Life, 1897-07-15 · page 14 of 20
Life — July 15, 1897 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This Life magazine piece satirizes the American summer boarding industry and the predatory practices of mountain resort owners. The "summer boarder" is a wealthy urban visitor (likely a merchant, lawyer, or broker from New York) who arrives annually to vacation in places like Mount Washington and the New Hampshire mountains. The satire's targets: 1. **Boarders themselves**: Gullible, forgetful tourists who fall for the same marketing ploys yearly, believing exaggerated claims about trout populations and pristine wilderness. 2. **Resort owners**: Portrayed as "banditti" (bandits) and "descendants of Herod" who exploit visitors through inflated prices scaled to altitude and desperation. The comparison to Irish landlords suggests ruthless extraction of wealth. 3. **The business model**: Prices are absurdly high because escape is "difficult"—guests are trapped and must pay whatever charged for mediocre "canned food" and false promises. The cartoons depict the boarder as an easily-deceived mark, caught by resort owners' hooks and schemes. The satire reflects Gilded Age anxieties about commercialized leisure and the commodification of nature.
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*LIFE: chicken, the hermetically sealed green pea and the fresh-laid railroad egg of the rural table d’héte; and beakers of hydraulic milk dance before his enchanted vision. The summer boarder is now ready for the Ishmael- ites who, since the spring thaws, have waited and watched for him with nets and lines, from the Isle of Shoals to the summit of Mount Washington. ° * * RICES of fresh air and canned food, with shelter, are regulated by the urgency of the victim and the elevation above sea level of the place of resort. Air and food being rare on Mount Washington, the prices are Alpine; yet the tariffs in the haunts at the base of the mountain show no depression, for the difference in altitude is set off by the difficulty of escape. On valley farms equipped with barbed wire fences and trout streams,a man may grow haggard at ten dollars a week; but lower down,on the margin of lakes, where bass and facilities for suicide are num- erous, a boarder may become intimate with famine for one dollara day. At Bethlehem and other misnamed landlord lairs, where the descendants of Herod live and prey on the weak and defenseless, starvation is decked with flowers and plunder disguised in coaching parades, and the price of mere existence is immense. The Irish law, which allows an open scason of eleven weather they unite to deplete the stranger and pilgrim, months for landlords, is needed in New Hampshire. * ° * Within a radius of twenty miles of Mount Washington, the HE memory of the summer boarder is gauged for only _ banditti make a specialty of toning the systems of overfed, three months; any period back of that is a blank, choleric merchants, lawyers and brokers from New York. This wise provision of nature was designed by Providence These apoplectic persons are allowed to sit on the hotel aa to enable the dweller on the cliffs and crags to secure his natural prey. By the return of spring the summer boarder has forgotten his experience of the previous summer; his new plum- age has obliterated the memory of his defoliation and despolia- tion, and he is cocked and primed to swallow the baits set in news- papers and magazines for his capture, The literary glories of mountain and valley are new to him; he reads and believes of the millions of ten-pound trout swarming in the brooks; he has no doubts about the herds of deer and flocks of birds that gather round hotel piazzas, soliciting death from urban Y THE THOUGHT OF HALF A KINGDOM MAKES THIS GIANT DEAD Easy, sportsmen ; = J = he pines for the chemi- _ TT ally pureair of the Stately mountains ; hi 1 “1 COULD FIGHT MY WAY UP TWO MILES OF STAIRS WHEN I THINK OF HER is palate waters FATHER’S MONEY | I SHALL SOON BE BY HER SIDE, KISSING ON HIS OWN HOOK. for the juicy canned AWAY HER TEARS OF Joy!” eo. DAVIS.