Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  But whatever happened to the remorse that Hornaday once felt as a nine-year-old boy back in Iowa, when he took the life of a blue jay? Now he was taking the lives of creatures that appeared to be distant relations of man, whose females suckled their eerily humanoid young and carried them astride their hips “precisely as do the coolie-women of Hindostan.”15 Later in life, when he had become a crusading conservationist fighting for stricter game laws and bag limits of all kinds, his enemies threw back at him the forty-three dead orangutans. Yes, these “specimens” had all found their way into museums and collections around the world, all in the name of science, but why had he taken so many? In a letter to Professor Ward early in the hunt, he sounded like a boastful boy, blinded by the thrill of the game: “” I shall not leave here with less than 25 good Orangs, and I expect to have even more than that. Senior Piccari got 24, and have I not vowed to snow every naturalist completely under?”16

  As a careful and observant naturalist, Hornaday did meticulously weigh, measure, and study each one of the series of specimens, and in the process, he contradicted an assertion that Alfred Russel Wallace had made in his own book. From Wallace’s examination of seventeen freshly killed orangs, as well as reports from other naturalists, Wallace concluded that “up to this time we have not the least reliable evidence of the existence of orangs in Borneo more than 4 feet 2 inches high.” But no fewer than seven of Hornaday’s specimens exceeded this height; in this way, his collection contributed to the body of knowledge about this elusive species.17

  After all these measurements and observations, Hornaday could not help but express a profound fellow-feeling for these mournful old men of the treetops. “Let such an [sic] one (if, indeed, one exists today) who is prejudiced against the Darwinian views, go to Borneo,” he wrote. “Let him there watch from day to day this strangely human form in all its various phases of existence. Let him see the orang climb, walk, build its nest, eat, drink, and fight like a human rough. Let him see the female suckle her young and carry it astride her hip. . . . Let him witness their human-like emotions of affection, satisfaction, pain, and rage.” Let him witness all this, he said, and feel “how much more potent has been this lesson” than all the theories and abstractions in books. Humans and the great apes were indeed kin.18

  Even so, there was no escaping the fact that there was a heartrending contradiction at the core of what Hornaday was doing here in Borneo—he was killing what he professed to love. Like Audubon, he had had to make a dark bargain with death to bring these creatures to the attention of the public, who would never see them in the wild. Still, over the months he spent in Borneo, he observed their behavior in the wild with such acuteness that he later published an article in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “On the Species of Bornean Orangs, with Notes on Their Habits,” which animal behaviorists such as Robert Yerkes cited for decades afterwards.19 But the contradiction was there nonetheless, like a bone lodged in the throat.

  At the beginning of his long journey back home, Hornaday stopped for a couple of weeks in Singapore and, by one of those lucky strokes of which his life was so full, he was introduced to the Scots-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who was on a year-long, round-the-world grand tour of his own.

  It was the morning of January 10, 1879, when he and Hornaday met. Carnegie, seated in the elegant drawing room of the U.S. consul’s house, was wearing a sumptuous high-waisted morning coat and had a tidily trimmed beard; although he was only forty-four years old, his hair was markedly receeding. But what was most striking about Carnegie was his diminutive size: he was barely five feet tall and weighed no more than 100 pounds. His friend Mark Twain once said of him: “Mr. Carnegie is no smaller than Napoleon, but for some reason or other, he looks smaller than he really is. He looks incredibly small, almost unthinkably small.”20 It was said that Carnegie favored high-heeled boots and top hats to add a few inches to his stature.

  By contrast, Will Hornaday—who had always been self-conscious about his size—looked like a veritable giant. Wearing his Norfolk hunting jacket, with a little orang youngster he called “Old Man” on his lap, he and the steel magnate, with his melodious brogue, chatted like old friends. These two diminutive, preposterously bold, complex, and contradictory men took an immediate liking to each other. They had more than a little in common. Carnegie had once written of himself that “whatever I engage in, I push inordinately”;21 words that could as easily have been written about Hornaday. The young naturalist was returning from his epic journey, with one of the largest collections of natural history specimens ever amassed by one man. Carnegie, for his part, was in the process of putting together his own epic haul, becoming not just one of the richest men in America, but one of the richest men who ever lived.

  Although Carnegie was known as a brutal businessman and strike-breaker, a man who gave his steelworkers only one day off per year, his manner on that January morning in Singapore was congenial and unpretentious. He was, Hornaday later wrote, “an ideal American. . . . I should call him a model millionare.” For his part, Carnegie later wrote of his encounter with the brash young American naturalist that “the recital of Mister Hornaday’s adventures are extremely interesting, and I predict that some day a book from him will have a great run.”22

  In fact, that book, Two Years in the Jungle, would become one of the best-selling adventure travel books of the nineteenth century. It was reviewed, almost entirely favorably, by more than fifty newspapers, literary magazines, and scientific journals, including the august Science and Nature. Because of Hornaday’s boyish zest, his breezy, vernacular style, his wide-ranging knowledge of natural history and zoology, his “Mark Twain–ish humor,” and the outlandish escapades he described, one reviewer described Two Years as “one of the best books of travel and adventure ever published.”23 On the day he died, almost fifty years later, the tenth edition was still in print.

  Hornaday’s friendship with Carnegie would prove long-lasting, genuine, and also strategically important. As the years went by and Hornaday plunged ever deeper into his bitter “war for wildlife,” seeming to manufacture new enemies at every turn, he repeatedly turned to Carnegie for help. And every time he did so, Carnegie responded. He was determined to give away as much of his fortune as possible before he died, and helping to fund Mr. Hornaday’s war was something he felt was urgent.

  Hornaday returned by ship to San Francisco, and then he took a train to his old school in Iowa, where he was treated like a conquering hero. He gave a series of lectures about his adventures and discoveries. But he could hardly wait to get to Battle Creek to see his bride-to-be, Josephine. She was overjoyed to see him, having lived by letter for almost three years. Strong-willed, dignified, and intelligent, Josephine was a perfect match for this small, fierce, impetuous man. On September 11, 1879, Josephine Chamberlain and William Temple Hornaday were married in the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan.24 It was a sweet and harmonious union that would last his lifetime, and it would become increasingly precious to him as his war for wildlife became more tempestuous, more public, and more punishing.

  Although he did not mention Josephine by name in the text of his book, Hornaday did fondly allude to her in the concluding chapter:

  Early in February [1879] I turned my face homeward, by way of China and Japan, and reached Rochester safe and well, just two years and nine months from the time of my departure. From first to last, I had been remarkably prospered, quite as if the prayers and good wishes of my friends had enlisted the services of a special guardian angel to accompany me at every step, in addition to the one I left behind me, whose charming missives of news, hopeful encouragement, and unfaltering affection followed me everywhere—one by every mail, without a single break—without which I would have been lonesome indeed.25

  It’s fascinating to note that this endless stream of letters, which kept Hornaday afloat in dark and dangerous waters, was almost the only written record that Josep
hine left of her life. Although William Temple Hornaday would leave a voluminous record of his own life, published and unpublished—in addition to his nearly two dozen books, there is an immense archive of his papers at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and elsewhere—the only published letter that Josephine appears to have written was one which appeared in 1903 in the New York Times. In it, she complained that there was no shelter at certain streetcar transfer points in the city, forcing women and children to stand in the rain sometimes. No matter how sophisticated and intelligent she may have been, she seems to have largely vanished from the written record like disappearing ink, as most other women of her day did.

  On his way home to Rochester, Hornaday stopped for seventeen days in Michigan to rediscover his fiancée after such a long absence. These few days with Josephine, he wrote to Chester Jackson, were “the pleasantest of all my life so far.”26 As if there were any further doubt of his feelings, on the day he received the first copies of his book while working at the National Museum, he was so excited that he tore off his canvas taxidermist’s apron and rushed home to show one to Josephine. He wanted to surprise her with the dedication, which she knew nothing about. It read:

  TO

  MY GOOD WIFE

  JOSEPHINE

  WHOSE PRESENCE BOTH WHEN SEEN AND UNSEEN

  HAS EVER BEEN THE SUNSHINE OF MY LIFE

  THIS BOOK

  IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED27

  CHAPTER 13

  “A Thief in the Night”

  In March 1887, Hornaday had returned from his heartbreaking bison trip to the Montana Territory so recently that his hunting boots, tucked in a back hall of his house in Washington, were still slathered with Montana mud. The mud would wash off. But the sorrow and sense of desolation evoked by what he had seen in the West was seared into his soul.

  He had seen how astoundingly fast it could happen: a noble beast like the American bison decimated from herds of 10 or 15 million, down to less than 1,000, in twenty years. Twenty years! The worst instincts of humanity, put to work in the most efficient way possible, could achieve dark wonders in a virtual instant. Without armies of wildlife protectors, without a network of laws and the manpower to enforce them, and without some safe reserve, some last stand against annihilation like a zoological park—without that, he feared, all was lost.

  It was out of this abject despair that the idea first came to him—suddenly, boldly, and fully formed, like “a thief in the night,”1 he would later write. There should be—there must be—a national zoological park in the nation’s capital, a place where breeding pairs of bison and other vanishing species could make a final stand against extinction and where ordinary people could come face to face with the whole marvelous phantasmagoria of nonhuman life. No one really knew if captive breeding of endangered species had any reasonable chance of success, but the war for wildlife was going so badly, in so many places, Hornaday felt that he absolutely must try. And now.

  It seems a curiosity that, in his voluminous writings, Hornaday never dwelled on this in any great detail, but the zoo epiphany was evidence of a profound inner transformation. In seizing upon this last hope for the preservation of the wild, one could argue that Hornaday had reached the third and final stage of the sorrowful story of humanity’s contact with wilderness. In the first stage, indigenous peoples and early explorers existed in a state of perpetual immersion in the wild, from which they drew material and spiritual sustenance without causing it lasting harm. In the second stage, civilization began to control, exploit, and “conquer” the wilderness, through exploration and settlement, military and scientific conquest, and ultimately in a fantastic bloodbath of excess, the decimation of species, and the collapse of indigenous cultures. In the final stage, civilizations awoke to a sense of overwhelming cultural remorse, the birth of conservation, and the impulse to save wildlife by whatever means before it was too late.2

  Hornaday was a man whose sprawling life, with its gnawing contradictions and transformations, straddled all three of these epochs of human contact with wilderness. As a young man, he was an explorer and adventurer into the nearly Edenic wildness of Borneo, Malaya, and the Orinoco, witnessing firsthand the last days of the first stage. As a taxidermist and specimen collector for Ward’s, he eagerly participated in the second stage, including its bloody excesses. And as his life ripened and darkened and he began to see what was happening to planet Earth more clearly, he was now ready to become one of the country’s most ardent defenders of everything that was being lost. The young specimen collector was a far different man than the one who dreamed of a great zoo in the nation’s capital and who was now furiously writing, night after night, his raging polemic The Extermination of the American Bison—a book that laid out, in all its heart-wrenching particulars, the national crime then occurring in the hinterlands of the West.

  Yet it was also Hornaday’s nature to be obstinate almost to the point of absurdity. When attacked, he circled the wagons, denying the inner doubts that had clearly led to what amounted to a dramatic conversion experience. Later in life, at a time when the fire-breathing conservationist was coming under increasing attack for having killed those forty-three orangutans, he wrote a friend, “I am not a repentant sinner in regard to my previous career as a killer and preserver of wild animals, but I am positively the most defiant devil that ever came to town. I am ready and anxious to match records for my whole 76 years with any sportsman who wishes to back his record against mine for square dealing with wild animals.”3

  To Hornaday, his whole life was of one piece comprising the four strategic tasks he had set before himself to pull the buffalo back from extinction, if it still could be done. The first had been the writing of his angry book; the second, the creation of a political organization to be called the American Bison Society, which would harness the public’s outrage; the third, the creation of his monumental mounted bison group. Now came the fourth, the founding of a national zoo in Washington to serve as the home of a small captive bison herd, and perhaps even the first experiments in captive breeding.

  He did not waste a moment getting to work.

  As soon as he had the idea for the zoo, Hornaday sat down and wrote a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who was also his boss, Professor Baird, a man he liked and respected immensely. Although Baird had recently been very ill and was often absent from the office, he dropped the letter by Baird’s office anyway. Only a few hours later, Baird’s assistant, Dr. G. Brown Goode, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, showed up at Hornaday’s office door. He was enthusiastic about Hornaday’s big idea but cautioned him that Baird was a very sick man, and the idea would have to be put aside for the present. “Later on, I’ll take it up with you,” he said, somewhat mysteriously.4

  Hornaday dearly hoped that Professor Baird would recover soon because he seemed the perfect man to champion the idea through the complex hierarchy of the Smithsonian and Congress, which would have to approve both the idea and the funding. Baird was a nineteenth-century scientific generalist at a time when a single man could straddle most of the different disciplines of science comfortably. At Dickinson College, he had taught natural history, chemistry, mathematics, and physiology; his published writings covered geology, minerology, botany, iconography, zoology, and anthropology as well. At the age of seventeen, he’d written to John James Audubon and described two kinds of flycatchers that proved to be new to science. Later he had been instrumental in creating the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, and as fish commissioner, he had studied the decline in coastal fisheries in the southern New England states. Baird had begun to see in the seas what Hornaday had seen on the land: a vast, steady, and alarming decline in wild populations.5

  Unfortunately, only a couple of months after Hornaday sent his letter, Baird died. Professor Goode took over until a permanent successor could be appointed. Hornaday described Goode as “a progressive and daring museum-builder, a most lovable man, ready to try any good idea once.” Go
ode made good on his promise to “take it up later on,” and in the fall of 1887, he and Hornaday “threw in together on the development of the idea [of the national zoo], and we worked like beavers, with no ambition beyond the successful accomplishment of a Big Thing.”6

  Brown proposed that they start “a little tryout zoo” on the Smithsonian grounds to test the public’s interest. In one stroke, Brown created a “Department of Living Animals” at the National Museum, with Hornaday as curator. Now, in addition to stuffing and mounting skins as realistically as possible, Hornaday would be providing food, water, and habitats for real, living animals on the mall in Washington.

  Professor Goode was also appointed acting U.S. fish commissioner, temporarily taking over another of Baird’s duties, and one of the first things he did was direct the new curator of living animals, William Temple Hornaday, to ride a Fish Commission railroad car across the American West to collect specimens of American mammals, birds, and reptiles for the “little tryout zoo.”

  A Fish Commission employee would be in charge of distributing 800 pails of young fish, mainly carp, to ranchmen across the West as the train made its way toward the Pacific. As the fish tanks emptied, Hornaday could use them to begin bedding down the future residents of the National Zoo.7