Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Then Hornaday laid out what he was after: a complete ban on all hunting of waterfowl, for three consecutive years. In a country in love with its guns, and in which duck hunters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, it was an impossibly bold request, a non-starter, ridiculous. But he didn’t care. The hour was late, and the damage to waterfowl populations across the country was so severe that it would take at least three years for them to recover, if they could recover at all. “Secretly,” he told the president, “I am hoping that before January goes out, you will boldly and forcefully make an announcement that there will be no open season on waterfowl. . . . I say to you in all seriousness that the only way to bring back the ducks in our country at large, and stock the sanctuaries that you have created, can be accomplished only by three straight years of absolute closed season.”7

  The situation had grown so dire that “in spite of a long and painful illness, I published during the last year two more warnings to the President, to Congress, the general public and all sportsmen, of the impending doom of our remainders of North American waterfowl,” Hornaday wrote. But now, in his pain and isolation, he had begun to feel that all his appeals had gone unheard.

  Hornaday knew well enough that Roosevelt had a long history of concern for the natural world. Like many early conservationists, he was a patrician, and as a young man, he had replanted trees on worn-out farmland at his family’s Hudson River estate in Hyde Park. When he registered to vote in 1910, he’d given his profession as “tree grower,” and over his lifetime, he calculated that he had grown half a million trees. He created waterfowl sanctuaries at Hyde Park and posted his land to keep birds and game safe from hunters. And he was an avid fisherman. Now Hornaday leaned heavily on these sympathies, knowing that Roosevelt would be receptive to some of what he had to say, if not all. The way forward, as Hornaday saw it, required a stark choice:

  Most earnestly and respectfully I point out to you the fact that because of the multitude of curses that have been afflicting the game of the United States during the past 40 years, and the utter inability of the game-defenders to catch up with the game-killers and pass them, you now stand at the forks of a road.

  For Hornaday, there was always a fork in the road, always a stark choice. His Seventh-day Adventist upbringing had imbued every human action with the imperatives of moral force. There was right and there was wrong. There was triumph or there was disaster, eternal reward or eternal damnation. Hornaday was self-righteous, he was stubborn, he was inflexible, and he might not always be right. But he was always sure. Now he tried to coax the president onto the right path, like an obstinate mule:

  The right hand road . . . lead[s] to the conservation of the remnants of our waterfowl fauna. . . . The left-hand road that lies before you leads to total extinction—of not only our waterfowl, but also in equal probability, though not quite so quickly in effect, to the extinction of our faunas of upland non-migratory game birds and small mammals, and finally all of our free, wild, and killable big game animals outside of protected areas.

  In conclusion, the old man thundered, summoning the old fire from his sickbed, “I am opposed to seeing the United States become a desert destitute of wild life or forests, or both. I urge you to be the master of this situation, and not the servant, or the victim of it.”

  He closed on a note of hopefulness. He was not alone in this fight—even though in his younger day he had sometimes felt as if he were—and neither was the president. A groundswell of rage and fear had swept through the country in previous years, leading to the creation of vast armies of conservation-minded citizens across the country. In some significant ways, the tide actually seemed to be turning in favor of the wild things. In the summer of 1935, Hornaday told Roosevelt, fully one-third of all the duck hunters in the United States—210,000 men and women in all—had chosen to hang up their guns for the season because they, too, had seen what was happening to the great migrations of waterfowl that once darkened the skies from Currituck Sound, North Carolina, to the lost lakes of Minnesota. Flights of ducks and geese in a pale autumn sky were as stirring and majestic a thing, as American, as the heartland’s “golden waves of grain.” These reformed hunters wished to be part of the glory of the birds, not part of their annihilation. They wished to be on the side of the angels on Judgment Day. And the president could be, too.

  A couple of weeks after Hornaday mailed his ten-page letter to the president, an important-looking envelope with an embossed return address marked “The White House, Washington, D.C.” fell through the mail slot at 20 West North Street in Stamford, Connecticut.

  “My dear Dr. Hornaday,” the letter from President Roosevelt began, “it is with feelings of great regret that I read the note accompanying your letter of January fourth and learn of your suffering. I hope it may afford you some consolation to know that I have the greatest admiration for your courage and for your continued devotion in the presence of physical pain and weariness to that cause to which you have devoted your years. Since you can not give me the pleasure of an interview, you may be assured that your written statement will be carefully read and with the consideration it so eminently deserves.”8

  A few days later, from his sickbed, Hornaday dictated a letter to his grandson, Dodge. He enclosed a copy of the letter from Roosevelt. The president’s letter was, Hornaday wrote, “one of the most charming and sympathetic letters that I am sure was ever sent from the White House to an old broken campaigner who wished to score once more in a public cause before closing his account.”9

  William Temple Hornaday had been unconscious for several days before he slipped away forever on March 6, 1937, in his comfortable bedroom at the place he called The Anchorage. His ever-faithful life companion, Josephine—The Empress, Her Royal Highness, My Dear Old Goose, Fairest Among 10,000—was at his side, along with their daughter, Helen.

  Although President Roosevelt did not close the waterfowl hunting season for three consecutive years, or even one year, he honored Hornaday’s legacy in another way. A year after the old naturalist’s death, Roosevelt suggested that a mountain peak in Yellowstone National Park be named after him. Today, Mount Hornaday stands over the pristine Lamar River Valley at the northeast corner of the park, overlooking grassy uplands and cottonwood brakes, where droves of buffalo roam in the late afternoon sun much as they may have appeared to native people 10,000 years ago. It’s not too far from the scene of Hornaday’s “Last Buffalo Hunt” of 1886.10 The Boy Scouts’ Wildlife Protection Medal, which Hornaday created in 1915, was renamed the William T. Hornaday Award after his death, and it is still bestowed today.

  Another honorific arrived unexpectedly in the mail in October 1936, just three months before Hornaday’s death. George S. Meyers, a renowned ichthyologist at Stanford University (who first described the common aquarium fish called the neon tetra), wrote the old man a letter to say that, as part of his work classifying fish specimens for the National Museum, he had come across several species collected by Hornaday in Borneo fifty-nine years earlier. A couple turned out to be completely new to science, Meyers said, and one he’d officially named after Hornaday. Polynemus hornadayi, or “Hornaday’s paradise fish,” was a small, curious “threadfish” festooned with a cluster of graceful, translucent filaments attached near its pectoral fins, and which streamed gaily out behind, two and a half times longer than the fish itself. Hornaday had been twenty-three years old when he’d collected this shimmering oddity in a dip-net on the afternoon of October 2, 1877, in a muddy tributary of the Sadong River, in southwestern Sarawak, Borneo. In his letter and a scientific paper that accompanied it, Meyers told Hornaday that he’d long been familiar with Two Years in the Jungle, “one of the classics of zoological exploration in Asia,” and that he was “exceedingly glad to be able to associate your name with at least one of the fishes you collected on your memorable trip for Ward’s.”11

  Even so, despite his fifty-year strut on the national stage, and all his many accomplishments, William Temple Hornaday seem
s to have been largely forgotten by historians. It’s fair to ask why this small, loud, imperfect man’s life has slipped into obscurity. Was the Ota Benga incident so repellant that it permanently expunged all his achievements from history? Were his contributions to conservation simply eclipsed by greater men like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, or John Burroughs? Or is his disappearing act at least partly payback for the long enemies list he racked up during his life? In a 1971 book, Frank Graham, Jr., a chronicler of the conservation movement in America, wrote of Hornaday: “Militants seldom attract eulogists. The directness with which [Hornaday] attacked every problem accounts for the planned obscurity into which other conservationists let his name drop immediately after his death.”12

  Yet his life did attract eulogists, and a good number of them at that. Several years before his death, when it was clear that the old lion was not much longer for this world, the editors of Outdoor Life magazine published a laudatory remembrance of him. “In the long and often weary annals of conservation progress, no man has been less bowed beneath reverses or less satisfied with success than Dr. Hornaday,” the editors wrote. “Determined and intransigent, it was never his policy to go around or under an opponent; smashing straight through his opposition, he has left a long trail of personal enemies in his wake—but has never looked back. Sold out by game-hogs in high places, rebuffed by organizations purporting to have a conservation purpose, deserted even by high-principled and well-intentioned leaders who felt him too radical or truculent for his time, much of Dr. Hornaday’s far-seeing effort has been single-handed. In his day of triumph, let his indomitable persistence be remembered.”13

  William Temple Hornaday’s life is not simply some Gilded Age antique, as quaint and outdated as a Stanley Steamer. The war for wildlife to which he devoted his life is a battle that still rages on, with this morning’s paper no doubt bringing news of some fragile species in peril, some dim fen falling to the onslaughts of human progress. Hornaday’s contentious life and bloody crusades are as vivid and as relevant today—perhaps more so—than they were when he died almost eighty years ago.

  But his loud, large life also changed the world for the better. Organizations that he helped build, legislation that he helped pass, and the sense of moral outrage that he helped set aflame have all made our world safer for wild things and wild places. The New York Zoological Society, where Hornaday served for thirty years, is now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society; it manages some 200 million acres of protected lands around the world, with more than 500 field conservation projects in sixty countries.14 The bison, once a whisper away from extinction, now number about half a million in North America alone (though only about 30,000 of these are genetically pure, free-roaming animals).15 In 2008, about 121,000 fur seal pups were born on the Pribilof Islands.16 And the North American population of the snowy egret, once hunted to the verge of annihilation for its spectacular plumes, is now thought to number about 143,000 (though it is still considered a threatened species).17

  George Bernard Shaw once famously remarked, “[N]othing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.” And William Temple Hornaday, whatever else he may have been, was without doubt the most unreasonable of men. Had it not been for his prophetic vision, his baleful and impolite pronouncements, and his unwillingness to sit still when he saw a crime being committed, our world would be poorer, sadder, less various, and less beautiful than it is. But were he alive today, no doubt he would tell you that his life’s work is far from over. In fact, it has scarcely begun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are a host of individuals I’d like to thank for their assistance and erudition in the preparation of this book. I owe a debt of gratitude to those who read and commented on the manuscript, including my brother Lawrence Bechtel, who’s always been smarter than me; my smart and now grown-up children Adam and Lilly; my friend Jim Crawford; the apostate Dr. Steve Cory and his University of Chicago book group; and the brilliant Robert L. O’Connell. Thanks to my little “home group,” Anya, Sammy, and Milo, for support and succor. I’d like to thank my agent, Don Fehr, for placing the book with Beacon Press, as well as my indefatigable editor, Alexis Rizzuto, and the rest of the staff at Beacon, who recognized the book’s merit and tried to give it a fair shake in the marketplace. Two scholar-historians are owed special mention here: Gregory Dehler, of Lehigh University, who wrote a dissertation about Hornaday and a century of wildlife protection in America; and James Dolph, of the University of Massachusetts, whose dissertation focused on the part of Hornaday’s life that fell in the nineteenth century. Both provided invaluable research and insight into this extraordinarily complex and interesting man. Finally, I’d like to thank the better angels of Dr. Hornaday himself, who, despite his manifest flaws, was an inspiration to me throughout the writing of this book.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE: THE FEAR

  1. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 20, page 1.

  2. Hornaday, Thirty Years War for Wild Life, p. xi.

  3. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 20, p. 3.

  4. Ibid., p. 4.

  5. Ibid., chapter 9, p. 11.

  6. Ibid., chapter 20, p. 3.

  7. Hornaday, Use and Abuse of America’s Natural Resources, p. 18.

  8. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 20, p. 1.

  9. Niles Eldredge, “The Sixth Extinction,” ActionBioScience.org (http://www.actionbioscience.org/).

  CHAPTER 1: HIS NAME WAS DAUNTLESS

  This account of “the last buffalo hunt,” clearly one of the signature events of William Hornaday’s life, is based largely on the three accounts he wrote of it, each with varying levels of detail and emphasis, as well as his journals from the field. He described these events in The Extermination of the American Bison in fairly clipped, scientific fashion; in A Wild-Animal Round-Up in a rollicking, popularized way (which first was published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1887); and in his unpublished autobiography, Eighty Fascinating Years, a similar account filled with bitterly remembered detail and melancholy emotion.

  1. Hornaday, Extermination of the American Bison, p. 229

  2. Philadelphia Zoo website, http://www.philadelphiazoo.org.

  3. Hornaday, Extermination of the American Bison, p. 229.

  4. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 10, p. 4.

  5. Hornaday, Extermination of the American Bison, p. 227.

  6. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 10, p. 4.

  7. “Sleeping car” entry, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/.

  8. Dolph, “Bringing Wildlife to Millions,” p. 400.

  9. Harper’s Weekly, January 1869.

  10. Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, p. 244.

  11. Dolph, “Bringing Wildlife to Millions,” pp. 13–15.

  12. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 2, pp. 1–2; “Behind the Scenes: King Kong,” Stereotype & Society blog, May 27, 2007, http://stereotypeandsociety.typepad.com.

  13. Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior, p. 281.

  14. Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1886, cited in Hornaday, Thirty Years War for Wild Life, p. 100.

  15. Popular Science Monthly 37, 1890, p. 276.

  16. “John James Audubon” entry in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/.

  17. Dolph, “Bringing Wildlife to Millions,” p. 400.

  18. William T. Hornaday, “Progress Report of Exploration for Buffalo,” cited in Ibid., p. 398.

  19. Dolph, “Bringing Wildlife to Millions,” pp. 401–2.

  20. “The Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1876,” Eyewitness to History website, http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/.

  21. The Northern Pacific Railway, Main Street of the Northwest, http://www.american-rails.com.

  22. Taos and Santa Fe Painters website, http://www.charlesmarionrussell.com.

  23. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, p. 16.

  24. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life, p. 247.

  CHAPTER 2: A MELANCHOLY INSA
NITY

  1. Trudeau, Southern Storm, p. 25.

  2. Letter from Ellen Sherman to John Sherman, in Lewis, Sherman, p. 203.

  3. Letter from William Tecumseh Sherman to the City Council of Atlanta, September 12, 1864, TeachingAmericanHistory.org.

  4. “Tecumseh” article, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/.

  5. Hine, American West, p. 127.

  6. Sherman to Sheridan, May 10, 1868, in Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West, p. 197.

  7. Marszalek, Sherman, p. 423.

  8. American Indian Genocide Museum website, http://www.aigenom.com/Delano.html.

  9. Punke, Last Stand.

  10. Grinnell, Hunting and Conservation, p. 219.

  11. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary for the Year 1871.

  12. “The Last Buffalo,” Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1874.

  13. Blackmore’s preface, in Dodge, Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants, p. xii.

  14. Rinella, American Buffalo, p. 158.

  15. Estimate by George Catlin, cited by Rita Laws, “Native Americans and Vegetarianism,” VRG Journal, September 1994.

  16. Hornaday, Extermination of the American Bison, pp. 173–181.

  CHAPTER 3: THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  1. Hornaday, Eighty Fascinating Years, chapter 10, p. 7.

  2. Dolph, “Bringing Wildlife to Millions,” p. 402; Drover House website, http://www.droverhouse.com.

  3. “History and Genealogy,” Miles City (MT) On the Web, http://milescity.com/history/.