Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  (It may seem curious that the Fish Commission was distributing carp, of all things, a fish often considered a nuisance. But in a department bulletin from 1874, Baird made what he considered an important distinction between the related “junk” species such as suckers and chubbs, and the common or German carp, or Cyprinus carpio, which has been cultivated as a food fish for centuries. Its flesh was “firm, flaky, and in some varieties almost equal to the European trout,” according to Baird. These fish were not meant to be introduced to water already stocked with good native species, but only for ponds and streams where no better fish could be raised. Even so, it was an early foray into ill-advised introductions of invasive species into places nature had not intended them to be.)8

  Travelling west through the Dakotas and the Montana and Washington territories, Hornaday bought or was given a cinnamon bear, a white-tailed deer, a Columbia black-tailed deer, five prairie dogs, a Cross fox, a mule deer, two badgers, a red fox, and two spotted lynx. The fifteen animals, all species indigenous to the United States or its territories, were reasonably well behaved once they were bedded in the converted fish tanks. The lone exception was a big badger with a fat, flattened body and huge paddle-like paws, which slept in a tank directly beneath Hornaday’s berth. Every night about bedtime, the badger began attempting to dig his way out of the railroad car, scratching away at the glass of the tank with such determination that Hornaday had to get up and slap the tank with a wooden lath to frighten it into submission.9

  One day when the train stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, hundreds of people swarmed around the railroad car, which was stopped on a siding, “just as hungry to see some wild-western beast as if none ever had existed outside that car.” It brought home to Hornaday with the force of a hammer blow the grave peril facing the natural world. But that was not the only experience that did so. In Salt Lake City, stacked and ready to be loaded onto a railcar, he saw the skins of 140 little spotted mule deer fawns, and he was told matter-of-factly that they were to be made into men’s vests.10 In Denver, when he saw seventy mountain goat skins stacked in the same way, he decided to buy them (for fifty cents apiece) for use as part of the “extermination exhibit” that he was planning at the National Museum. It would become part of his great propaganda war in the battle for wildlife.

  At the beginning, the grandly designated “Department of Living Animals of the National Museum” was a ramshackle affair, really just a collection of small wire pens and paddocks in the western shadow of the Smithsonian castle, which sat on the edge of the broad pedestrian walkway known as the “national mall.” At first, the fifteen animals Hornaday had collected on his rail trip out west, including four prairie dogs, were the sum total of the animal population of the National Zoo.

  But that changed rapidly. From the very start, the public was fascinated by the zoo, and people began showing up to see the animals in great numbers, just as the people of Wyoming had showed up to peer at the badgers, foxes, and deer in the railcar on a siding in Cheyenne. People began bringing animals as gifts, like the magi bearing frankincense and myrrh. One of the first benefactors of the Department of Living Animals, in fact, was the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland had been given a golden eagle as a Christmas present, and rather than return it to the sender, as was customary, he gave it to Hornaday for the new zoo. A benefactor in Texas contributed two black bears and a jaguar. Then Hornaday bought a grizzly bear cub from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. And so on and so on, until between the early winter of 1887 and the early spring of 1888, the zoo had grown from 15 to 172 animals. In fact, it had grown so rapidly that it was bursting at the seams, in need of space, accomodations, funding, and staff.11

  Of all the new residents at the Department of Living Animals, the rarest and most wonderful were four American bison, contributed by a rancher in Nebraska. In December 1887, Hornaday wrote Professor Goode a letter to propose formally that the institution begin attempting to preserve the buffalo by breeding them in captivity, something he’d been thinking about ever since the death of Sandy:

  In view of the fact that thus far, this government has done nothing to preserve alive any specimens of the American Bison, the most striking and conspicuous species on this continent, I have the honor to propose that the Smithsonian Institution or the National Museum, one or both, take immediate steps to procure . . . the nucleus of a herd of live buffaloes . . . which may, in a small measure, atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in a wild state.12

  The four bison, consisting of a breeding pair and two of their calves, one male and one female, were a gift from Dr. Valentine T. McGillicuddy, a legendary frontier surgeon who was also the Indian agent of the Sioux Reservation in the Dakota Territory.13 The animals had been captured in the Black Hills, which was sacred land to the Sioux. In fact, during a vision quest, the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk, who had fought Custer at the Battle of Little Big-horn, had ascended the great stone monolith called Harney Peak, at the center of the Black Hills, and declared that it was “the center of the universe.” He’d been only a nine-year-old boy at the time, but what he learned there that day shaped the rest of his life. From Harney Peak, Black Elk saw “more than I can tell and understood more than I saw,” he later told John C. Neihardt for a famous book called Black Elk Speaks. “For I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together like one being.”14 In some supernatural sense, it was almost as if McGillicuddy’s gift of a breeding pair of buffalo had been sent by Black Elk and the Sioux, from the center of the universe, to populate the new zoo in the country’s capital.

  In September 1888, Dr. Samuel Pierpont Langley was appointed to succeed the deceased Baird as secretary of the Smithsonian. Hornaday greeted this news warily, describing Langley in his autobiography as “an austere physicist from Pittsburgh.”15 Langley took an office up in the tower of the Smithsonian castle so that he could peer down on the goings-on below, including the somewhat unsightly shanties and cages of Hornaday’s little proto-zoo. A celebrated inventor, Langley was one of the leading innovators in the quest to solve “the problem of flight,” as it was then called. As the new head of the institution, his primary interest was in establishing an astrophysical laboratory at the Smithsonian. He had no great interest in this motley collection of cages and all their braying, barking, shrieking inhabitants down there.

  Goode suggested to Langley that, given the great interest in the “tryout zoo,” the Smithsonian begin scouting out a bigger, better location for the real zoo, the National Zoo of the United States. Goode suggested Rock Creek Park, an area of picturesque hill and dale, mostly forested, beside a small rocky river very close to downtown Washington. Hornaday loved the idea—it would provide visitors with a feel for the wild places where the wild things roamed. Langley seemed to assent to this, if only by lack of objection.

  But as the weeks and months went by, Hornaday grew increasingly disenchanted with the Smithsonian’s new secretary. Langley was, Hornaday wrote, a preeningly proud, deeply private man, a “seasoned bachelor of lonely habits, a domineering temper, and the congeniality of an iceberg . . . his ‘no’ was like the snap of a steel trap.”16 Hornaday, himself a proud, quirky, and sometimes difficult man, had met his match in Samuel Langley. But this time he was outranked.

  It’s quite possible that Hornaday found Langley hostile to his zoo plans because the secretary was simply not very interested in them. His mind was elsewhere. Langley was a brilliant, self-taught astronomer who as a boy had designed and built advanced telescopes with which he’d mapped the Sun and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. But what fired his passion more than anything else was the great race to build a heavier-than-air flying machine, a feat more than one respected student of aerodynamics said was not possible. Over a period of sixteen years, Langley built repeated iterations of a craft he called an “aerodrome,” which grew ever more e
laborate, more expensive, and more ungainly.17 Most of the money was provided by the government; Langley got the funding at least partly because of all his prestigious academic degrees and appointments, which now included being the administrator of the Smithsonian. Langley launched his awkward-looking airships off a houseboat floating in the Potomac River. For the first few launches, Langley was unwise enough to allow the press to be present, who duly noted that the “flights” lasted only a few moments and ended in spectacular crashes into the river. The reporters’ pens began to drip poison. The papers started calling these seemingly ridiculous experiments “Langley’s Folly,” and questioning the expenditure of taxpayer money on something that would very likely prove a bust. Langley, wounded, withdrew into himself.

  Meanwhile, Hornaday and Goode kept trying to push the idea of a genuine National Zoo in Congress, which would have to approve and fund the project. Recognizing that Congress served at the behest of the public, Hornaday began his campaign by going directly to the press, giving a series of newspaper interviews in which he pointed out that the United States was the only great country without a national zoo, and that having one might be the only way to save the buffalo from annihilation.18

  Newspaper editorial pages around the country picked up on Hornaday’s tone of alarm, so that the whole idea of a national zoo seemed to take on a life of its own. In the spring of 1888, the New York Public Opinion summed up the popular mood regarding the zoo:

  With all our great game animals being swept out of existence by modern breech-loaders, a magnificent site within two miles of the Executive Mansion, a huge surplus in the Treasury, gifts of live animals pouring into the Smithsonian, the public clamoring for a National Zoo, and a competent naturalist ready and anxious to build it up, what reason is there why the bill should not be passed and work begun at once?19

  When the time came to begin pushing in earnest for the first round of funding for the zoo, Goode and Hornaday were able to enlist the support of two key senators, James Beck of Kentucky and William Allison of Iowa. A bill for an enabling act was drafted and introduced in the Senate on May 2, 1888. It called for the then-extravagant sum of $200,000 to buy 166 acres of Rock Creek Park as a site for the zoo. Langley now agreed to let Hornaday spend part of his official hours trying to sell the idea to Congress, a task for which Hornaday, more than any other man in Washington, was eminently qualified. Hornaday made a detailed relief map of the proposed park, complete with tiny trees and enclosures for the animals, to use as a visual aid for his public relations campaign.

  Hornaday tucked his relief map under his arm when he went to testify before the House Committee on Appropriations, which was considering the zoological park bill.20 A little awed by the grand drawing room behind the Speaker’s stand where the hearing took place, Hornaday nevertheless made an “eloquent appeal” for the zoo, according to a story in the Washington Post. Most of the discussion that followed Hornaday’s presentation was positive, though several representatives argued that the proposed zoo would be too expensive and benefit only the people of Washington. One House member, Mississippi Democrat Thomas Stockdale, told a reporter that the zoo “would be of no use to the poor who come to Washington to visit the last of the buffaloes.” The whole idea, he said, “does not sound like republicanism. It echoes like royalty.” When it came to a vote, the zoo bill was voted down, by a vote of 36 in favor, 56 against, with one abstention.

  Still, Hornaday was not too terribly worried about this initial defeat because he’d been given a brief tutorial in Washington politics by House member “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, an old Confederate cavalry hero. Wheeler explained that the Democrats had opposed the zoo bill as a part of a complex political ploy, and they’d more than likely pass the amendment the next year. The failure of the zoo amendment, in other words, had absolutely nothing to do with bison, elk, or moose, and everything to do with power politics in Washington. Fighting Joe was teaching Will Hornaday about the way battles were fought in the capital: rarely was anything what it seemed.

  Before the opening of the next session, in December of 1888, “Buffalo Bill” Cody made an extravagant offer: he wanted to give the Department of Living Animals eighteen more buffalo, the third-largest captive herd in existence. But Hornaday had to turn Cody down because there was simply not enough room in the zoo’s cramped, temporary quarters. It was a kind of melancholy public relations coup, which Hornaday used to maximum advantage in the press.

  For the next session of Congress, a bill for the establishment of a zoological park was introduced in both the House and the Senate at about the same time. Hornaday and his compatriots had enlisted the help of a canny Philadelphia lawyer named Thomas Donaldson.21 Hornaday also was riding a tide of good publicity: most newspapers supported the idea of a National Zoo, even in places like San Francisco and Denver, where the paper’s readers would probably never even get to see it. More than a bit surprisingly, among the powerful people who stepped up to support the bill was Langley. In a letter read before the House of Representatives, the Smithsonian head said that a zoological park was needed to serve as “a city of refuge for vanishing races” of animals.

  Ultimately, when the measure came to a vote in the House, it sailed through on a vote of 131 to 98. It looked as though Hornaday’s vision was going to be realized in record time, and with almost no opposition. But of course, Washington had a few more tricks up its sleeve for Hornaday.

  On July 4, 1889, a Zoological Park Commission was created with Hornaday as superintendent and Professor Langley as chairman. Hornaday got the happy task of going down to Rock Creek Park on a series of sunny afternoons to stake out the boundaries of the hoped-for zoo, marker flags snapping merrily in the summer breeze. Here was where the bison enclosure would go, here the deer park, here the monkey house.

  He had a new office at the Smithsonian with a temporary sign that said, “Zoological Park Commission” hung on his door. Langley gave him free rein to begin creating the zoo, even though Goode did not want him to give up his work as chief taxidermist, especially because he was working on several different habitat groups at the time. Although Hornaday was still a relatively young man—only thirty-four years old—he had attained a position of great power and importance in the world of Washington, and of wildlife conservation. In fact, one newspaper reporter, commenting on his qualifications for his new job as zookeeper-in-chief, wrote that Hornaday was “young, energetic, and thoroughly informed of the work expected of him . . . there is probably no other man in America, and few in any other part of the world, whose knowledge of animal life and habits is more extensive than his.”

  But the fights and disputes over the zoo’s border began almost immediately; and the survey, platting, and negotiations over twelve separate parcels of land that needed to be bought were so contentious that it made Hornaday’s head hurt. The theater of war in the battle to save the animals had shifted from the Montana Territory, where the enemies were the hide-hunters, railroads, settlers, and thrill-killers, to the halls of Congress, where the enemies were mind-bogglingly complicated power politics and hidden agendas of all kinds.

  Even after Hornaday finally secured title to the last piece of property needed for the zoo, he still needed to secure funding for the project for its first year. Now a bit more seasoned and cynical player in Washington power politics, Hornaday went back to Congress to ask for $92,000 to cover the cost of the current year’s operations. It was a startling sum—Dr. Goode was aghast, and Professor Langley, generally about as emotional as a barnacle, was severely shocked. Goode gave Hornaday some sage counsel about the ways of Washington.22

  “In Washington, the development of a new institution always moves slowly at first,” he told Hornaday. “By no possibility can you get more than $25,000 now. If you ask for so large a sum as $92,000, you may get nothing. I strongly advise that the amount be made $25,000.”23

  Goode, no doubt, did not quite understand that Will Hornaday was the man who had approached his first job as a fifteen-
year-old by asking, “What can you do for me?” Boldly was the only way he knew how to operate. Besides, he had worked out the numbers, and the zoo needed $92,000 to pay all its bills for one year, so he decided to ask for $92,000. To Hornaday’s surprise, the funding request sailed through the Senate. But in the House, it came up against the scowling countenance of Joseph “Uncle Joe” Cannon, one of the craftiest and most dominating congressmen ever to serve as Speaker of the House, and a man who had fought the zoo almost every step of the way. Hornaday took his map and argued his case once again for a national zoo to preserve the bison, to assuage the nation’s guilt at their near-extermination, and to educate the public. When he was done, he took questions from the congressmen. Not all of them were friendly, but after an hour of sparring, he felt that he had defended his case adequately.

  He looked over at Uncle Joe Cannon sitting in his gaudy chair at the head of the chamber. Cannon uncrossed his legs and seemed to look sourly at the carpet.

  “Wel-l,” Cannon said, in disgust, “I suppose we’ll have to pass this damned bill!” And they did.

  It was April 1, 1890, and as Hornaday later described it, the first bill marked the actual creation of the Washington Zoological Park, and this second bill served as its “swaddling clothes.” Once President Benjamin Harrison signed the act, the money became available. The temporary Zoological Park Commission was dissolved, and a new National Zoological Park was created, with Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley at the top of the flowchart of power.

  And that, Hornaday later wrote, is when “some mighty unpleasant things” began to happen.24

  CHAPTER 14

  A Dream Deferred

  Samuel Langley was “a hard man and devilish difficult to get on with,” Hornaday wrote, and in fact, according to Hornaday’s telling of the story, ever since Langley’s ascension to the job of secretary of the Smithsonian, he had instituted a “quiet reign of terror.”1 Still, Hornaday had found that in the face of conflict or disagreement, Langley was at least frank and fair. Hornaday was willing to put up with him because he was devoted to the glittering vision of a national zoo. But the back-channel whispers at the Smithonian were that “getting along with Secretary Langley is like trying to sleep with a porcupine,” and that Hornaday was the only person on staff who was not afraid of him.2