At top, a man is being carried in a sedan chair, with many porters carrying furniture from a train on the right to his cabin in the wilderness on the left. At bottom, on the left, is a buck holding up a young hunter, exclaiming “To think of anybody mistaking a thing like this for me!” At bottom, on the right, is “The Guide’s Farewell” where a hunter stands outside the door as his guide takes leave of his family. The guide’s wife is weeping into a handkerchief, an infant sitting on the floor is crying, and his son hands him a rifle. The expectation is that he will be shot by accident by the hunter. At center, a man gestures toward his trophy wall and boasts about having “shot every one of them myself.” On the wall are portraits of many men mistaken for one animal or another, and one deer, which was shot “By Accident.”
comments and context
Comments and Context
Puck increasingly turned its occasional genre cartoons — jokes revolving around one subject in center-spread cartoons — from light humor to social, if not political, attacks. S. D. Ehrhart here takes aim at hunters whose interests were desultory, not for the thrill of the hunt nor food. The idle rich are the cartoonist’s target, ridiculed as a wastrel who outfits his luxurious mountain cabin. The foppish “hunter” and his similarly represented guest are ridiculed for the only possible “trophies” such people could manage to acquire.
