From human grizzly-bear bait to ‘Deadliest Catch,’ hazardous occupations have always fascinated Americans. Why?
By chance, the Discovery Channel began the eighth season of its reality program Deadliest Catch just as my new book about a 19th-century man famous for nearly being eaten by a grizzly bear was set to come out. The luck of the timing gives me an opening to pay off an intellectual debt to the captains and crews of the Alaskan crab-fishing vessels featured on the show. Their labor helped me see my subject, and American history, anew. The festival of abuses on the boats—the Bering Sea abusing the men; the men abusing each other, as well as numerous baggies of controlled substances—got me thinking about the entertainment value of human suffering in the workplace.
With the possible exception of occupational-health-and-safety inspectors, Americans have long enjoyed watching people labor in hazardous conditions. Indeed, taking pleasure in other people’s nasty jobs is as old as the republic itself. Hurt workers, especially men injured in remote and wild locales, helped establish the United States as a continental nation with a special destiny. Through their exertions, they wrung wealth from nature, and as they changed environments—chopped trees, killed animals, dug mines—they changed too. Their bodies accumulated scars as wayward axes and mule kicks remodeled their physiques. They suntanned their hides, while endless toil built up muscles and then wore them away. Those alterations naturalized laborers: Wilderness workers melded with the landscape in ways the growing legions of pasty clerks shuffling papers back in Philadelphia or Boston never could. Their ordeals grounded them in American soil, and their pain made them unwitting, and often unacknowledged, founding fodder.