Multicultural Wilderness

Wilderness parks in the United States are often described as landscapes of leisure for affluent white nature tourists. This article challenges that interpretation by exploring visitation to the Cook County Forest Preserves and the Indiana Dunes State Park, two Chicago-area wilderness parks that during the early twentieth century attracted far more visitors than all of the national parks combined. The author argues that if we turn our gaze from rarefied and far less-visited parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone to the wilderness parks created just outside of major metropolitan centers, we can clearly see that early-twentieth-century wilderness landscapes attracted a far more cosmopolitan audience than commonly assumed. Moreover, the author shows that marginalized Chicagoans were not simply passive consumers of wilderness. Drawing on theorists and historians of mass-culture reception, the author makes the case that new immigrants, children of the foreign-born, African Americans, and industrial workers appropriated these Chicago wilderness parks in much the same way that they borrowed and creatively rewrote Jazz-Age mass-culture entertainment such as Hollywood films. Far from places that Americanized immigrants and neutralized class tension, Chicago-area wilderness parks became important sites for the production and reproduction of subaltern national, ethnic, and working-class communities.