into the frontier-like wilds of the Adirondacks made national news (Robinson, 1859; Richards, 1859a, 1859b; Schlett, 2015). Importantly, sketches in Frank Leslie’s New Family Magazine and other publications enriched the outdoor imaginary by illustrating the group’s campsite (Stallknecht and Whitehead, 1858) (see figure 1). Nevertheless, only a handful of Americans took to camping.

11American camping was finally born in spring 1869 when the Reverend William H.H. Murray produced America’s first how-to-camp manual, Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp Life in the Adirondacks. Publications like Headley’s had suggested why one would want to camp and the pleasures of the experience, but they had provided little guidance on how or where. In contrast, Adventures in the Wilderness was a blend of practical advice (one’s “kit” should include “a pair of warm woollen blankets, uncut, and a few articles of luxury, such as towel, soap, etc.” [p. 27]), Romantic antimodernism (“Ah, me, the nights I have passed in the woods! How they haunt me with their sweet, suggestive memories of silence and repose! How harshly the steel-shod hoofs smite against the flinty pavement beneath my window, and clash with rude interruptions upon my ear as I sit recalling the tranquil hours I have spent beneath the trees!” [p. 23]), and witty, lengthy tales about the region. Highly successful, the book launched what came to be known as the “Murray Rush,” which was an unprecedented horde of campers from New York, Boston, Hartford and other northeastern cities charging into the Adirondack Mountains during the summers of 1869 and 1870 (see figure 2). Within a decade, other authors were producing similar books with language and images that enhanced and guided the Adirondack camping imaginary begun in earlier decades and furthered by Murray (see figure 3). In a short time, the popularity of a leisure activity that had been widely unknown exploded and a region that had previously attracted fewer than 100 campers per year was embraced by more than 10,000 annually. Those numbers continued to grow for over a century even as camping spatially diffused across the country. Although Romantic painting and park making faded as antimodern responses, camping endured because it continued to bring regeneration to these urban Americans who unquestioningly assumed that travel to and a temporary stay in a “natural” place would restore them before returning to everyday life. That is, campers felt that a pilgrimage into nature would actuate camping’s antimodern power.

Hallock, 1870, p. 325.

Pilgrimage

12From its outset, campers enjoyed three principal modes—on foot; on horseback; or, with a wheeled vehicle—but no matter which was employed, most campers were antimodernists visiting nature where they consciously or unconsciously recapitulated the “frontier experience.” A foundational environment and era in the American imagination, the western frontier was said to have autonomously progressed across “wild” lands and peoples leaving America in its wake. Long perceived as a crucial element in the formation of the national identity, the frontier was famously declared “closed” by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 (Turner, 1986). One consequence was an accelerated effort to preserve and protect America’s vanishing wilderness lands (Mitchell, 1981; Klein, 1993; Lewis, 2007; Nash, 2014). Even though the frontier was geographically distant for Adirondack and similarly early campers, and unavailable to all after 1890, when “pioneer life” was recapitulated in national parks and related settings by campers, it was imagined as a re-binding of alienated urbanites to the nation. Pioneer and frontier imagery, and language emphasizing mythic places (especially “the West”), people and events became a staple in camping guidebooks, brochures and equipment advertisements, contributing to the geographic and outdoor imaginaries of camping (see figure 4). In addition, Gregory (2009, p. 282) has noted that geographical imaginaries “involve bordering as well as ordering; the hierarchical division of the globe [into, for example, “the tropics”] …and the oppositions between.” Consequently, campers in all eras were able to find “nature” in ocean beaches, forests, lake shores, mountains, grasslands, and beyond because these places stood in opposition to modern cities. The diversity of camping destinations prompts us to look beyond their differences to see that all shared an essential oppositional element–these places were not a part of everyday life; each was not-city. Instead, they were the half of the urban-nature opposition that produced relief. Campers did not travel into the nature, but many “natures” as they headed out of cities.

14While pilgrimage is ancient and transcultural, three fundamental beliefs generally account for why any pilgrim launches her or himself onto the path. First, they are convinced that powerful forces exist and that they influence people’s lives. Second, pilgrims believe it possible to have meaningful relationships with these forces. They are not beyond reach. And, finally, they trust that there are unique and special places where the unmatched power of these forces feels close enough to touch. Such places are what Turner termed “the center out there” (1973).

15No single type of pilgrimage exists, but they frequently involve a number of recurrent elements, including the destination (and why it is sacred), the route traveled, a pilgrim’s motivations, the physical, mental or other challenges faced, the outcome once a pilgrimage is complete, and the relationship between pilgrimage and a pilgrim’s sense of personal and group identity. When we apply these common elements to American campers, we find that they generally seek to visit “nature,” which varies in its locations and forms. It can be at the end of the journey or, as in backpacking, it can suffuse the journey itself. Campers can take many routes, with some being more demanding than others, but always they must journey from their everyday homes. Most modes of camping are relatively inexpensive, but camping can be mentally taxing, physically punishing or some combination. As a consequence, camping has long been colloquially known in America as “roughing it.” The end result sought by campers also varies, but a common refrain is release from modern life’s everyday tensions and the opportunity to relax. Likewise, campers seek to reinforce a variety of identities, but a frequently shared pursuit is the reinforcement of a camper’s sense of belonging, especially of being an American (Stoddard, 1997).

16Camping fits into the larger pilgrimage pattern, but the latter is rarely a pure practice. Pilgrimage and tourism often are interwoven, making the commonalties and differences difficult to discern. To address the blurred overlap, institutions have sometimes formalized and regularized the internal conditions that a proper pilgrim is supposed to achieve and/or the physical actions one should complete. Such efforts, however, are of limited effect because what sets someone apart as a true pilgrim is contested in both meaning and practice (Eade and Sallnow, 1991; Di Giovine and Choe, 2019). According to Frey (1998), pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela generally had little regard for individual motivations. Instead, they considered those who walked or rode a horse long-distance and along one of the traditional paths as true pilgrims. Their collective embrace of these non-motorized and challenging forms of travel generated authenticity because it linked them to the community of Santiago’s pilgrims whose paths stretch across Europe and back deep in time. Travelers who chose to ride in automobiles, buses and airplanes to the city and its shrine were cut off from the past, judged ersatz, and dismissed by the non-motorized pilgrims as “tourists.”

17Campers similarly contest what is authentically camping. Like the pilgrims to Santiago, campers rarely question individual motivations but instead hitch their judgments to differences in mode and equipment. Today’s backpackers routinely reject car and recreational-vehicle camping as too easy and inauthentic. They are, to borrow a phrase from Cohen (1973), “Nomads from comfort.” For their part, motorized campers may respect the physical challenge of backpacking, but they fail to see it as transformative because in their view it demands too much exertion. “Are you kidding me?” snorted one RV camper when asked if he would consider camping in a tent (Egan 1995). “I’ve got a whole house with me. My wife likes to shower every day. Why would I ever go camping in a tent?”

18Just as few campers would consciously describe camping as an antidote for modernity, so few of them would frame it as pilgrimage. Nonetheless, camping fits comfortably within this cultural form. When camping is unpacked from its popular descriptions, manuals and advertisements, what remains is a leisure-time activity that moved people from their everyday homes and out into nature in order for them to return home transformed. As a consequence of being pilgrimage, camping was a “rough” activity, but campers disagreed about the appropriate degree of challenge in the same way that they disagreed about what qualified as a “natural” destination.

Technology and Modernization

19Campers’ concerns about authenticity and their attitudes toward the other camping modes and equipment point to a third issue—the interaction between camping, modernization and technology. As noted, modernity has been a vibrant force for change, but ironically, antimodern practices and antimodernists themselves have not been beyond its reach. The Arts and Crafts movement, which took inspiration from John Ruskin, may have encompassed a critique of modern life, but many participants were ambivalent in their antimodernism, so modernity continued to shape and alter their lives. For them, the movement led to a rise in personal crafting as a way to engage in what Gelber termed “productive leisure,” which in turn spawned a love of collecting, personal gadgets, “tinkering,” hobby shops and much more (1999, p. 196).

20Camping followed a similar trajectory. No matter which mode of camping was chosen, its enthusiasts sought restoration from the everyday world. Backpackers, for instance, sought to counteract the worst aspects of modern life by embracing the most physically challenging and historically rich mode. Like earlier backpackers and the pedestrian pioneers before them, they continued the tradition of walking while carrying one’s equipment and supplies. However, backpackers shifted from blanket rolls to backpacks during the 1920s, which then gradually became lighter, more comfortable and more effective (see figures 5 and 6). This modernization allowed backpackers to escape the crowding that increased in the most popular national parks after World War II. In 1951, the Sierra Club’s David Brower recounted that he and his fellow backpackers “knew for sure that no matter what the valley-floor crowd, it was possible to travel all day on almost any of the trails in the Yosemite High Sierra without meeting more than a few people” (p. x). Graburn (1989, p. 31) explained why Brower thrilled at the absence of people. “If nature is curative, performs magical re-creations and other miracles otherwise assigned to Lourdes, God, or gurus, the medicine is weakened by the presence of other humans. To share is to lose power” (italics in original). As the number of RV and automobile campers increased in one area, backpacking allowed these campers to travel into less populated nature. Nevertheless, the majority of campers were never willing to rough it as much as backpackers.

22It was not, however, just auto camping’s growing class, family and gender diversity that generated responses; race was also an issue, especially where African Americans were involved. During the 1920s, some African Americans, like their White counterparts, had grown wealthier and embraced a variety of short and extended recreations, including such nature-based activities as relaxing at the beach, swimming, picnicking, fishing, hiking, participating in the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, enrolling at summer camps, and family camping (Foster, 1999; Holland, 2002; Alnutt, 2005; Finney, 2014). Most of these recreations, however, had prompted few disputes because they occurred on private land. When the first US national parks were opened in the early 1930s in the Jim Crow South, Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah, and African American automobile campers sought to enjoy them, park policy debates began. Before 1934, most national parks were in the West and national park racism had generally consisted of the ejection of indigenous peoples from such places as Yellowstone (Spence, 1999) and a conscious, but unpublicized policy of discouraging visits by African Americans. Black visitors and campers severely disrupted the imaginaries of White campers so were, in the opinion of administration, “conspicuous… objected to by other [i.e., White] visitors… [and] impossible to serve.” As a consequence, National Park Service (NPS) superintendents had decided at their 1922 conference that “we cannot openly discriminate against them, [but] they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care of them” (Shaffer, 2001, p. 126). In the southern national parks, however, discouragement was replaced by racial segregation and by the consciously slow provision of facilities in the places designated for African Americans (see figure 9). For nearly a decade the NPS struggled with this issue both inside itself and with Black and White Americans, only reaching a resolution—no segregated campgrounds in any national parks—with the onset of World War II (Young, 2009). Unsurprisingly, of the four largest ethnic/racial groupings, African Americans least enjoy camping today (Outdoor Foundation, 2020, p. 14).

23The automobile also allowed for a massive flowering in the size, range and types of camping equipment used (see figure 10). In concert, modernization slowly altered automobile camping’s imaginary in terms of practice, material culture and destination features relating to comfort and convenience. “Yes,” the manufacturers and retailers who sold camping equipment and the administrators who managed camping areas promised, camping would renew those who “roughed it,” but a camper need not be completely without modern devices and techniques to attain restoration. Should a camper choose to use a particular appliance, such as a grate-broiler (see figure 11), he could count on a more efficient, calculable, predictable, and controlled experience that eliminated “unnecessary” roughness (Ritzer, 2008). Other businesses likewise promised products that would reduce bulk, prolong food freshness, keep campers drier, warmer, cooler, bite-free and more. The authors of new camping manuals similarly informed their readers how to avoid discomforts by purchasing particular products, by using special techniques, and by selecting the best locations. And beginning in the 1920s, managers modernized private and public campgrounds by installing such infrastructure as drinking water, tables and fire grills while instituting such regulations as designated campsites within designated campgrounds (McClelland, 1998) (see figure 12). In each instance, these efforts included an appeal to reducing camping’s challenges. By the 1920s, modernization had so impacted camping that one of the era’s best-known authors, Elon Jessup (1923), avoided any ambiguity by simply titling his how-to-camp manual, Roughing It Smoothly.

24Despite its antimodern roots, camping increasingly modernized and imaginaries shifted, but it did so unevenly, causing a tension to develop between the adherents of the different camping modes. When camping first appeared, the imagined, technical and technological differences between campers who walked, rode on horseback or employed a wheeled vehicle had been minimal so little tension had existed. However, as camping modernized, some modes became a lot less challenging, safer and relatively comfortable. Consequently, a contradiction developed as modernization proceeded. As noted, this contradiction was rejected by some campers as inauthenticity and was largely expressed as disrespect or anxiety between the practitioners of camping’s several modes. Backpackers, pack-horse campers, car campers and recreational-vehicle campers often felt antipathy towards campers enjoying the other camping modes and would overtly dismiss them as somehow pointless or worse. Even though an RV camper and a backpacker could enjoy similarly transformative journeys, they also could view the other’s camping mode as a threat and expend energy to see that their mode of choice was secure and, where possible, enhanced in America’s parks, forests and other protected areas (Sharpe et al., 1983).

Conclusion

25Camping was not beyond the reach of modernity. Despite its antimodern origins and its pursuit of renewal through pilgrimage, many campers increasingly embraced and accepted elements of everyday life on their journeys and at their destinations. There may, however, be a limit to this process. The percentage of the American population that camps has been decreasing since the 1980s with an increase in computer games and increasingly sedentary lifestyles being proffered as the explanation (Pergams and Zaradic, 2006; Kareiva, 2008). However, an historical-geographic analysis provides an alternative account for the decrease. Camping arose as a response to the unsettling aspects of modern urban life, so an increasingly modernized camping undermines its original value. Why go camping when it is so much like being home? And, as evidence, we need only look to the one major mode of camping that has not experienced the post-1980s decrease in participants–backpacking. Its appeal remains steady, even enhanced, with participation increasing from 6.6 million in 2007 to 10.7 million in 2019 (Outdoor Foundation, 2020, p. 19-20) or as illustrated by Jon Krakauer’s bestselling Into the Wild (1996), Cheryl Strayed’s popular Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) and the movies based on them. This is not a coincidence. Backpacking began as and remains the most Romantically antimodern of the modes because it most closely resembles pioneering in mode and outdoor setting, and how camping was practiced 150 years ago. In the future the overall number of campers may continue to decrease, but backpacking will likely endure because in both the imaginary and in practice, it remains truest to its origins and best continues to provide campers relief from their unsettling everyday lives.