Mr. Hornaday's War
Page 2
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.”3 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.”4
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.”5 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.”6
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.
On this hastily arranged expedition, Hornaday was accompanied by his old hunting pal George Hedley, an experienced outdoorsman and taxidermist from Medina, New York; and a youthful museum assistant named A. H. Forney, who seemed all arms, legs, and Adam’s apple but who proved to be both brave and cheerful. Now the three of them made their way through the train to their berths in a Pullman sleeping car, widely marketed as “luxury for the middle class” and replete with heavy, dark green drapes, hanging lamps, and porter service. Each sleeping car had its own porter, each of them black and each known simply as “George.”7 For Hornaday, on his modest government salary, all this unaccustomed luxury—middle class or not—was possible only because the three men had been provided with free train tickets by the museum. A sleeping car would be lovely, though: the rail trip was to last four days and take them all the way to Miles City, in the Montana Territory, a muddy settlement on the Yellowstone River in the flat, wind-whipped grasslands of the northern Great Plains, a place still haunted by the Crow, the Paiute, and the Blackfoot, but no longer by the great herds that these tribes had once hunted and revered.
Once the men stowed their bags in the green lap of their Pullman berths and the train pulled out of the station, they made their way forward to the dining car for a late breakfast. As it happened, they were seated across the table from two young, sunburned Army officers, who told them that, after a visit to Washington, they were returning to their desolate outpost in the Montana Territory. Hornaday brightened at this happy coincidence. He told the officers about the mission of his three-person Smithsonian expedition: to travel west to the territories, and with the assistance of local guides, cowboys, and soldiers garrisoned to Fort Keogh, attempt to locate and procure specimens of the American bison for the museum.
The two officers exchanged quick glances which, it seemed to Hornaday, were filled with wry amusement. Then one of them turned to him and spoke.8
The chances of you fellas finding any buffalo, anywhere in the territories—at least, any buffalo that are still alive—are next to nothing.
It wasn’t as if people out East were entirely uninformed about what was happening. As recently as 1869, Harper’s Weekly magazine had carried an engraving of Western tourists firing from a slow-moving train at a herd of buffalo with Sharps rifles, carbines, pistols—any armament they could lay hands on. “An American scene, certainly,”9 the editors observed breezily, as if the people were merry picknickers. Did people believe this could go on forever? And boarding the train only an hour earlier, Hornaday had noticed that the station platform was crowded with well-dressed women wearing extravagant Gilded Age hats, nearly all of which were festooned with feathers—feathers plucked from native songbirds and from wading birds of the swamp and shore, feathers stolen from birds of the equatorial jungle. Did people imagine that there was no end to nature’s bounty? That they had the right to sacrifice a snowy egret or a lyrebird simply because its feathers were pretty, or a buffalo because its hide was warm? Didn’t anybody see what was going on? Was the entire country asleep?
He’d known things were bad out in the Western territories, but seated in the dining car across from the sunburned officers, Hornaday was just beginning to realize how bad. In his correspondence with ranchers, hunters, and stockmen across the West, attempting to locate the remnant bison herds, he’d learned that bison sightings had become so rare they were cause for special celebration (and of course, a celebratory hunt). Theodore Roosevelt, in his book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, had written that a rancher who’d traveled a thousand miles across northern Montana told him “he was never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one.”10 Now, on the westbound train, Hornaday was seized with the terrible fear that the few remaining herds might reach the vanishing point of extinction before he even got there.
Still, William Temple Hornaday was not a man who was easily daunted by a dismal prophecy about his chances from strangers on a train, or superior firepower, or overwhelming odds of any kind. He was a fighter down to his fingernails. He had all the belligerent pugnacity of a small man with an outsized notion of his importance in the world. A proud, prickly, imperious man with a fierce, almost swordlike nose, ferociously unsettling eyes, and eyebrows so black and overbearing they appeared to have been painted on, he bore a passing resemblance to the young Sigmund Freud. His manner was one of calculated crudeness, his hands were calloused, and even in a fine suit and a high, stiff Victorian “turnover” collar, like two small white wings at the throat, his hair would sometimes be matted with flecks of mud or bits of grass from recreating nature scenes in the taxidermy shop.
Born six years before the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War, Hornaday was too young to have served in the Union army, but he was deeply affected by it nonetheless—his beloved older brother Clark died in a military hospital after being grievously wounded in the war.11 By the time he was fourteen, both of Hornaday’s parents had died, the family farm and everything in it had been auctioned off, and he was sent off to live with distant relatives in Illinois. His brothers and sisters had moved away or were dead, and he was quite alone in the world. So he learned to fight. And the defiant boldness he learned from being thrown on the world so young, without any advantages, became the defining characteristic of his life.
He was still a teenager when he went to work for the famous Ward’s Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, New York, a kind of Sears, Roebuck of natural history specimens for museums, universities, and private collectors. He’d worked there all of six months when he decided, at the age of nineteen, to mount a collecting expedition, alone, to the remotest part of Africa. He’d been inspired by the exploits of Paul Du Chaillu, the French-American explorer who was the first man to bring back a great ape from the dark continent and whose 1861 book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa later inspired the movie King Kong. Hornaday’s uncle Allen had to bribe the boy with $500 to keep him from going (and in Allen’s view, saved his life).12
As a hunter and tracker, Hornaday was fearless. In India, where more than eight hundred people had been killed and eaten by tigers in the single year 1878, he stalked an immense Bengal tiger into a bamboo thicket, on foot, and shot it at thirty yards with such a small-bore rifle that it was practically a toy. To call him dauntless was to understate the case.
Hornaday was also “obsessive, unbuckling, and stubborn beyond words,” writes historian Douglas Brinkley. “His certainty about zoology bordered on arrogance. His daily conversation was filled with such bio-trivia as the flesh preference of wolverines and why hawks were copper-clawed.” At the same time, “there was always a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, like a child who had suddenly aged overnight.”13
Now, staring across the table at the two officers on the westbound train, who had just told him he could not do what he intended to do, all Hornaday felt was a stiffening of his resolve, as if, through sheer willpower, he might be able to conjure a thundering herd of buffalo out of thin air.
The zeitgeist of those days, and a general sense of the enemy’s astonishing obliviousness and power, is succinctly summed up by a story which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on November 22, 1886. The paper published an account of a sumptuous wild game dinner that was to be held at the Tremont House, a lavish hotel at the corner of Dearborn and Lake Streets. This feast, hosted by the Tremont’s proprietor, John B. Drake, would be held just before Thanksgiving, just as it had for thirty-eight consecutive years previously, and would be attended by such notables as Ulysses S. Grant; General Philip Sheridan; Senator Stephen A. Douglas; Mr. and Mrs. Marshall Field, of department store fame; and Mr. and Mrs. George M. Pullman, the eponymous owners of the railcar company. The menu, apparently meant to tantalize the masses with the imagined immoderation of the ruling classes, stands as a mute testament to what was happening to wildlife in the United States in the late nineteenth century—not just to the buffalo, but to every other wild thing that crawled, walked, or flew. It was a saturnalia of blood that invites the modern reader to nothing so much as indigestion:
PROCESSION OF GAME
SOUP
Venison (Hunter style) Game Broth
FISH
Broiled Trout, Shrimp Sauce, Baked Black Bass, Claret Sauce
BOILED
Leg of Mountain Sheep, Ham of Bear, Venison Tongue, Buffalo Tongue
ROAST
Loin of Buffalo, Mountain Sheep, Wild Goose, Quail, Redhead Duck, Jack Rabbit, Blacktail Deer, Coon, Canvasback Duck, English Hare, Bluewing Teal, Partridge, Widgeon, Brant, Saddle of Venison, Pheasants, Mallard Duck, Prairie Chicken, Wild Turkey, Spotted Grouse, Black Bear, Oppossum, Leg of Elk, Wood Duck, Sandhill Crane, Ruffed Grouse, Cinnamon Bear
BROILED
Bluewing Teal, Jacksnipe, Blackbirds, Reed Birds, Partridges, Pheasants, Quails, Butterballs, Ducks, English Snipe, Rice Birds, Red-wing Starling, Marsh Birds, Plover, Gray Squirrel, Buffalo Steak, Rabbits, Venison Steak
ENTREES
Antelope Steak, Mushroom Sauce; Rabbit Braise, Cream Sauce; Fillet of Grouse with Truffles; Venison Cutlet, Jelly Sauce; Ragout of Bear, Hunter Style; Oyster Pie
SALADS
Shrimp, Prairie Chicken, Celery
ORNAMENTAL DISHES
Pyramid of Game en Bellevue, Boned Duck au Naturel, Pyramid of Wild-Goose Liver in Jelly, The Coon Out at Night, Boned Quail in Plumage, Red-Wing Starling on Tree, Partridge in Nest, Prairie Chicken en Socle14
Staring out the window of the westbound train, William Temple Hornaday was consumed with fear and impatience. Unable to sleep, he watched as the sun rose, flared, set, and rose again and the little towns with their grain silos and saddle horses went by, a smoky dawn over some dinky city hall, the oceans of corn. Baltimore, McKeesport, Pittsburgh, Akron, Goshen, South Bend. Then Gary, Indiana, which smelled like a dirty nickel, and
on to the darkness and steam and clambor of Chicago, where Hornaday and his companions changed trains onto the storied Northern Pacific railroad—a new Pullman car, a new “George”—for the last long leg of the journey west. Only three years earlier, on September 8, 1883, former president Ulysses S. Grant had driven the final “golden spike” that joined the eastern and western Northern Pacific rail lines, linking Chicago with far-off Seattle. Now the train steamed north along Lake Michigan, through Milwaukee and northwest through the little farm towns and the melancholy blue-black lakes of Wisconsin, into Minnesota, the white birches flashing out of a dark sea of spruce forest, Minneapolis, St. Cloud, Fergus Falls, Fargo.
The old buffalo hunters claimed there was a different, slightly larger species of bison with a more pronounced hump, known as the “wood buffalo,” that haunted the green eastern forests in ancient times. But now that the train was entering the northern Great Plains, Hornaday was passing into the ancestral homeland of the western herd bison, whose numbers were so vast they were often said to be “beyond counting.” He watched as the near-limitless West of the imagination spread out before him—home to what until quite recently were two vast herds, the larger “southern herd,” south of the Platte River which transected the West at Denver, and the “northern herd,” which roamed the plains north into Canada. But now all he saw was emptiness, yucca and greasewood growing in the sandy washes, distant cattle, and the occasional pronghorn antelope, like tiny insects at the foot of an immense, unforgiving sky.