Frank Buck (animal collector)
Frank Howard Buck (March 17, 1884 – March 25, 1950) was an American hunter, animal collector, and author, as well as a film actor, director, and producer. Beginning in the 1910s he made many expeditions into Asia for the purpose of hunting and collecting exotic animals, bringing over 100,000 live specimens back to the United States and elsewhere for zoos and circuses and earning a reputation as an adventurer. He co-authored seven books chronicling or based on his expeditions, beginning with 1930's Bring 'Em Back Alive, which became a bestseller.
Frank Buck
March 25, 1950 (aged 66)
1911–1949
- Lillian West, Nina C. Boardman, Muriel Reilly
Between 1932 and 1943 he starred in seven adventure films based on his exploits, most of which featured staged "fights to the death" with various wild beasts. He was also briefly a director of the San Diego Zoo, displayed wild animals at the 1933–34 Century of Progress exhibition and 1939 New York World's Fair, toured with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and co-authored an autobiography, 1941's All in a Lifetime. The Frank Buck Zoo in Buck's hometown of Gainesville, Texas, is named after him.
Contemporary critical assessment[edit]
Daniel Bender, author of The Animal Game: Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo, argues that Buck was a fundamentally fraudulent character who told "many fibs...over the course of his long career," but that his manufactured persona was generally accepted in his time as exciting enough to warrant tolerance of the fiction masquerading as biography.[99] Catherine Diamond, in her paper comparing Buck to fellow animal collector and author Gerald Durrell, notes that Durrell remains widely read and even cherished, while Buck's work has languished with both critical audiences and the general public.[81] Diamond also observed that "The wild animal capture narrative belongs to a specific period—from the height of colonialism in the early twentieth century to the post-World War II aftermath—and reflects many American and European attitudes toward colonized peoples and territories."[81]
Steven Lehrer, a lifelong Frank Buck fan who edited and wrote the scholarly introduction to a compilation of Buck-and-coauthor-produced stories released in 2000, thought Buck deserved appreciation for publicizing the once-obscure wildlife of southern and eastern Asia. Nonetheless, Bender saw fit to extensively edit Buck's mangled Malay vocabulary.[59] According to Joanne Carol Joys and Randy Malamud in Reading Zoos argues that "accounts of Buck's adventures overstate his actual involvement in the capture of wild animals, and he served principally as a middleman between traders and American circuses and zoos" and that a comprehensive historic perspective on Buck's impact is obscured by his manufacture of his public persona as a "polymorphic phenomenon—trapper? animal aficionado? explorer? film star?"[2]
Joys writes, "Today, it is politically correct to cast Buck as a villain, a self-aggrandizing braggart who decimated the wilds to acquire animals for zoos and circuses, who opposed conservation measures, and racially demeaned the indigenous people of India and Southeast Asia, considering them as no more than his servants...Of course, the books, articles, and especially, the films, are filled with examples of animal combat. Since most of Buck's actual adventures occurred in the late teens and 1920s, and none of the supposed combats were either filmed or photographed, we have no way to know if they really occurred or were part of the lore surrounding the capture of wild animals in the region...Although most seem unlikely, they are not out of the realm of possibility...As for racist claims, Buck, if anything, seems condescending, but not racist. He was working in a colonial region, where white men were expected to maintain the upper hand. But Buck gave credit to the indigenous people for teaching him everything he knew about trapping and collecting wild animals, as well as repeatedly heaping praise on his assistants, and noting how beneath the skin all men are basically the same."[2]