The Art of Camping

This chapter explores the era of camping before the automobile came onto the scene. Camping persisted as a largely upper-middle-class and white activity during this time, but its popularity grew rapidly as magazine accounts, how-to manuals, and guidebooks taught more urban people how and where to camp. The chapter features a few camping advocates, including Horace Kephart, a tortured soul who became America's best-known camping author during the twentieth century's first decades. It also follows two camping parties—historian Frederick Jackson Turner out with his family on a month-long canoe trip to Ontario's Lake Nipigon and the writer Mary Bradshaw Richards, who with her husband traveled from Massachusetts to the young but distant Yellowstone National Park.