Humans tamed the first campfires over 500,000 years ago, and the word "camp" itself comes from the Latin campus, or "level field," but recreational camping as a popular cultural practice did not emerge in the United States until the end of the nineteenth century, when large numbers of urban residents went "back to nature," fleeing the pressures of industrialization and increased immigration for the temporary pleasures of a primitive existence in the woods.

The camping movement began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century, when upper-class men from New York, Boston, and other northeastern cities traveled to the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the White Mountains to hunt, fish, and find solace in the beauty and sublimity of untrammeled nature. Encouraged by such books as William H. H. Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-life in the Adirondacks (1869), these men sought to improve their moral and physical health and test their...