| This dissertation explores how city-based mountain clubs in the western United States inscribed hierarchies - of region, landscape aesthetics, race, class, and gender - on iconic mountain landscape. In focusing on mountain clubs, it seeks to shed light on social evolutionary beliefs that informed the activities of some conservationists well into the first half of the twentieth century.;Emulating English models, urban professionals in several western cities founded mountaineering clubs, most notably San Francisco's Sierra Club, near the turn of the twentieth century. This study focuses on the journals that developed, within and between clubs, an ethos of individual aspiration and public service. Narratives associated northern European heredity and staunch male-gendered individualism with unfettered mobility and ascent in mountains made to evoke "primeval" rigor through stock motifs and conventions.;The dissertation analyzes the process of grafting meaning on mountains by exploring clubs' construction of alpine sites described as remnants of both original evolutionary conditions and a disappearing wilderness frontier. Clubs' yearly summer encampments, described as idylls of face-to-face democracy, established behavioral criteria grounded in social class, race, and gender that defined who did and did not belong in sanctified high-places. These criteria reflected an enduring dis-ease with perceived urban artificiality and disorder, anxiety that intensified as cities grew and remote sites became more accessible. After the Second World War, the formerly insular Sierra Club in particular began to pursue a wider membership to defend "wilderness," at the same time that it sought to limit access to it. In becoming a national organization, the Sierra Club publicized its recreational practice as a meaningful lifestyle choice for a similar prosperous, white, educated cohort. Its newly militant conservation rhetoric, textual and visual, subsumed earlier race and class angst within the vague menace posed by crowds and cities. |
