Mr. Hornaday's War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World - Softcover

Bechtel, Stefan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807006386 ISBN 13: 9780807006382

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2013

Synopsis

He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he began as a taxidermist and an adventurer who tracked tigers in Borneo with friendly headhunters, lead crocodile-hunting expeditions in the Orinoco, and scouted the last remaining bison in the Montana territories.
 
William Temple Hornaday (1854–1937) was also a man ahead of his time. He was the most influential conservationist of the nineteenth century, second only to his great friend and ally Theodore Roosevelt. When this one-time big-game collector witnessed the wanton destruction of wildlife prevalent in the Victorian era, he experienced an awakening and devoted the rest of his life to protecting our planet’s endangered species. Hornaday founded the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., served for thirty years as director of the renowned Bronx Zoo, and became a fierce defender of wild animals and wild places. He devoted fifty years to fighting gun manufacturers, poachers, scandalously lax game-protection laws, and the vast apathy of the American public. He waged the “Plume Wars” against the feathered-hat industry and is credited with having saved both the Alaskan fur seal and the American bison from outright extinction.
 
Mr. Hornaday’s War restores this major figure to his rightful place as one of the giants of the modern conservation movement. But Stefan Bechtel also explores the grinding contradictions of Hornaday’s life. Though he crusaded against the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, he was at one time a trophy hunter, and what happened in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo, when Hornaday displayed an African man in an “ethnographic exhibit,” shows a side of him that is as baffling as it is repellant. This gripping book takes an honest look at a fascinating, enigmatic man who both represented and transcended his era’s paradoxical approach to wildlife, and who profoundly changed the course of the conservation movement for generations to come.

About this title

About the Author:

Stefan Bechtel is the author of ten books, his most recent including Tornado Hunter and Roar of the Heavens. A founding editor of Men’s Health magazine, his work has appeared in Esquire and the Washington Post, among other publications. He lives in Free Union, Virginia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From Chapter 5

The Last Buffalo Hunt

It was late September of 1886, and along the Yellowstone River out­side Miles City, Montana, the shimmering aspen leaves were just be­ginning to turn, like cascades of tiny golden coins. Four months after his first, exploratory expedition into the territories, Hornaday had once again boarded a westbound train in Washington, but this time he was prepared for an organized, extended hunt. He also was return­ing with a much better feel for the lay of the land in the rugged coulee country north of the Yellowstone, and of the habits of the few remain­ing buffalo who remained alive there—if it was not already too late.

This time, he knew almost for certain that there were at least a few animals hiding out in the headwaters of Sand Creek and the Little and Big Dry creeks, probably tucked away up in the heads of the ravines. His great hope was to secure twenty specimens and get back over the Yellowstone within two months,“before the terrors of a Montana winter should catch us afield.”1 Secretary Spencer Baird had asked that Hornaday attempt to secure that many animals because if he was successful, the skins and skeletons could be distributed to other museums, which were as bereft of decent specimens as the Na­tional Museum. This expedition was to become the last organized buffalo hunt in Montana, and one of the last in the United States. Hornaday was not unaware of the profound melancholy that hung over the whole affair, like the faint odor of something beginning to go bad.

In his autobiography, written forty-eight years after these events had faded into memory, Hornaday acknowledged his own misgiv­ings over what the museum party was about to do—and begged the forgiveness of future generations for what could arguably be called a crime. But to Hornaday’s way of thinking, he was there only to rem­edy the atrocities committed by a criminal enterprise—the million individual crimes of the buffalo-killing industry that grew up in the West in the mid- to late 1800s, and the “criminal indifference” of the government that allowed it to happen.

“If the reader now should feel doubtful about the ethical propriety of our last buffalo hunt, and the killing that we had to do in order that our National Museum might secure a few good wild skins out of the wreck of the millions, let him feel assured that our task was by no means a pleasant one,” he wrote, continuing, 

"At the same time, remember that the author has made atonement to Bison americanus by the efforts that he put forth since 1889 for the saving and the  estoration of that species. Never since Juan Cabeza de Vaca killed the first buffalo on the Texas plains did any man ever set forth bison hunting with a heart as heavy, or as much oppressed by doubt, as that carried westward by the writer in 1886."

On this “last buffalo hunt,” Hornaday had engaged the services of Irwin Boyd as guide, hunter, and foreman, and Boyd had hired on two veteran Montana cowboys, Jim McNaney and L.S.“Russ” Rus­sell. McNaney was not only a crack shot and champion rider, but he also had a reputation for playing the meanest firelight mouth-organ in all of Montana. He was a former hide-hunter who claimed to have brought down 3,300 buffalo in his day, but he knew the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide as well as anybody, and if anyone could find buf­falo in it, it was McNaney. For the buffalo, it was the end of days, and Hornaday could see no way forward but to shake hands with the devil.

Hornaday also brought with him a twenty-four-year-old senior at the University of Kansas named Harvey Brown, whose university had been promised a couple of specimens in exchange for Brown’s time, and who proved to be unfailingly cheerful and resourceful on what was probably the most memorable adventure of his life. Horna­day and Brown arrived at the Drover House in Miles City at two in the morning on September 24. The hotel was so crowded that Brown had to finish out the night on the puncheon floor of the barroom, wakened periodically by tipsy cowboys stomping into the bar for a drink, and also by the seemingly indefatigable Hornaday, who stayed up into the wee hours “gassing” with an old fur dealer about buffalo hunting. (Hornaday may have to talked to excess, but he didn’t drink that way—he was a teetotaler.)

Again, the quartermaster at Fort Keogh had supplied a six-mule wagon, a Sibley tent and stove, cooking utensils, commissary stores, and even a grizzled old camp cook named McCanna,known as “Mac.” The next day, Hornaday bought two months’ supplies of commissary stores, a team, and two saddle-horses, and he hired three more horses and a set of double harness. All the cowboys came with their own horses, so that in the whole outfit, there were ten horses, a team, and two good saddle-horses for each hunter, plus a light ranch wagon that could go anywhere, the ATV of its day. The worst of it was that they had to haul 2,000 pounds of oats into buffalo country to feed all those horses, and even that probably wouldn’t last the whole trip.

The soldiers of the Fifth Infantry arrived in Miles City to help pack up the wagons on the day of departure, but by mid-afternoon, they were all uproariously drunk, waving whiskey bottles overhead as the team, wagon, and horses made their way out of town. Three miles out of town, on a steep hill, the wagon tipped over and 4,000 pounds of food and supplies went clattering down the hill. McCanna and the driver, who with Hornaday were the only sober passengers, had to supervise reloading the wagon, and they were far from happy about it. By the time they got to Chapman’s ranch and set up camp that first night, the soldiers were too “shiftless and drunk” even to put up their tents, so they slept in the open. Hornaday, meanwhile, had the runs. It was an inglorious start for the last buffalo hunt.

By September 29, they had reached the HV Ranch, as desolate and half-finished-looking as the LU-Bar, on Big Dry Creek, about 90 miles from Miles City. Here, they unloaded the provisions from the six-mule wagon, loaded up the wagon with bleached-white skeletons and skulls of buffalo which they’d picked up along the way, and sent the wagon back to Fort Keogh. The cowboys, with their penchant for nicknaming everything for which they felt affection, were by now calling Brown “Browney” or “Flapjack Bill” (after he was discovered secretly making himself a stack of pancakes one morning).

In the following days, Hornaday, Hedley, and the cowboys scoured this difficult country, full of wild and rugged buttes, steep-sided ra­vines, and badlands, without finding any sign at all of buffalo. But it was the sort of country in which embattled game loved to hide, and on October 13, after almost three weeks in the field, one of the cow­boys, Russ Russell, got lucky. In the late afternoon, he came across seven buffalo lying up in the shadows at the head of a deep ravine. As they stumbled to their feet and took off at a dead run, Russell got off a few shots from horseback, but he missed, and they all went thunder­ing away. He chased them for two or three miles, but his horse was tired and the buffalo escaped, heading due south.

Russell brought this great news back to the rest of the hunters at the camp on Big Dry Creek. Hornaday concluded that the cow­boy’s discovery must mean the buffalo were in the habit of hiding in the shady coolness at the head of these ravines whenever they were disturbed on their favorite feeding grounds further south. The next morning at first light, Hornaday and three cowboys, mounted on fresh horses, returned to Russell’s ravine and picked up the trail of the seven buffalo. They followed the trail into the devilishly difficult country that the cowboys called “gumbo ground,” where the soil was loose and crumbly, like ashes, and the horses’ hooves sank halfway to the fetlocks with each step; where the ground was overrun with deep seams and cracks that could easily turn a horse’s ankle or even break a leg; and where the whole confounded mess was interspersed with sagebrush and greasewood. Crossing twelve miles of this in pursuit of the buffalo, Hornaday wrote, was “killing work” and very slow. The ashy soil had one big advantage, though: tracking was easy.

Finally, the animals left the gumbo ground and passed into grassy country near a small stream called Taylor Creek, where tracking was practically impossible. Around noon, the hunters rode up onto high ground and Hornaday surveyed the windswept, treeless countryside with binoculars. About two miles away, resting on the level summit of a small butte, he spotted the buffalo; the original drove of seven had been joined by seven more. Although it was a fragment of the once-mighty multitudes, nevertheless it was the biggest herd Hor­naday had ever seen in the wild. The hunters crept up to within 200 yards of the animals and, on a signal, they all began to fire. The buffalo leaped to their feet, unharmed, and bounded away at breathtaking speed, heading for the shelter of the ravines.

Hornaday and the cowboys leaped back in the saddle and took off at a mad gallop, this time directly through a vast prairie dog town, even worse than gumbo ground, which could have snapped a horse’s leg should it slip down into a hole at top speed. But none of the horses were injured, and once they’d caught up to the fleeing buffalo, Mc-Naney killed a fine old bull and a beautiful two-year-old or “spike” bull. Hornaday brought down a cow and another large old bull. It was a fine day of hunting, even shot through with the aftertaste of remorse as it was.

For the rest of October, as the aspen leaves turned and then be­gan to fall, the museum party focused their hunt on the heads of the ravines, the buffalo’s secret hideouts. By the end of the month, they had taken a total of twelve specimens, with Hornaday, by firelight, spending his evenings painstakingly preparing the skins and skele­tons for museum mounting. He cut “SIBO” into the thin, cutaneous muscle that lined the inside of the buffalo hide, a brand which stood for “Smithsonian Institution Buffalo Outfit,” the official name of the expedition. It was just the way the old buffalo hunters used to mark their hides in the days of the great slaughter.

Most of the buffalo meat was consumed by Hornaday’s hunting party or given to cowboys and soldiers they encountered along the way. Almost all the work of skinning out and skeletonizing the buf­falo was done by Hornaday, with help from Harvey Brown, the young student. It was brutal work.“Brown and I worked all day on the buf­falo skins, fleshing, washing out blood, etc.” Hornaday noted in his journal on October 20. “It is a fearful job to wash the blood out of a skin, a long, cold, tiresome job, freezing to the hands, breaking to the back. Worked all day on 2 skins.”

Hunting these last remaining buffalo in this murderous country was doubly difficult because the few that remained alive had prob­ably been shot at before and spooked at the slightest sound. In open country, they also could run like the wind, even though the big bulls could weigh almost a ton. McNaney’s technique, once he’d spooked a buffalo into a run, was to fool the buffalo into thinking he’d aban­doned the chase, then spur his horse into making a wide circuit of three or four miles, cut in ahead of the buffalo and lie in wait for it behind the crest of a ridge. It took hard riding, but it could be done without killing the horse, and McNaney never seemed to fail. Russ, riding his favorite horse Selim, “an ungainly old beast with a gait like an elephant but staying powers like a steam engine,” sometimes used a more straightforward method, actually overtaking a solitary old bull who had a half-mile head start in a straight-ahead race.

This hunt,Hornaday admitted in his journals,was “great sport,”partly because it was so difficult and partly because he enjoyed the rugged outdoor life and the friendly rivalry that developed among the hunt­ers. ( Jim McNaney won the hunting contest because he was far and away the best shot, coupled with having the canniest intuition about buffalo behavior.) “In our eagerness to succeed in our task,the sad fact that we were hunting the last representatives of a mighty race was for the time being lost sight of,” he wrote.

Buffalo were such indomitable animals, particularly the big bulls, that very seldom did they fall with the first shot. Even though they might be gravely wounded, they had to be chased, often for miles, before they were brought down with repeated volleys of gunfire, aim­ing for heart, lungs, or spine.11 One day McNaney and Russell shot four buffalo, including a big bull which finally fell eight miles south of where it was first hit. By then it was getting dark, so the cowboys left the bull and returned the next day to skin it out and skeleton­ize the carcass for later mounting. When they came back the next morning, however, Hornaday and the cowboys came upon a shock­ing scene: The bull had been stripped of its hide and flesh, its bloody skeleton exposed to the sky, its leg bones broken to get at the mar­row, its tongue cut out. The great lionlike head, with its fearsome horns and immense, sorrowful face, was still intact. But one half of the head had been smeared with yellow paint, and the other half with red paint. A tattered bit of red flannel had been tied to one horn and fluttered fitfully in the breeze, apparently as a signal of defiance. Around the denuded carcass, Hornaday found moccasin prints in the sand.

A small band of Indians, thought to be Piegans (members of the Blackfoot nation) were later reported to have been seen in the area a few days earlier. The Piegans, renowned for their skill and savagery as warriors and their prowess at stealing horses, were nomadic peoples who depended on the buffalo for their existence. The decimation of the great herds had brought disaster to these free-ranging people. Ethnographers believe that as many as one-fourth of the Piegans in Montana died of starvation during the years 1883 and 1884. They had laid claim to the fallen bull—very likely one of the last wild buffalo the tribes of the northern plains would ever see—because they be­lieved that it belonged to them. It was not only the buffalo that was passing away. It was also the end of the ancient ways of the native peoples who revered and depended on them.

But like so many other whites of his time, Hornaday had little un­derstanding or sympathy for the Indians. In fact, he was furious that they’d “stolen” his prize bull, and vowed to get off a shot if he ever came across them. Hornaday had come all the way out to Montana to gather specimens for science, and the specimens turned out to be almost impossible to find. He’d be damned if he’d let the Indians steal them.
Eventually, after weeks of searching, Hornaday’s hunting party spotted seven bison resting in the shade of a ravine near Sand Creek, north of the Yellowstone River, at the foot of a rugged, three-square­mile butte Hornaday called the “High Divide.” Hornaday and three cowboys, all on horseback, crept to within 200 yards of the herd and then dismounted behind the crest of a hill. They inched up to the rim, drew a bead, and fired, but the bison got to their feet in an in­stant and went th...

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0807006386
• ISBN 13: 9780807006382
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272