Mr. Hornaday's War (2 page)

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.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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!”
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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,”
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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.
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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.

On the fair spring morning of May 6, 1886,
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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.
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) 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.

Hornaday was in such a hurry now because his immediate superior at the museum, Dr. G. Brown Goode, had asked him a few months earlier to inventory the museum's specimen collection of
Bison americanus,
the American bison, once one of the greatest glories of the continent. But when Hornaday looked into the matter, peering into dim cabinets and specimen drawers, he was appalled to discover that, as he later wrote, “the American people's own official museum was absolutely destitute of good bison specimens of every kind.”
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He could find only a few dusty old skins and skeletons—sad, neglected relics, like discarded overcoats whose owners would never return.

Hornaday had then undertaken a census of the bison in North America, writing to ranchers, hunters, army officers, and zookeepers across the American West and in Canada as far north as the Great Slave Lake in an attempt to come up with some estimate of how many buffalo still might be left alive by 1886. Although no man, white or red, would ever know for certain how many buffalo had once roamed the plains of North America, the estimates ranged up to 60
million
or more (though more recent estimates have reduced this number to something closer to 30 million). But whatever the actual numbers were, buffalo were the largest herds of quadrupeds ever to walk the face of the earth, including the epic migrations of Africa. But, as the news came back from all these far-flung correspondents, the true story of what had happened to the millions of bison became heartbreakingly apparent.

Based on the best firsthand accounts he could find, Hornaday estimated that as recently as 1867, only about twenty years earlier, the
total number of wild bison in the trans-Missouri West was about 15 million. But what had happened to these last representatives of a mighty race during the subsequent two decades was a testament to astounding human greed and short-sightedness, as well as the shiny new efficiencies of capitalism. The same ingenious interlocking mechanisms that mass-produced washing machines, farm implements, and, later, the Model T Ford, and then marketed and distributed them worldwide, had been put to use exterminating the American bison, and with breathtaking haste. The slaughter became mechanized, streamlined, and eerily calm, with armies of hunters (who were paid by the carcass) killing and butchering bison by the tens of thousands and then loading their hides by the bale onto eastbound trains.

The fact that there was, in all of this, a ghost in the machine—an end to it all—went largely unnoticed. Even the hide hunters themselves did not notice what was happening. In retrospect, Hornaday later wrote, it appeared that the last of the great herds disappeared in 1883–84, but the hide hunters prepared for another season nonetheless, laying in Sharps rifles, cases of ammunition, skinning and butchering tools, tents, commissary supplies, tons of feed for the horses, and all the rest of it, not realizing that they were preparing to hunt for ghosts.

Although bison herds had once darkened the earth from horizon to horizon, now they were reduced to a few thin, embattled droves defended by a scattering of bewildered bulls, their great shaggy heads turned outward toward a threat they could not understand. When the magnitude of the crime began to dawn on the young taxidermist, it was as if the world had crashed down on his head. “In March, 1886,” Hornaday later wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “I received a severe shock, as if by a blow on the head from a well-directed mallet. I awoke, dazed and stunned, to a sudden realization of the fact that the buffalo-hide hunters of the United States had practically finished their work.”
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These noble, prehistoric-looking animals, millions of years in the making, with their mountainous forequarters and magnificent heads, were like a candle flame that was one breath away from winking out. And once the gate of extinction clanged shut, the living history of an ancient life form would close forever, never to be reopened.

Hornaday dashed off a letter summarizing his alarming conclusions
and hand-delivered it to Dr. Goode at the museum. In the letter, he reported that “by extensive correspondence it was ascertained that in the United States the extermination of all the large herds of buffalo is already an accomplished fact. While it was supposed that at least some thousands remained in the more remote regions of the Northwest, it was found that the total number is estimated at less than five hundred.”
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By including all the animals held in captivity by zoos or private individuals, Hornaday estimated that there were now fewer than eight hundred bison left on the face of the earth. It was likely only a matter of a few years—or even months—before all the wild bison on the planet would join the woolly mammoth in the sepulchre of extinction.

Hornaday stood there in Dr. Goode's office, watching, as the kindly superintendent read his terrible letter. The old man's face fell. He seemed momentarily unable to speak. Then he lifted his eyes to Hornaday and said finally, “I'm greatly shocked and disturbed by your letter. . . . I dislike to be the means of killing any of those last bison, but since it is now utterly impossible to prevent their destruction we simply must take a large series of specimens, both for our own museum, and for other museums that sooner or later will want good specimens.”
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It was the Faustian bargain of science: to save some vestige of a vanishing species for future generations, a few specimens would need to be sacrificed and carefully preserved. “To all of us the idea of killing a score or more of the last survivors of the bison millions was exceedingly unpleasant,” Hornaday wrote, “but we believed that our refraining from collecting the specimens we imperatively needed would not prolong the existence of the bison species by a single day.”

When Hornaday begged Dr. Goode to allow him to mount a small exploratory expedition to the Montana Territory right away, Goode readily agreed. It was still early spring, and the bison—if they could find any—would be shedding their winter coats in great disorderly bolts; bison hides were not considered “prime” for harvest until November or December. But the young taxidermist felt that he had to go west at the earliest possible moment owing to the ongoing crime he now knew was taking place there.