Mr. Hornaday's War Read online

  Mr. Hornaday’s War

  How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper

  Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife

  That Changed the World

  Stefan Bechtel

  BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

  For my grandfather,

  Earl S. Krom,

  who taught me to love the woods.

  CONTENTS

  NOTE TO READER

  WILLIAM TEMPLE HORNADAY: A LIFE IN BRIEF

  PROLOGUE: THE FEAR

  PART ONE The Awakening

  CHAPTER 1 His Name Was Dauntless

  CHAPTER 2 A Melancholy Insanity

  CHAPTER 3 The Second Civil War

  CHAPTER 4 Souvenir of a Lost World

  CHAPTER 5 The Last Buffalo Hunt

  CHAPTER 6 A Mysterious Stranger

  CHAPTER 7 “A Nobility Beyond All Compare”

  PART TWO The Heedless Hunter

  CHAPTER 8 Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa

  CHAPTER 9 Yearning, Too Much, for Fame

  CHAPTER 10 The Empress Josephine

  CHAPTER 11 Man-Eaters of the Animallai Hills

  CHAPTER 12 Darwin’s Firestorm

  CHAPTER 13 “A Thief in the Night”

  CHAPTER 14 A Dream Deferred

  CHAPTER 15 Scandal at the Zoo

  PART THREE Wildlife Warrior

  CHAPTER 16 The Dark Shadow

  CHAPTER 17 Empire of the Buffalo

  CHAPTER 18 Our Vanishing Wildlife

  CHAPTER 19 Two Hundred Years of War

  EPILOGUE: HIS INDOMITABLE PERSISTENCE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  NOTE TO READER

  This is a work of nonfiction. So far as possible, all assertions of fact in this book are supported by original source material, including William Temple Hornaday’s private letters and papers, books (both published and unpublished), news clippings, and official documents. Dialogue that appears in direct quotations is taken from an account of the conversation by someone who was present (usually Hornaday). Dialogue that appears in italics is a reasonable reconstruction of conversations whose substance was described by someone who was there (for instance, Hornaday’s description of his first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt). All errors of fact or inference, of course, are mine.

  WILLIAM TEMPLE HORNADAY

  A Life in Brief

  1854 Born on a farm near Plainfield, Indiana.

  1871 Attends Okaloosa College and the Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State).

  1873 Hired by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, New York.

  1874 First collecting expedition to Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas. First zoo in the United States opens in Philadelphia.

  1875 Meets Josephine Chamberlain at a dinner party. Collecting expedition to the Orinoco River delta, Venezuela.

  1876–77 Two-year collecting expedition to India, Ceylon, Malaya, and Borneo.

  1879 Marries Josephine in Battle Creek, Michigan. The marriage lasts fifty-eight years, until his death.

  1882–90 Appointed chief taxidermist at the U.S. National Museum (the Smithsonian).

  1885 Two Years in the Jungle published.

  1886 The Last Buffalo Hunt published.

  1889 Becomes founder and first director of the National Museum in Washington. Publication of The Extermination of the American Bison.

  1896–1926 Serves as director of the New York Zoological Park (the Bronx Zoo).

  1900 Lacey Law, the first federal law protecting wild birds, game, and plants from illegal trafficking, passed; repeatedly amended, it remains in effect today.

  1906 Ota Benga incident at the Bronx Zoo.

  1907–10 Serves as president of the American Bison Society.

  1907 First bison sent to Wichita National Forest and Game Reserve, in Oklahoma. By 1919, Hornaday and the American Bison Society have established nine herds across the West.

  1911 Hay-Elliot Fur Seal Treaty, which saves the Alaskan fur seal from extinction.

  1913 Hornaday creates the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund, which he uses to finance his “crusade for wildlife” until his death. Publication of Our Vanishing Wild Life.

  1937 Dies in Stamford, Connecticut, at age eighty-two.

  PROLOGUE

  The Fear

  Long after the early dark had fallen on the evening of December 1, 1934, an old man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and fierce, slightly accusatory eyes sat down in the library of the rambling, comfortable home he called “The Anchorage,” in Stamford, Connecticut, rolled a sheet of blank paper into a typewriter, and began to write the story of his life.

  It was his eightieth birthday. Earlier in the day, there had been a small celebration attended by a few of his colleagues from the wars and, of course, by his sweet and long-suffering wife, Josephine, the one he liked to call “the Empress Josephine” because of her grand, highborn manner and discerning intelligence, and because, quite simply, he adored her. She’d been by his side for nearly six decades, since a long-ago dinner party in Battle Creek, Michigan, when both of them had been twenty-one. She’d been a comely young schoolteacher wearing her best black silk dress; he, a naturalist and adventurer preparing to depart on a collecting expedition into the dark and fateful Orinoco River delta in Venezuela. Hoping to win her sympathy, he’d regaled her with the dangers that he would soon face on the Orinoco, with its flesh-eating fish, giant electric eels, and forty-foot snakes. He’d gazed directly into her eyes. He’d reached out and lightly touched her arm. In the corseted Victorian age, his boldness and presumption, verging on rudeness, was shocking. At one point, he’d even corrected her grammar. She had been taken aback, but when he pressed for her address, so he might perhaps write to her from some lonely outpost on the dark river, she’d relented. That was his manner: blunt, aggressive, acquisitive. If he saw something or someone he liked, he just put his head down and went for it, like a country boy tackling a calf. Life was short, and those who hesitated lost.

  His audacity, as well as his boundless love of the natural world, eventually carried him to some of the remotest places on the planet. He’d been one of the first white men to penetrate the interior of Borneo, voyaged up the Malay Archipelago not long after the young naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had been so astounded by the profusion of life there that it had led to the theory of evolution he cofounded with Darwin, and hunted big game on the Indian subcontinent, the Amazon basin, Trinidad, the Everglades, the Canadian Rockies, and the Montana Territory. In the Everglades, he’d tried to grab an immense alligator by the tail. He’d stalked man-eating tigers on foot, nearly drowned, starved, perished of tropical fever, or otherwise died on multiple occasions, and told people he’d always felt more at home in a remote hunting camp than in any of the finest salons of New York.

  Pugnacious, intrepid, and blessed with amazing physicial stamina, he had survived all manner of escapades and adventures, but now—and he found this difficult to admit—his long life had begun to catch up with him at last. Both his feet were crippled by a mysterious form of neuritis, which his doctors were struggling to overcome but which left him virtually unable to get around except with a walker. Now the old adventurer and naturalist spent a good deal of time in bed or in his chair, with a blanket over his lap. The pain was continuous, like a grinding noise.

  “Tonight as I sit in the glow of my library fire,”1 William Temple Hornaday began, “with a perfectly clear mind, and a memory for these events almost as good as new, I see the main features of the past years more sharply than contours of terrain are seen from an airplane.” From these heights, his life looked like a Civil War battlefield, with smoking battlements, the clash of advancing infantry lines
, strategic retreats, desperate regrouping, and dauntless charges against impossible odds.

  Glaring down the corridors of history at his many critics, living, dead, and yet unborn, Hornaday spat in their eyes: “I now give notice that in writing the stories of my own campaigns I am perfectly indifferent to all the scoffs and charges of ‘egotism’ that my enemies can or will make. I do not propose to write misshapen history under any handicaps of false modesty.”2

  Yet, at the same time, with this declaration of war against his detractors and implied promise of ruthless truth-telling, there was one enormous thing in particular that he would fail to mention at all. The document that he was now writing, which would grow into a full-blown, three-hundred-page autobiography called Eighty Fascinating Years (and would never be published), would not breathe a word about it. The archive of his papers at the Library of Congress alone, one of several such historical data banks, would run to 39,000 items but with no more than a single sentence referring to it. Squarely at the center of the life of a man who could rightly be considered one of the greatest environmental heroes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a crime against humanity, yet he did not address the charges against him either in his public or his private writings. The man who would later be credited with saving at least two species—the American bison and the Alaskan fur seal—from extinction, a man whose greatest contribution to the environmental battles of the twenty-first century would be a sense of moral responsibility and moral outrage concerning the natural world, this man would be the central player in one of the most morally repellent incidents of his day. Yet nowhere in the voluminous written record of his life did he directly address the incident for which he would still be remembered seventy-five years after his death. (In fact, he would no doubt be aghast to learn, it would be almost the only thing he would be remembered for, if he were remembered at all.) He was the man who, in 1906, displayed a human being—a black pygmy from the Congo—in a cage at the Bronx Zoo.

  Instead, Hornaday preferred to view his life as a war, with himself in the thick of the fight. “With the exception of the period from 1890 to 1896”3—when he’d made an ill-fated attempt to leave the battle behind and become a businessman—“I have been continuously on this wild-life job. The total period of my really MILITANT activity in this field is now (at the close of 1934) about 40 years.” The past four decades of his life had been one of more-or-less continuous war—what he called his “war for wildlife,” which to his mind was undoubtedly the greatest and most important armed conflict in human history. The Civil War had quite literally ripped the nation asunder, but at least it eventually came to an end; but the slaughter of birds and wildlife, if they were driven to the desolate terminus of extinction, would leave a wound that would last forever.

  Hornaday did not shrink from combat—in fact, there was nothing he loved more than a good fight, for good reason. But what had pained and surprised him almost more than anything else was that so many of his battles were against people who were allegedly on the same side. When the avowed lovers of birds and game turned on him, betrayed him, double-crossed him, made secret deals with the enemy—that was what had made him feel mortally wounded and unutterably alone. He needed all the friends he could find in the battle against the destroyers of wildlife because, over the past seventy years, the history of game protection had been “a bad and bitter chronicle of the folly and greed of civilized man—of amazing wastefulness, duties horribly ignored, and a thousand lost opportunities.”4 Of the story of the greedy and senseless war against wildlife, he wrote, “there are enough facts to make half a dozen volumes; but what is the use?”

  As the years went by, Hornaday’s life led him to ever-higher pinnacles of public achievement. He was the founder and first director of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. (until a nasty fight with Samuel Langley, the secretary of the Smithsonian, “a man of lonely habits and all the congeniality of an iceberg,”5 and Hornaday had quit in disgust); had served for thirty years as director of the New York Zoological Park (which would become known to the world as the Bronx Zoo); had written almost two dozen books about wildlife and conservation; led the charge in Congress for innumerable game protection laws and the creation of game reserves for birds and mammals; and had fought the gun lobby, the feather lobby, and, always, the great immobile apathy of the American public.

  What he cared about most, and what he had cared about throughout his long life, was the attempt to preserve the whole great phantasmagoria of nonhuman life in the United States, and on the planet as a whole. In the fight to save the birds and mammals, he didn’t care how many enemies he made—and, to be sure, he made plenty. “Any man who enlists in any great cause for the defense of the rights of wild life and is discovered in the act of promoting a reform that is worthwhile soon finds himself fighting all the enemies of wildlife on whose toes he treads,” he wrote. “If he is devoted to peace and harmony at the expense of justice and success, he may just as well quit before he begins. To me, the saving of wild life always was more important than ‘harmony’ with its destroyers.”6

  Still, despite all the battles he’d won against the destroyers, and all he’d accomplished in his life, he knew very well that in many ways, the war for wildlife was going badly. “In America,” he wrote wearily, “the national spirit may truly be expressed in the cry of the crazed Malay: Amok! Amok! Kill! Kill!”7 All over the country, dozens of species of birds and animals had been reduced to tiny remnant populations struggling to survive against the onslaught of “civilization.” The destroyers had gained all the high ground and were bitterly determined and heavily armed. In his prophetic poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats was describing the strategic situation facing American conservationists in the late nineteenth century when he howled: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

  Thinking back now, from the vantage point of eight decades, Hornaday could feel again what he had first felt so long ago—that nauseating stab of fear and sorrow—when he realized just how bad things had gotten and how few people seemed to realize it, or even seemed to care. “Just as a carefree and joyous swimmer for pleasure suddenly is drawn into a whirlpool—in which he can swim but from which he cannot escape—so in 1886 was I drawn into the maelstrom,”8 he wrote, remembering the shock of what happened during the terrible spring and summer of that year. What he had witnessed in the West that tender May of 1886 had frightened him right down to the smallest cell in his body. He’d seen something that few others on the planet, save scattered hunters and Indians, had noticed. It was the beginning of something so frightful, and so gigantic, that even he did not fully grasp its significance.

  More than a hundred years later, biologists would give it a name: The “sixth extinction” or the “Holocene extinction” (in reference to the Holocene epoch in which we live). Almost entirely caused by human activity, it is a wave of species loss so enormous that it has taken its place alongside the five other major extinction events in the past 500 million years of life on Earth. The previous extinction, the “end-Cretaceous event” of 65 million years ago, not only annihilated the dinosaurs but also 75 percent of all species on our home planet, the only planet we have.9

  Now another dark shadow was slipping down over the world. Everywhere Hornaday looked, he could see it happening: in the disappearance of migratory songbirds all up and down the Eastern seaboard, in the steady loss of wild field, forest, and shore. It was time to raise the alarm, to shout to the everlasting skies, to mobilize for war against the destroyers of wildlife—if it were not already too late.

  He was galvanized by rage. But in his heart, all he felt was fear.

  The fear: that’s where it had all begun.

  PART ONE

  The Awakening

  CHAPTER 1

  His Name Was Dauntless

  On the fair spring morning of May 6, 1886,1 an intense-looking young gentleman with eyes that burned like meteors and a jet-black beard
vaulted up the stairs of a Pennsylvania Railroad westbound train, which was steaming at the platform in Union Station, near downtown Washington, D.C. He was a small man—all of five foot eight in his stocking feet—but lithe, compact, and powerfully built, like a predatory animal. He was wearing a new bowler hat, a slightly uncomfortable-looking tweed suit, and scuffed alpine walking boots. The young man’s whole body seemed to follow the forward thrust of his chin as he mounted the stairs into the railway car; trailing along behind him, scarcely able to keep up, were a middle-aged man and an adolescent boy whose face bore a touch of acne and a look of perpetual astonishment.

  The bearded young man was in a frightful hurry. He was, in fact, desperately afraid that all his hurrying was in vain, that it was already too late. He hardly dared imagine the possibility: when he got where he was going, a monstrous crime would be a fait accompli, an unspeakable slaughter beyond the reach of redemption.

  The young man, whose name was William Temple Hornaday, was thirty-two years old. He’d lived his whole life to date with such breathless velocity that one of the most arresting things about him now was the disconnect between his relative youth and the gravity of his purpose and station in life. Born on a hardscrabble farm in Indiana, without wealth or connections, he’d risen to become chief taxidermist at the U.S. National Museum—later, in 1911, part of the Smithsonian Institution—when he was only twenty-eight years old. He was considered one of the most masterful taxidermists in the country at a time when mounting skins for museums was considered the highest form of “nature art” and the closest most people would ever get to exotic species like a wildebeest or an African lion. (Few people would ever see live animals in a zoo—the first zoo in the country had opened in Philadelphia just a few years earlier, in 1874.2) Because of his deft artistic touch, his ingenious method of creating sculpted, clay-covered manikins over which the animal skins were mounted, and most of all because of his intimate acquaintance with living animals in the wild in some of the world’s most remote places, Hornaday was able to bring a Bengal tiger or a harpy eagle to life with an almost spooky realism.