Field and Stream magazine, America's fishing and hunting bible, was born in a Minnesota duck blind in 1895. With contemporaries such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, it challenged the nineteenth-century stereotype that hunting and fishing were the domain of fur trappers and frontiersmen such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Christopher "Kit" Carson, or amusements for the idle rich. Coupled with technological innovations that made shooting and fishing more accurate and easier, the new magazines demonstrated that hunting and fishing were recreational activities that could be enjoyed by all, especially the growing middle class. Through the twentieth century, Field and Stream has crusaded for conservation measures, developed a library of wildlife film and video, and commissioned wildlife images by well-known artists and photographers without ever forgetting its basic purpose, to provide the stuff of dreams for generations of hunters and fishermen.

The Civil War...