Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  The ideal thing, of course, would be to show the American public the living, breathing animal, just as Hornaday had seen them on the great plains—the big bulls breaking into a gallop, throwing up clots of snow; the frightened cows, crowding together to protect their young; the sound and the smell and the thrill of them. But that was impossible—and even seeing them in a zoo was improbable because there was only one real zoo in America at that time, and that one was only twelve years old—so Hornaday would have to show the American public six mounted animals, re-created with as much realism as his talents could conjure.

  To reconstruct these animals out of the formless skins and bones the party had brought back from Montana, Hornaday would use the multistage “clay manikin process” that he had developed at the taxidermy table, which was a dramatic improvement over the primitive “rag-and-stuff method” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, he completely discarded all the bones and innards of the animal (in the process, eliminating the skeleton as a source of support). Then he carefully cleaned, dried, and preserved the skin, cutting around bloodstains, bullet holes, and other evidence of a violent death. Then he sculpted a plaster cast of the buffalo’s body, supported by a wooden frame or armature wrapped in rope. This artful creation, called a manikin, then was coated with textured clay to give the animals’ forms their final contours. Essentially, he had created a life-size statue of a buffalo, over which the preserved skin, head, hooves, and other parts were stretched. In his famous 1891 textbook Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting, Hornaday maintained—with his usual bravado—that the clay manikin method was the only proper way to “produce a specimen which fitly represents the species.” But not everybody could do it. The task required the field observations of a wildlife biologist, the deft artistic hand of a sculptor, and the practical ingenuity of an engineer, especially when it came to re-creating the 1,600-pound bull.

  What Hornaday wanted to do was, as far as possible, simply “bring ’em back alive”—to display birds, mammals, and now buffalo as he had actually seen them in their natural habitat, in a scientifically responsible way, so that the public could actually see things that they had never seen before. Even seeing live animals in a zoo did not really convey what the animals looked like in their natural habitat. Animals were so embedded in their habitats, having actually been created by their surroundings, that the two could not really be separated, Hornaday believed.

  This was especially true of the American bison, which was a creature of the immense vastnesses of the great plains. To a large extent, the buffalo was a physical embodiment of those huge spaces, that vaulting sky, those unimaginable distances. It was a touching irony that, in actuality, Hornaday was re-creating this sense of imagined immensity inside a sixteen-foot-by-twelve-foot-by-ten-foot glass box, in a museum, in a city more than two thousand miles away from the place these animals had lived once. Even so, what Hornaday was trying to do in this exhibit was communicate what he had seen out on the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, glimpsing the last remnants of the buffalo herds in mixed groups of bulls, cows, and calves. He wanted to bring museum visitors from all over the country closer than they had ever come—perhaps, regrettably, closer than anyone would ever come—to Bison americanus in the wild. His great aspirations seemed fulfilled when, in 1888, a scholarly survey of American museum taxidermy called Hornaday’s buffalo group “a triumph of the taxidermist’s art, and, so far as known, it surpasses in scientific accuracy, and artistic design and treatment, anything of the kind yet produced.”18

  Hornaday’s second strategic task was to write an angry book about the history of the buffalo slaughter and distribute it as widely as possible. He’d call it The Extermination of the American Bison, as if the end of the species were a fait accompli. On the train back home, and later in his small upstairs study in Washington, late at night, he began pounding out this furious testament and call to arms.

  The third, and perhaps most ambitious, task was to take the first steps toward creating a national zoo in Washington, D.C. All the great cities of Europe had public zoological gardens, but there was nothing of the kind in the young nation’s capital. He began imagining that a small herd of live bison might be kept in a spacious enclosure and perhaps, if captive breeding proved possible, the herd might grow to the point where some animals could be released into the wild. It would be the first reintroduction of captive-bred animals into a wild population ever attempted.

  Last, Hornaday felt that he neeeded to create some kind of a political organization that would draw attention to the deadly peril facing the buffalo and harness the public’s outrage in order to do something. He’d lobby Congress to draft legislation that would stop the buffalo slaughter and create reserves and ranges in the West to the bring the bison back from the precipice of extinction, if possible.

  But the task of setting up a political organization, Hornaday recognized, was not one that he was terribly well suited for. He felt far more at home at a taxidermy worktable or in a rude hunting camp than hobnobbing with the muckety-mucks on Capital Hill or the power brokers of Wall Street.

  Enter his new friend, Theodore Roosevelt (who hated the name “Teddy,” because that’s what Alice had called him). With more of a natural instinct for politics and better connections in high places, Roosevelt also was envisioning one of the first conservation organizations in America. The year before he and Hornaday met, Roosevelt had formed an organization he called the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation group named after two of Roosevelt’s heroes, Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. These men, who were exemplars of “ethical hunting,” the notion of the “fair chase,” and lovers of wilderness, would stand as the guiding lights for a group of a hundred affluent New York big-game hunters, which would later became one of the most influential conservation groups in the United States.

  But Hornaday wanted to create an organization that would address the terrible plight of the buffalo specifically. So in the months following their initial meeting at the National Museum, Hornaday and Roosevelt began laying the groundwork for creating an organization to be called the American Bison Society. Hornaday would serve as the organization’s first president, running its day-to-day affairs and being its public face and spokesperson. The “honorary president” would be the up-and-coming political powerhouse Theodore Roosevelt, a man who seemed destined for great things indeed, but whose dance card was already almost completely full. Roosevelt began lunging up the ladder of power, often taking two steps at a time. He was appointed New York City police commissioner, then assistant secretary of the Navy, then elected governor of New York, then vice president, and then (after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901), president of the United States. The inauguration took place six weeks before his forty-third birthday.

  Even in his ascent to the pinnacle of power, Roosevelt never forgot William Temple Hornaday or left him behind. “Whenever you really, really need me, when you can’t get any further, call me,” Roosevelt had told Hornaday.19 Throughout his two terms in the Oval Office, Roosevelt regularly sent Hornaday invitations to lunch so that the old hunter-naturalists could dine in luxurious privacy and talk shop. But such access to power had come only in the nick of time. In the summer of 1887, inspired by Hornaday’s successful bison hunt for the Smithsonian, a collecting party from the American Museum of Natural History had gone West to procure a few specimens of Bison americanus of its own. Using local guides, these seasoned hunters scoured the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide for three solid months.

  But they did not find a single living animal.

  CHAPTER 7

  “A Nobility Beyond All Compare”

  In the months after Hornaday returned from the Montana Territory, “dazed and stunned,” he was like a man possessed. What he had witnessed on the frontier frightened him to the marrow. No one back East seemed to grasp the magnitude of the slaughter; no one could hear the implacable silence or see that windswept ocean of bones where once had roamed numberless herds of a
species that had once been the undisputed lord of the great plains. What was worse, almost no one besides himself seemed to care that the slaughter was happening.

  Now, in addition to his work on the monumental six-figure bison group, the formation of the American Bison Society, and his first attempts to create a national zoo in Washington, he sat down to write a book that one historian later called “the most forceful protest ever written against the criminal matter in which the buffalo were nearly exterminated.”1

  Professor G. Brown Goode, Hornaday’s boss at the National Museum, had given him permission to write his book, but only after working hours. Night after night, month after month, Hornaday labored away on his manuscript, no longer crouched in the lantern-light of a remote Western hunting camp or jungle outpost, but in an upstairs study in the small rented house he shared with Josephine. He wrote like a man on fire, convinced that this could be the last written record of a species that soon would vanish from the earth. He had decided to call his book The Extermination of the American Bison, as if the saddest possible outcome had already occurred.

  Because he intended for this book to be not just a raging polemic but also a serious scientific monograph, Hornaday began by describing the nature and range of the species, making the point that the bison had been very likely the most abundant quadruped that ever lived on the planet. He moved on to the more subjective judgment that, in his view, Bison americanus was also arguably the most magnificent ruminant in the world. The only other animals that came close were the Indian bison, or gaur (Bos gaurus); the European bison (also known as the wisent); and the aurochs, an extinct ancestor of domestic cattle. But the gaur seemed “more like a huge ox running wild,” and the auroch, though taller than an American bison, was also leaner and leggier, and it lacked the bison’s lionlike pelage, or mane. Its hair was sparse and thin, completely unlike “the magnificent dark brown frontlet and beard of the buffalo, the shaggy coat of hair upon the neck, hump, and shoulders, terminating at the knees in a thick mass of luxuriant black locks.” All things considered, the American bison had a “grandeur and nobility of presence which are beyond all comparison amongst ruminants.”2

  In the following pages of his book, Hornaday laid out the biology and habits of the species. In addition, in melancholy detail, he described the story of the slaughter, the numbers killed, the methods used, the steady disappearance of the great herds, and the approaching end.

  “There is no reason to hope that a single wild and unprotected individual [buffalo] will remain alive in ten years hence,” Hornaday wrote at the conclusion of his book, dated May 1, 1889. A buffalo, he said, “is now so rare a prize, and by the ignorant is considered so great an honor (!) to kill one, that extraordinary exertions will be made to find and shoot down without mercy the ‘last buffalo.’ ”3

  In fact, he was off by only a couple of years.

  One deadly problem for the species, he explained, was that a buffalo “would very often stand quietly and see two or three score, or even a hundred, of his relatives and companions shot down before his eyes, with no other feeling than of stupid wonder and curiosity.”4 The bison’s apparently dim intelligence made possible one of the easiest and deadliest forms of hunting, that of the still-hunt, and “of all the methods that were unsportsmanlike, unfair, ignoble, and utterly reprehensible, this was in every respect the lowest and the worst.” Hunting buffalo from horseback was difficult and dangerous; it required too much skill and too much time. (William F. Cody, or “Buffalo Bill,” was one of the few white hunters who had the skill to hunt from horseback, claiming to have brought down 4,280 buffaloes in eighteen months during 1867–68.)5 Most of the buffalo hunters in the West were not only without skill, they were also both greedy and lazy, Hornaday wrote, and “if they could have obtained Gatling guns with which to mow down a whole herd at a time, beyond a doubt they would have gladly used them.”6

  During the years 1871 to 1873, when still-hunting (or “sneak-hunting”) was at its worst, all a hunter had to do was get up at daylight in his camp on the range and walk to the nearest buffalo herd, usually less than three miles. He’d be well-armed, usually with a huge breech-loading Sharps rifle weighing almost twenty pounds, and with 75 to 100 loaded cartridges in his ammunition belt or his pockets. Then he’d creep up on the herd, keeping low and out of sight—some still-hunters wore gunny sacks with holes cut out for eyes and arms—and once he’d gotten to within 100 to 250 yards, he’d settle into a comfortable position. If the herd was moving, the animal in the lead would be the first one shot; if the herd was at rest, the oldest cow was generally the leader, and she’d go down first. She would stagger, blood pouring from her nose, fall to her knees, and then drop. The others would gather around her, bawling plaintively, confused and frightened. But they wouldn’t run. The hunter would wait, perhaps a full minute—the trick was not to fire too rapidly—and then blast another animal, and another. Sometimes the rifle would get too hot to use, and the hunter would have to wait for it to cool off.7

  In this way, even the laziest, stupidest hunter—even a drunk one—would find himself surrounded by mounds of corpses within a half-hour’s time. Then all he had to do was start skinning or, better yet, hire somebody else to do the skinning. Such was the slaughter that was taking place in the West. In eight years, between 1876 and 1884, a dealer in New York City called Mssrs. J. & A. Boskowitz reported handling 246,175 buffalo skins, Hornaday reported. And that was just one middling dealer. By Hornaday’s count, if you totaled up all the buffalo hides shipped by all the railroads between 1872 and 1874, the total number of buffaloes slaughtered by whites added up to 3,158,730. Perhaps most appalling of all, more than half of these animals—1,780,481—were simply killed and left to rot; the blood-tide ran so high and so fast that hunters and skinners were unable to keep up with the overwhelming task of harvesting all those hides, tongues, and meat. The absolute extermination of the buffalo was inevitable, and in an astonishingly brief period of time. In some ways, the near-extermination of the buffalo can be thought of as a failure of the national imagination: they were at one time so unimaginably abundant that almost no one could conceive of a day when they had vanished entirely. Yet that day very nearly arrived.8

  In Hornaday’s telling of this tragic, epic story, whites were almost completely to blame. The Plains Indians had a much thriftier and more sustainable relationship with the buffalo, using the meat for food; hides for warmth and trade; skins for teepees; stomach and intestines for containers for cooking, storage, and transport; and dung for fuel. Even the way they hunted the buffalo—generally on horseback, wading into the undulating herds with nothing but bow and arrow—seemed to demonstrate honor and respect for the animal, in contrast to the grim, meaningless carnage of blasting away from a hidden location with a large-bore rifle. “It was the buffalo that undergirt the economy [of Indian life] and mightily influenced society, religion, and warfare,” one historian wrote.9

  Even so, the native peoples got their share of blame. They, too, sometimes got so carried away by the buffalo’s multitudes that they became participants in the slaughter. In his book, Hornaday retold a story from George Catlin, who told of arriving at the mouth of the Teton River, in the Dakotas, in 1832. He saw that “an immense herd of buffaloes had showed themselves on the opposite side of the river.” Shortly afterwards, a party of 500 or 600 Sioux warriors forded the river on horseback and set about decimating the herd. They came back about sunset with 1,400 fresh buffalo tongues, which they sold to white soldiers for a couple of gallons of whiskey. (Arguably, these Sioux were red men who had been corrupted by the white man’s liquor.) “Not a skin or a pound of meat, other than the tongues, was saved after this awful slaughter,” Catlin wrote. The destruction of the buffalo was not so much a white man’s crime as a human crime.10

  During the terrible winter of 1886–87, some Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory that had once lived on the buffalo were so destitute, and so close to starvation, that some Cree resorted to cannib
alism. But Hornaday pointed out that, like the white man, many tribes had been reckless and foolish with the buffalo, and now they were paying the price for the wanton slaughter. “The buffalo is his own avenger, to an extent his remorseless slayers little dreamed he ever could be.”11

  Among the people who actually cared, blame was almost universally heaped upon the government for allowing the slaughter to happen on public lands. In fact, between 1871 and 1876, various laws were introduced in Congress to protect the buffalo, but all of them, to one degree or another, failed.

  In his book, Hornaday briefly summarized the tragicomic fate of one bill, H.R. 921, which was introduced in the House by Mr. Fort of Illinois on January 5, 1874. The bill was simple, making it unlawful for any person who was not an Indian to kill or wound any female buffalo within the boundaries of any of the territories of the United States. Violations would result in a fine of $100; and second violations, a jail sentence of not more than 30 days.

  S. S. Cox, the gentleman from New York, stood to object that old hunters said it was impossible to tell the sex of a buffalo while it was running, and also that the bill gave preference to the Indians. (Years afterward, Hornaday commented that “I know of no greater affront . . . to the intelligence of a genuine buffalo hunter than to accuse him of not knowing enough to tell the sex of a buffalo ‘on the run’ by its form alone.”)12

  Fort replied that he had been told that it was possible to distinguish the sexes, and the point of the bill was to the stop the wanton slaughter, in which thousands of buffalo were being taken simply to cut out their tongues.

  Cox persisted, stating that he wanted the clause excepting the Indians removed. He pointed out that the secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, had already told the House that “the civilization of the Indian was impossible while the buffalo remained on the plains.”