Author Judith Fryer’s Felicitous Space, essentially a fine detail of the writings of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, both late 19th and early 20th century writers, reveals, as an aside to Wharton and Cather’s writing, much about why wilderness was then and is now - in peril.

Fryer writes, “In America - where in our descriptions of landscape from the 17th century on, we have taken the conventions of self-conscious (European) ‘literary’ language for the vocabulary of everyday life - there has been a male need to experience the land as maternal because of the threatening, alien and potentially emasculating terror of the unknown.

“Making ‘the new continent Woman was already to civilize it a bit, casting the stamp of human relations upon what was otherwise unknown and untamed.’”

So, at the outset, the Pilgrims and then the Puritans cast the new continent in the realm of a "Mother protector" (from which evolved the distorted expression “Mother Nature”).  This was quickly followed however by “an attempted movement out of that confinement (of Mother control) in order to experience the self as independent, assertive and sexually active,” which the white males felt they’d accomplished by taking land from the Indians through violent (male-oriented) acts.  The perceived 'ownership' of the land produced an immediate sense of security.  Still, the enslaving of Africans as virtually free labor, along with the blatant killing off of most of the Pequots in 1637 (just 17 years after landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts), clearly broadened the myth of white supremacy.

Kay Larson writes in the New York Times of July 26, 1998, “The Pequot war preceded the Salem witchcraft hysteria by a mere three decades. From the outset, the Puritan clergy denounced Indians as devil-worshipping witches destined for damnation.  Pequots, on the other hand, often tortured, flayed and roasted captives; other tribes sided with the British against them.  The war, which nearly obliterated the Pequots, opened the Connecticut coast to settlers, who paid off their debts with the fur trade they commandeered from the Pequots.

“The basic facts of the massacre are agreed upon.  In 1637, British militiamen and their Narragansett allies surrounded a Pequot fortified village and set it afire. In the chaos, men, women and children burned (to death) or were speared (or shot) to death.  Pequot captives were beheaded or sent into slavery.  Local tribes were stunned by the Europeans' scorched-earth brutality.  The Puritan clergy rejoiced.  A clerical 'leader' of the raid declared, ''We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.''

“The passions of this event and the subsequent quarrels over its interpretation are the originating points for some familiar myths of the frontier.  Melville, sympathizing with the Indians, sent Captain Ahab after the white whale in a ship, the Pequod, that represents the blind wrath of the European mind desperate to subdue the mystical unknown. 

“John Wayne, siding with the settlers, scoured the desert in The Searchers to rescue Natalie Wood, who had been abducted by Indians, a tale originally enacted when Pequots stole two girls in a bloody raid that precipitated the massacre.

Of interest to us at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet is the similarity of the justification used in killing Pequots with the justification to deforest or de-wildernessize the continent: “the ideology of Manifest Destiny.”  “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”  There was also "sufficient light" to "subdue and bring into subjection" ALL the perceived "wild things" - whether man or beast or land or forest or space.

Fryer goes on in Felicitous Space,  “In the ‘melodrama of beset manhood,’ as Baym calls the myth of ‘the pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances’”....”the promise that ‘in this new land, untrammeled by history and social accident, a person will be able to achieve complete self-definition.

And how do men, by in large white, go about achieving this self-definition?  Fryer says that Richard Slotkin finds “the myth of the hero whose adventures of initiation and conversion enable him to achieve communion with powers that rule the universe. 

“In the wilderness, something in his subconscious stirs up his hunting instincts: he tracks the wilderness beings, learns their secrets, and when he has established this connection with his prey, he uses his acquired skills against his teachers to kill or assert his dominance over them. 

“In killing,” Slotkin says, “the hero is confirmed in his new and higher character and comes into full possession of the powers of the wilderness: ‘Through the ordeal and discipline of the hunt and its culmination in violence, the hero has achieved a regeneration of the spirit akin to the Puritan (religious) conversion experience.’”