Karen R. Jones's topic – the western hunting trail as site of nineteenth-century US identity formation – is not new. Her approach, however, is. Working primarily within performance studies, she argues for “the importance of performance as a conceptual marker for understanding the material and semiotic dynamics of the hunt” (334) both on the game trail and in its reenactments, from Wild West shows to taxidermy to the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance. At its best, her analysis plumbs the highly ritualized drama of the hunt to reveal how deeply and extensively it runs through US culture and to make newly visible the power of the “hunter–performer” (192), male and female, in connecting individual and national ambitions, social and political exclusions, performance rites and human rights.

Jones structures the discussion into three “acts” which loosely follow the chronology of the hunt. The first focusses on the actors and agents who constructed and pursued the hunting trail, the second on its transmission through expressive forms (literary, visual, theatrical, and material), and the third on the legacy of this “hunter's paradise” (23) as, in its dying throes, its racialized codes of inclusion and exclusion shaped the rise of conservation policy.

Along the way, Jones exponentially expands the cast of characters from the usual suspects – such as Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Buffalo Jones – to include a host of less remembered hunters, settlers, and military figures who were also cultural producers. The result is a notably expanded archive of the hunting genre along with the finer distinctions and deeper analysis which this multiplicity enables. Her acuteness in deciphering the tight symbiosis between rifle and camera culture, for example, embraces everything from physical and rhetorical hunting practices, to literary, visual, and performative representations, to novelty gun cameras. She goes beyond gendered binaries and easy comparisons between sport and subsistence in teasing out distinctions in performance and representation by “lady adventurers” such as Isabella Bird and Grace Seton and western homesteaders such as Evelyn Cameron, Agnes Morley Cleaveland, and Elinore Pruitt Stewart. The strong chapter on taxidermy conjoins the much-discussed William Hornaday with the lesser known Martha Maxwell, the “Colorado Huntress” (253). It convincingly argues that “trophy taxidermy” (251) choreographed the sports hunter's performance while again expanding the cast – from the big-game animals (bison, bear, elk) mounted in aristocratic homes to the monkeys, hummingbirds, eagles, and squirrels innovatively combined by Maxwell to educational and theatrical effect.

Jones also reads familiar performances in new ways through the prism of hunting culture. See her analysis of Buffalo Bill's Wild West as a restaging of the hunter's paradise, including the climactic “Attack on the Settler's Cabin” (189). An act often read in terms of the demonization of Native warriors and the heroization of military imperialism here adds a quite subtle layer in performing the hunter's family as the bedrock of colonialism. Jones repositions Bill Cody partly by attending to the hunting–showman culture out of which he emerged, unexpectedly conjoining his story with that of James “Grizzly” Adams – bear hunter, bear trapper, and bear fighter in one. In the hunting and display of live animals – aided by his amenuensis, journalist Theodore Hittell, and promoter, P. T. Barnum – Adams successfully staged himself a generation before Cody and his primary mythmaker, Ned Buntline. Hunting paradigms also bring new nuance to the cultural meanings of Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, within and beyond entertainment arenas.

At times, the power of the performance studies analysis falters. Some discussion of the hunt's contributions to transnational imperialism, white masculinity, and quest narratives seems well-worn, adding little to the field's rich scholarship from Richard Slotkin onwards.Footnote ¹ At other moments, the analysis travels too quickly to do full justice to its range of subjects. For all the gesture to Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, for example, the discussion does less with the agency of nonhuman “relational participants” (animals, landscapes, firearms) than it promises to (14).Footnote ² Jones too glancingly suggests echoes with Indigenous cosmologies and parallels between trophy and lynching photographs (and between hunting and torture more generally) – all intriguing directions which need more development lest they be recontained within eurocentric frameworks.

Nevertheless, this is a study full of provocative reconceptualizations, from the hunting guide as choreographer to the hunter as curator. Arguing that western hunting was centrally a “testimonial culture” (11) and tracing the “dramaturgy of the game trail” (15) in its constitution and ramifications, Jones pinpoints the embeddedness of performance, the need to show and tell – that is, the need for an audience – at the heart of the ostensibly solitary frontier on which so much US mythology rests.