A less driven person would have been discouraged; Akeley, not quite sixteen, was not. He quit the farm and had business cards printed: ARTISTIC TAXIDERMY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES. Three years later, in 1883, he began an apprenticeship at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. When he showed up there, he must have been astonished by what lurked inside: barrels, boxes, and crates brimming with the most exotic beasts and birds—kangaroos, koalas, opossums, fish, polar bears, dugongs, gorillas, narwhales—all of which had been snared in Professor Henry Ward's "universal dragnet." "Neither the elephant nor the whale is too strong to break through," enthused Hornaday, who had left Ward's in 1882 and himself had once sent twenty-six cases of crocodiles, tigers, Indian bison, and "monkeys galore" to the emporium. Although Ward had posted a sign on the gate that said, "This is not a museum but a working establishment," people were no doubt transfixed by the place. Inside, a colorful group of long-bearded Europeans and other free spirits scraped whale bones, polished rocks, assembled buffalo skeletons, and preserved orangutans. One hall contained human skeletons (hung by their necks) and mottled snakeskins; another held all the wonders of the sea—shells, corals, starfish, and sponges. There were fossils and meteorites, the strangest and most marvelous things imaginable.
All these treasures ended up in museums and colleges. Chicago's Field Museum was founded in a single day when dry goods tycoon Marshall Field saw Ward's magnificent quarry at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, paid $100,000 for the entire hoard, and set up shop. Another big customer, Louis Agassiz of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, bought hundreds of specimens from Ward's: he wanted to acquire the entire animal kingdom in specimen form to disprove Darwin's theory of evolution.
Unscientific and profit driven, Ward's was basically a taxidermy factory—this in spite of Hornaday and the other SAT founders who worked there. At Ward's, men literally stuffed animals. The specimens had no vitality, none of the gloss or vibrancy of wild creatures. Akeley was appalled. He saw men filling raw skins with greasy bones, straw, and rags until they bulged, creating disfigured zebras with exposed seams and lopsided deer. They weren't anatomically sculpted; they were, as he put it, "upholstered."
But that's exactly what most museums wanted pre-Tree-Tops: specimens as raw data. The first natural history museums attempted to create a complete inventory of nature by accumulating everything that roamed, swam, and crawled the earth. They were primarily formed around magnificent private collections, the stately cabinets of kings, princes, and rich adventurers who explored the unknown reaches of the earth or hired others to hunt for them in search of new species to bring back to England, Europe, and America. The British Museum, for example, was founded in 1753 when England bought Dr. Hans Sloane's amazing personal collection: 19,290 animal specimens and fossils. In 1869, the year it was founded, the AMNH purchased Prince Maximilian of Wied's preserved menagerie of 4,000 birds and 600 mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. The AMNH later bought paleontologist James Hall's fossil collection (1875); P. T. Barnum's iguana and "one Human Hand"; and Jules Verreaux's unrivaled collection of 2,800 stuffed birds, 220 animals, and 400 skeletons. Most early preserved specimens were crude approximations, but since science had never seen anything as strange as, say, a kangaroo—Captain James Cook brought the first kangaroo skin to London in 1771—they were still marvels to behold.
Taxidermy fared better at the small private museums such as Charles Willson Peale's Repository for Natural Curiosities in Philadelphia (1784–1845) and William Bullock's London Museum of Stuffed Animals (1809–1819), but these immensely popular establishments had been closed long before the big museums were ready to embrace artistic taxidermy for public education ("rational amusement" in Peale's day; "edutainment" in ours). Still, Peale's repository bears mentioning. Peale was a famous portraitist who used his artistic skill to animate taxidermy. He had no formal scientific training, but he believed in portraying nature accurately, to the extent that he manufactured glass eyes and carved limbs out of wood, even displaying his birds in front of painted skies. (In Europe, birds were displayed scientifically, singly on white paper.) Although his birds were arranged systematically (unlike the kaleidoscopic curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), his repository also contained a five-legged cow, stuffed monkeys posed as humans, an exhibit debunking the popular notion that elk breathe through their tear ducts, a lock of human hair from an albino, four-inch shoes worn by a Chinese woman, a snake den, and, in the yard behind Independence Hall, a live menagerie. What cemented his fame as a naturalist, however, wasn't his artificial ponds, his superior use of arsenic, or even his prairie wolf clobbering a mule deer, but rather his "mastodon" skeleton, which was really a mammoth he called "the Carnivorous Elephant of the North." When Peale wasn't singing "Yankee Doodle" inside the mammoth's reticulated skeleton with a cohort of chums or conversing with his sons—Raphaelle, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, Vandyke, Charles Linnaeus, and Benjamin Franklin (some of whom shot the birds that he himself preserved)—he liked to think the massive skeleton proved that animals were indeed as large in America as they were in Europe (and so, incidentally, were American men). You get the picture.
By the mid-1800s, especially after Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, museums, obsessed with taxonomy, prepared specimens in a way to facilitate comparative morphology—the study of an organism's form and structure. Comparative morphology did not happen on the banks of the Sadong River, but inside the dark museum, aptly called the "closet." Although this practice allowed science to progress, it basically killed taxidermy. The big public museums, you see, generally employed the worst taxidermists—or, rather, the fastest ones: taxidermists whose unintentional anatomical blunders would prejudice the way people would view dodos, goblin sharks, and other species for generations. Pioneering field naturalists were horrified. "That which once was a bird has probably been stretched, stuffed, stiffened and wired by the hand of a common clown," ranted the eccentric British taxidermist-explorer Charles Waterton in 1825. It was entirely unlike the bird itself, which was "touched by nothing rougher than the dew of Heaven."
Only a handful of pioneers in Germany, France, England, and Sweden preserved animals and birds with any liveliness, and those who did tended to favor combative tigers and camel-riding Arabs mauled by lions. Although these sensational displays riveted crowds at world's fairs and expos, they failed to show how an animal truly behaves in the wild. This would eventually change when American and Swedish museums embraced public education in the form of grand public displays (birds followed by mammals). But when Akeley arrived at Ward's, taxidermy was still amateurish, either too dead or too alive.
Fueled by a restless ambition, Akeley left Ward's in 1887 to prove that taxidermy could be scientifically sound, technically ingenious, and evocatively beautiful, and that he—"nothing but a taxidermist"—could be a true artist. His goal was to revolutionize taxidermy by approaching it as a sculptor, and after thirty years of tireless experimentation, he did just that. Instead of stuffing a skin full of rags and bones, he studied anatomy, replicating every muscle in clay. Eventually, he devised a method for stretching the animal's skin over a plaster replica of its body that was so finely contoured no one could deny that taxidermy was art. His manikins were so strong, lightweight, and accurate that museums such as the Smithsonian use a variation of his method today. In 1889, Akeley created the first habitat diorama in America: muskrats for the Milwaukee Public Museum, which still has it on display.
It was the grand era of the scientific field expedition. Museums no longer relied only on private collectors and places like Ward's for their specimens. They sent their own teams of explorers, naturalists, and taxidermists to exotic lands, where they collected an astounding number of specimens. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Americans led the pack. These hair-raising journeys involved not only the thrill of the hunt but also the less celebrated task of skinning the animals and curing thousands of exotic pelts in primitive conditions, then shipping them bac
k to the museum across oceans and deserts in hermetically sealed "chop boxes" (boxes used to transport food on safaris). When the precious skins arrived at the museum, taxidermists spent years preserving them using rudimentary tools, limited scientific knowledge, and no refrigeration.
In 1887, the AMNH sent an expedition to Montana's badlands in search of bison. It was the first of more than one thousand such collecting trips sponsored by this museum alone. In 1931, the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology sent a six-man team to Australia. "We shall hope for the specimens of the kangaroo, the wombat, the Tasmanian devil, and the Tasmanian wolf," wrote museum director Thomas Barbour. They returned to Cambridge with more than one hundred mammals and thousands of insects.
Some expeditions were much less fortunate. Around 1900, Carl von Hagen, a German butterfly collector, went to Papua New Guinea to collect butterflies. After he netted an exceptionally beautiful Ornithoptera paradisea, he himself was captured and eaten by cannibals. Ironically, his 110-year-old winged trophy survived and now resides at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, its magnificent day-glo green and black wings as vibrant as ever.
In 1916, an expedition headed by Roy Chapman Andrews crossed southern China on horseback in search of dinosaur fossils and, according to one account, the elusive "blue tiger" and other new species. They never found the mysterious tiger but managed to send home more than three thousand zoological specimens (about two thousand mammals and mammal skeletons, eight hundred birds, and two hundred reptiles), two-thirds of which had never been seen before in the United States.
Taxidermists who collected animals for museums considered themselves conservationists, not trophy hunters, even though their expeditions were funded primarily by wealthy patrons who wanted to hunt for big game—especially with Akeley. Today you can see their quarry (and their names) in the AMNH's Hall of North American Mammals and other grand galleries. Although Akeley did discard the occasional elephant (uneven tusks; facial tumors), Cape buffalo (scorched pelt), and diseased hyena, he claimed that he never shot for sport or for profit. That's why he could look you in the eye from under his pith helmet, a smoking 475 Springfield rifle in his hands, and say, "As a naturalist interested in preserving African wildlife, I was glad to do anything that might make killing animals less attractive."
Animals were, after all, his dearest friends, and, like most taxidermists, he viewed them anthropomorphically. He considered elephants chivalrous, lions regal and fearless, kudu stylish and graceful, hippos and rhinos stupid and blundering, ostriches wary and clever, and buffalo vigilant and vindictive. The only animal he ever truly disliked was that "sneaky carrion eater" the leopard. In the shy, gentle gorilla, he found his "kin"—a species that "desired to be loved."
The place that enchanted him most was Africa, where he led five scientific field expeditions. He was seized with the idea of re-creating Africa in America on his first expedition for the Field Museum in 1896, but the notion didn't fully take hold until 1909, when the AMNH sent him back to collect elephants for it. (He would spend the next seventeen years at the museum, but he refused to take a position on staff, instead preferring to be paid in stipends.) By then, Africa had changed. It was no longer pristine and wild but marred by civilization. Hunting safaris had become big business, led in vehicles, not on foot. Forests that had once teemed with exotic birds and beasts were now, taxidermically speaking, picked over, and it took Akeley two years to find four elephants splendid enough to represent the largest land mammal on earth.
One day Akeley was on Mount Kenya, taking photographic reference of the elephants' habitat, when he startled an old bull in a bamboo forest. When the bull charged, his gun jammed. He escaped with (relatively) minor injuries: a broken nose, swollen eyes, cracked ribs, punctured lungs, and a torn cheek that hung off his face, exposing his teeth. Only an elephant charge could pry Akeley off the trail. He spent weeks on a camp cot recuperating, his bandaged head making him look like a mummy with eye slots. While he healed, however, the driving forces that gave meaning to his life crystallized into a plan that would consume him for the rest of his days.
He would re-create Africa in Central Park, of all places, to prove that the Dark Continent was actually flooded with sunlight. He would do this not by satisfying the public's urge for sensation, but by crafting forty flawless dioramas, each a sincere and scientifically faithful record of the beautiful creatures as Akeley himself had come to know them: in the jungle, at peace. After all, as he put it, "Why in hell should a good sculptor waste his talents on reproducing a lie?"
The work was backbreaking. So was the pressure to record the scene before the animals became extinct and their virgin habitats were trampled. Already the last quagga (an extinct zebralike quadruped) had been wiped out. Akeley figured he had twenty-five years to collect the specimens; it was, as he used to say, "now or never."
So there was the matter of time. More so, there was the matter of Akeley, an uncompromising nature freak. He was restless, impatient, eager to move from one challenge to the next, a man with a furious temper who laid into anyone not as exacting as he, but whose stern expression melted away at night in his studio with friends. In the archives, I found a memo in which someone suggests that Akeley—who was short an antelope bull for the hall—take the skins of two females and transform them into a single male. Akeley flew into a rage, tearing into the person who dared him to cheat nature. Painstaking perfectionism, of course, can drive those in charge of budgets and deadlines—namely, museum administrators—nuts, and in the end Akeley's crowning achievement may have been that the museum shared his indomitable vision and left him alone.
In 1912, the president of the AMNH was Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, a paleontologist who founded the museum's Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. When Akeley presented Osborn and the trustees with his sketch of African Hall, they immediately accepted it. The museum already had an Africa hall, essentially a trophy room. This was a bit more ambitious. Yet countless delays put construction on hold for the next thirteen years, during which time Akeley preserved his elephants, dreaming of Africa.
In her fascinating memoir The Wilderness Lives Again, Akeley's widow, the mountaineer Mary Jobe Akeley, describes his process of collecting, skinning, tanning, and mounting a single elephant (thirteen pages of tight prose, which, incidentally, matches up with what Hornof, Quinn, and the conservators discovered with their x-rays). Basically, this is what he did. After the elephant was shot in the bush, he shaded it under a tarp to slow it from decomposing. After he photographed it for reference, he took detailed measurements with a tape measure and calipers, compensating for variations that make a dead animal different from a living one, such as deflated lungs, a limp trunk, and flaccid muscles. Next he cast the skull and leg bones in plaster and made a death mask of the face to capture its fine musculature. Without this data, the animal would have been a trophy (a generalization); Akeley's elephant would be an exact duplicate.
Properly skinning an animal is incredibly difficult, particularly in primitive conditions. Akeley skinned animals like a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. All his incisions minimized future seams, so they'd disappear when the animal was assembled later. The legs were cut on the inside; the back was cut longitudinally along the spine; the head was cast, cut off. Once skinned, the elephant was fleshed, a far more grueling task. It took Akeley and his team of porters four to five days to remove and prepare the thick, two-thousand-pound hide, using small knives so that they would not mar the skin. When the salted skin arrived in the museum workshop, it was hard and stiff and had to be tanned—a twelve-week process of daily turning to achieve optimum suppleness. (Mary Jobe Akeley said that her husband's tanning formula—undisclosed—was so good that he never lost a wrinkle, a wart, or a tick hole.) Eventually, the two-and-a-half-inch-thick hide was reduced to a quarter inch of leather (soft as a glove) and was ready for mounting.
Akeley always made a miniature clay model of every animal as a guide. Then he outlined the elephant's body on
the floor in chalk and built its internal scaffolding on top of that, starting with a steel backbone, neck, and legs and working outward. Eventually, he had an armature made of steel, wood, and the elephant's own bones, which he covered with wire mesh and three inches of clay to mimic its muscles. He placed the tanned skin over the clay muscles, manipulating every fold and wrinkle until it looked like a real elephant. Then he cast the form in plaster to make his manikin. There's actually a whole lot more to it than that, and when you consider that, for instance, a hairless black rhino is nothing at all like an eighteen-foot giraffe or a fleshy-faced gorilla and that each one requires specific anatomical knowledge and reference (which, of course, had to be personally obtained in the field), you can get a sense of who Akeley was: by his own definition, "a fool."
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