The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (47 page)

By 1879 Hornaday was chief taxidermist and director of the now defunct United States National Museum. When Hornaday created the National Society of American Taxidermists the following year, Roosevelt sat up and paid attention. Stitch for stitch, Hornaday was probably the best American mammal taxidermist of his era. When working on a buffalo, for example, he took the extra step of ridding his specimen of screwworm flies
(Cochliomyia macellaria)
, which frequently laid eggs in an open wound or sore. He was an artist skilled enough to prepare an exhibit of a buffalo grazing, stampeding, or simply looking forlorn, bringing out the personality of the animal vividly in any mood or situation. Most famously, Hornaday himself shot a huge 1,800-pound buffalo in Montana; it became the centerpiece of a popular diorama at the National Museum of Natural
History. Upon skinning this buffalo, however, Hornaday made a startling discovery, later claiming that it triggered an effusion of sorrow. “Nearly every adult bull we took carried old bullets in his body, and from this one we took four of various sizes that had been fired into him on various occasions,” he recalled. “One was sticking fast in one of the lumbar-vertebrae.”
¹⁷

When Roosevelt moved to Washington, D.C., in 1889 for his civil service job, he befriended the bawdy Hornaday, then chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian. Despite his skill at mounting, Hornaday was pushing for the Smithsonian to open a “live animal” department. Hornaday insisted that people preferred to see a real wobbly little buffalo rather than a stiff, old, stuffed one. The global killing of wildlife for science was the hackneyed way, Hornaday came to believe, for truly enlightened men and women to study animals. Newly developed netting techniques made it possible to capture everything from a hippopotamus to a cougar alive. He even wanted to start tagging animals in the wild. Once Hornaday was given permission to show live specimens at the Smithsonian turnstile increased three-fold. The public roared its approval and Hornaday pratted on about the advanced wildlife protective ethos.

Hornaday’s new vision led to his founding of the National Zoological Park in 1889, in Washington, D.C.
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But such brilliant, original thinking (like that of Robert B. Roosevelt) can often go hand in hand with a difficult personality. Since Hornaday loved being out in the field, chief among the targets of his lacerating criticism were those zoologists and ornithologists who didn’t get grimy tracking down wildlife for science. You might say he had an outbank Audubon complex, like Theodore Roosevelt. Often smelling of buffalo or bears, Hornaday was far more comfortable in alpine hiking clothes than in a suit. Sometimes his hair was matted with dry grass and mud. There was, as noted above, a farmyard crudeness to his manners, and his rumored atheism did nothing to endear him to the pious Methodists and Episcopalians he worked with at the Smithsonian. In fact, when the people who were financing the National Zoological Garden started telling Hornaday how to run his shop, and radically changing his Darwinian plans for animal displays, he resigned and moved to Buffalo, New York. Once he was settled there, he tried to change the city’s name to Bison, New York, to be more zoologically accurate.

Although Roosevelt never approved of Hornaday’s vulgarness or imperiousness, he knew that Hornaday was the most knowledgeable expert in the world regarding buffalo. It was said that Hornaday, in a quick glance, could identify the precise home range of a buffalo—for example, Nebraska
or Manitoba or Oklahoma—by the constitution of its dung. Furious that these wild creatures were treated so shabbily, he nevertheless remained hopeful that repopulation programs and new game laws might be able to reverse the trend toward extinction. When Hornaday told Congress in April 1896 that national bison ranges should be created to save the vanishing herds, Roosevelt fully agreed. Even though Hornaday wasn’t considered refined enough for the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt had no hesitation in asking him to head the Bronx Zoo. To Roosevelt’s thinking Hornaday was wasting his talent working in the Erie County real estate business and merely serving as a trustee for the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Roosevelt promised to let Hornaday develop exhibits at the Bronx Zoo any way he wanted. He had faith that Hornaday was the man best able to breed buffalo in captivity as the first step in repopulating the Great Plains. Always speeding up the timetables, Roosevelt was impatient and held the view that if it took six years to destroy all the bison in Kansas, Nebraska, Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and the Texas panhandle, then the Bronx Zoo should be able to repopulate those same expansive grasslands with buffalo in an equivalent time. Only a maladjusted obsessive like Hornaday, with fever in the veins, could possibly pull off a breeding program in such unrealistically short order. Promised a handsome salary, Hornaday agreed, with a little pressure from the Boone and Crockett Club, to accept the zoo directorship—a position he held for the next thirty years. During these decades Hornaday wrote a series of books, articles, and lectures that are the core documents of the wildlife conservation movement in America. His
Our Vanishing Wild Life
is perhaps the single most important (if deeply flawed) book ever published on protecting endangered species. “Give the game the benefit of every doubt!,” he would lecture. “If it becomes too thick, your gun can quickly thin it out; but if it is once exterminated, it will be impossible to bring it back. Be wise; and take thought for the morrow. Remember the heath hen.”
¹⁹

As Hornaday saw it, the Bronx Zoo would celebrate the whole post–Civil War generation of Darwinian naturalists, including the affluent Roosevelt. The center of Hornaday’s zoo was Baird Court—the administrative and library offices—named after the head of the Smithsonian Institution. Then there was Lake Agassiz, named after the great Harvard zoologist. The Boone and Crockett Club contributed hundreds of horns and antlers to put on display. Meanwhile, plans to raise buffalo got off to a rocky start. The native Bronx grass on which the bison grazed was not the same
as prairie grass; in fact, it was so different that the first domestically raised herd of American bison died. Grinnell, it seemed, had been right. Bitterly disappointed, Hornaday had to remove all the native grasses and then pay zookeepers to feed the buffalo the proper prairie grasses by hand and keep the water hole always full.
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That was quite an embarrassing failure for Roosevelt; he felt a real, if momentary, sense of loss when the buffalo died. But Roosevelt wasn’t a quitter. He stuck by his determined zoo director. Since buffalo weren’t going to be the zoo’s only mission, Hornaday, at Roosevelt’s request, hired the field researcher Andrew J. Stone to survey the status of Alaska’s caribou herds, polar bears, and seal rookeries.
²¹
For even if the Bronx buffalo range went away, Roosevelt and Hornaday’s plan of breeding buffalo in the Indian Territories (and two or three prairie states) was on track. And Grant, lobbying for financing from the New York state legislature, got the Boone and Crockett Club all the appropriation provisions it had requested. Roosevelt essentially left all the fund-raising and architectural details of the Bronx Zoo up to Madison Grant, whose actorish ways could move mountains. When the Bronx Zoo was officially sanctioned by the Park Board around Thanksgiving of 1897,
²²
Roosevelt offered Grant thanks. “I congratulate you with all my heart upon your success with the Zoo bill,” he wrote. “Really, you have done more than I hoped. I always count myself lucky if I get one out of three or four measures through.”
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III

The creation of the Bronx Zoo, with the help of regiments of planners, was the capstone to Roosevelt’s tenure as president of the Boone and Crockett Club. Over the years 1888 to 1894, he had achieved a scorecard of extraordinary accomplishments. From the Timberland Act of 1891 to the Yellowstone Protection Act of 1894 to the creation of the New York Zoological Society, the Boone and Crockett Club had become the most effective big-game conservation group in America. Even though Roosevelt was sometimes tasked with club work that he despised—such as preparing accounts for audit
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—he relished promoting outdoor writers in his edited books. Encouraged by the fine reviews of
American Big-Game Hunting
, Roosevelt and Grinnell began working throughout 1894 on a successor volume, one having a more global perspective than the first. How did North American white-horn deer compare with the fallow deer of the Mediterranean region of Europe and Asia Minor? Why did the Nubian ibex of the Palestine countryside have larger scimitar-shaped horns than
the mountain goats Roosevelt had hunted in the Rockies? What caused the nyala of southeastern Africa to be slightly faster than the Badlands antelope? These were the types of questions Roosevelt and his coeditor George Bird Grinnell wanted answered in the new book, called
Hunting in Many Lands
.

When commissioning Madison Grant to write on moose in
Hunting in Many Lands
, for example, Roosevelt preferred that his hunt story take place in Canada. Roosevelt wanted to know everything about moose found farther north than Maine and Minnesota, around the headwaters of the Ottawa River along the Ontario-Quebec border. This, Roosevelt wrote to Grant, would run against the current zoological thinking that the differences between species in tropical and temperate zones were the most scientifically important. By focusing on moose in a specific Canadian habitat, Grant could show (so his editor hoped) the variation among moose populations in North America. “The best zoologists nowadays put North America in with North Asia and Europe as one archetypal province, separate from the South American, Indian, Australasian, and South African provinces, which have equal rank,” Roosevelt complained to Grant. “Our moose, wapiti, bear, beaver, wolf, etc., differ more or less from those of the Old World but the difference sinks into insignificance when compared with differences between all these forms, Old World and New, from the tropical forms south of them. The wapiti is undoubtedly entirely distinct from the European red deer; but I don’t think the difference is as great as between the black-tail [mule] and white-tail deer.”
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In 1895
Hunting in Many Lands
was published, with a sterling article by Madison Grant, “A Canadian Moose Hunt,” about the upper Ottawa River, essentially companion piece to his article in
Century
. Grant also eventually became instrumental in two other conservationist causes besides the Boone and Crockett Club and its offshoot, the Bronx Zoo: these were the American Bison Society (founded by Roosevelt and Hornaday in 1905) and Save the Redwoods League.
*
Unlike
American Big Game
, this second volume, comprising sixteen essays (plus appendixes, which included the Yellowstone Protection Act), was, as Roosevelt and Grinnell
planned, international in approach. Fine photographs were interspersed throughout the text. The final product included essays on hunting Russian wolves, Sierra Mountain bears, Mexican rams, East African zebras, Korean leopards, and American antelope-deer (by Roosevelt).

And another contributor, the future U.S. secretary of state Henry L. Stimson, wrote of the wildlife he encountered when he was climbing the turret-shaped mountains of northwestern Montana. W. W. Rockhill, a friend of the Dalai Lama, focused on the big game found in Mongolia and Tibet. There was even an essay on dogsledding in Manitoba by D. M. Barringer, a nineteen-year-old graduate of Princeton University who dedicated his life to the “impact theory” (he became the first geologist to discover that Coon Butte, Arizona, was in fact a meteor crater). In the impressive essay “The Cougar,” by Casper W. Whitney (the editor of
Outlook
) Roosevelt himself was praised as being
the
world’s expert on the mountain lion’s “moods.”
²⁶
The global approach to wildlife conservation of
Hunting in Many Lands
was smart and innovative. In the preface Roosevelt and Grinnell called for accelerated mammological research. Color variation, hoof sizes, whisker lengths, mating habits—the more scientific data compiled, the easier it would become for “wild creatures” to be taught “to look upon human beings as friends.”
²⁷

In a piece that Roosevelt and Grinnell wrote together, the Yellowstone Protection Act of 1894 was held up as a model for policing wild refuges around the world. All the contributors to
Hunting in Many Lands
(except Elliott Roosevelt, whose posthumous contribution, “A Hunting Trip in India,” was embarrassingly antediluvian in attitude), promoted spirited ideas for global forestry and wildlife protection. Charles E. Whitehead of New York, for example, wrote that the “true hunter” took “more pleasure in watching the natural life around him than in killing the game that he meets.” His essay “Game Laws” recommended that the U.S. Army be authorized to try and punish poachers under martial law. “When we reflect how many and valuable races of animals in North America have become extinct or nearly so, as the buffalo and the manatee,” Whitehead fumed, “how many varieties of birds that afforded us food, or brightened the autumn sky with their migrations, have been annihilated, as have been the prairie fowl in the Eastern States and the passenger pigeon in all our States, the necessity of these laws appears urgent.”
²⁸

Most of the essays in
Hunting in Many Lands
made at least a passing reference to proper land and wildlife management. An argument was also made that all the other existing national parks besides Yellowstone—Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant—should likewise have game pro
tection laws.
*
As for the coeditors themselves, Roosevelt argued that the reports of various hunters would help naturalists and zoologists better understand species. Grinnell endorsed Roosevelt’s participation in the Committee on Measurements exhibition, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in May 1895, which rated the symmetry and coloration detail of big-game trophies.
²⁹
In the registration book Roosevelt, wanting to be associated with the American West, untruthfully gave his residence as “Medora N.D.” Along with other furrists and taxidermists, Roosevelt had submitted to the show numerous specimens, none of which drew more attention than his Texas tusked peccary head.