Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  How could people be so stupid? How could they be so rapacious? Wasn’t there any ethic of limits in this country? In some perverse way, the very fact that a thing was rare and endangered made it all the more tempting a prize. “The nearer the species approaches to complete extermination,” Hornaday had written, “the more eagerly are the wretched figures pursued to the death wherever found.”15 Moreover, much of this slaughter was for no purpose whatsoever. The vast majority of the meat from the buffalo massacre was simply wasted. The native peoples, by contrast, made use of every scrap—meat for food, hides for clothing, sinew for rope, stomach for carrying sack. Hornaday had once estimated that “probably not more than one-thousandth of the buffalo meat that might have been saved and utilized was saved.” Millions of people could have been fed with the meat that was left to rot on the plains.

  Hornaday himself was an experienced tracker, hunter, and marksman; he’d killed more than his fair share of game, from Borneo to the Orinoco River delta. But, except for “bush meat” taken to survive in remote jungle camps, these kills were always in the service of science. He forcefully maintained throughout his life that virtually all the specimens he had ever taken were later mounted and displayed in museums, universities, and private collections for the edification of scientists and the public. He insisted that “bringing wildlife to the millions”—allowing people to see, up close, what he was asking them to save—was a key part of his war for wildlife. The moral queasiness that he sometimes felt about killing the animals that appeared in his museum displays was trumped by his absolute conviction that what he was doing was not only right, but urgently important.

  He was already envisioning a magnificent habitat grouping of perhaps six or eight mounted bison, a big bull, a couple of cows, several yearlings, and calves, which would enthrall visitors to the Smithsonian for years to come and, more importantly, galvanize them to action when they read about the slaughter of the living bison in Montana or the Dakotas. It grieved him to be westward bound on a mission of death. But all those birds depicted so lovingly by John James Audubon in Birds of America—the radiant scripture of the New World—had all been shot first, their feathered corpses tenderly arranged in lifelike poses. Audubon’s book was a chronicle of death, a hunting diary, but its ultimate purpose was noble: to awaken the American public to the glories of their country and awaken their hearts to the crying need for preservation.16

  On the third day out of Washington, in the western Dakota Territory, Hornaday awoke in his nest of temporary dark-green luxury and peered out of the window. “Houses few and far apart, & the country looks dreadfully lonesome,”17 he confided to his journal. The country was deserted partly because the train was passing through the ancient borderlands of the fierce plains peoples, the people of the buffalo—the Santee and Yankton Sioux, the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara, and the Crow. This country had never been hospitable to humans—too dry, too infertile, too hot in summer, too cold in winter—and the Indians only made white settlers feel more unwelcome.

  In all of his dismal correspondence with ranchers and hunters, Hornaday had stumbled across a few reasons to hope that he and his small hunting party might be able to find some buffalo, somewhere. One army doctor named J. C. Merrill, stationed in the windswept northeastern reaches of the Montana Territory, wrote to Hornaday that he felt it still might be possible to find a few scattered buffalo, but only in three places—on the headwaters of the Powder River, in Wyoming; and in the Judith Basin and along the Big Dry Creek, both in Montana.18

  Along the banks of the Little Missouri River, the train passed through the tiny cow town of Medora. Theodore Roosevelt, then a twenty-eight-year-old New York assemblyman and author who had abandoned his political career temporarily to become a Dakota rancher, had bought a place near here recently. It was still lawless country, plagued by cattle rustlers, and just a month before Hornaday’s train passed through Medora, Roosevelt had made the much-celebrated capture of a notorious horse and cattle thief named Mike Finnegan. Roosevelt walked forty-five miles with Finnegan in custody to deliver him to the local jail. At one point, Roosevelt borrowed the rustler’s dime Western to read, so he could stay up all night while guarding his prisoner at gunpoint.19

  The Montana Territory in 1886 was still a raw, wild, and dangerous place. It was only ten years earlier, in June 1876, that a reckless cavalry officer whom the Crow called “Son of the Morning Star” attacked an enormous gathering of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors under chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, in the Montana Territory. General George Armstrong Custer, who had graduated dead last in his class at West Point, was slaughtered by the Indians, along with 268 of his men.20 Elsewhere, rustlers and outlaws were commonplace. In many places, the Northern Pacific Railroad line into the territory was so new that the rails were still shiny as mint dimes.21 People back East, extravagantly overdressed in their fin de siecle hats, crinolines, corsets, frock coats, and twenty-button shoes, were fascinated by this almost unimaginable openness and wildness. A teenage boy from St. Louis named Charles M. Russell became so obsessed with sketching cowboys and Indians that his parents allowed him to go out to the Montana Territory in 1880, at the age of sixteen, where he got work as a cowhand and began sending back a steady stream of drawings and paintings of Western life to the people of New York, Chicago, and Boston. The images of wranglers, rustlers, and feathered braves in war paint were as startling as pictures from another planet.22

  But there was another story unfolding in the United States at the same time, a story that very few people had heard or seen. It was a story that William Temple Hornaday was determined to shout from the rooftops, even if it made him look like a kook, a crank, or a busybody. It was a story that was not readily apparent to others because few men of his day had spent as much time as Hornaday had in such remote places—from the Orinoco River delta, to Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. He had been appalled to realize that, even in these wild places, enormous regions had been almost completely “shot out”—where the forest had been emptied of birds, mammals, reptiles, and almost everything else that breathed. Returning from these exotic locales to the United States, he’d been able to see that here too, a virtual war of extinction was in progress, and the war was going very badly indeed.

  On two successive winter afternoons in 1886, an ornithologist from the American Museum of Natural History named Frank Chapman took a stroll down Fourteenth Street, in Lower Manhattan. In the course of this ramble through the crossroads of New York fashion, Chapman observed more than 700 extravagant Gilded Age women’s hats, bearing the plumage of forty different species of birds, from the white-throated sparrow to the bobolink, the laughing gull to the sanderling. Was anyone paying attention? Was anyone outraged?23

  There was a bitter, bloody war going on—what Hornaday called a “war for wildlife,” but it was more accurately a war against wildlife—and very few people seemed to realize how badly outgunned the friends of wildlife were. In fact, according to Hornaday’s own calculations, the enemies of wildlife outnumbered the friends by at least 500 to 1. Worst of all, the enemies included enormously influential people like General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, and even, by his failure to act, the former president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant.24

  Meanwhile, gun manufacturers were churning out ever more deadly and efficient weapons, like the new Winchester Autoloader, which could get off five shots in four seconds and was loaded and cocked by its own recoil. These weapons were like machine guns, more suited for war than for sport. At the same time, in states and localities across the United States, the legal system for protecting wildlife was like a defensive perimeter made of sticks and leaves—bag limits, hunting laws, hunting seasons—almost all of them had been dictated by hunters and hunting lobbies to ensure that they could kill as much game as they liked. A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, then shoot thirty more the next day, and
it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.

  Now, hurtling westward, Hornaday could think only of the great quest that lay ahead. Were the ranchers and hunters right? Had the “extinction event” already overtaken the few buffalo that were left in the wild? Would this journey turn out to be a requiem? All he knew for sure was that the gauntlet had been thrown down, and he intended to answer the battle call. There was not a moment to be lost.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Melancholy Insanity

  Even in the full dress blues of the Union Army, General William Tecumseh Sherman tended to look dishevelled, as if he’d slept in a tent. The hair on the back of his head was crazed, like a wild dog’s; and there was a strange, clenched muscle that crossed his cheek on the diagonal like a scar left by some primitive ritual of war. One soldier recollected that Sherman “generally looked like some old farmer; his hat all slouched down and an old brown overcoat.” Another observed that Sherman was “a very nervous man and can’t keep still a minute,”1 forever fidgeting with his hands and feet, glancing about sharply as if someone were after him, which generally was the case.

  But it was Sherman’s eyes that riveted you. They were a predator’s eyes, and once they locked on you, it was clear that you were the prey. They were eyes that had seen things no man should ever have to see, eyes that had peered into the darkness of which men are capable and seen no end to it.

  The net effect was one of ferocious intensity and near-derangement, an impression that was augmented by the well-known fact that, after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Sherman had had a nervous breakdown and been temporarily relieved of his command. The papers reported that he’d gone insane. Even his wife, Ellen, had written in a letter to Sherman’s brother that Sherman suffered from “that melancholy insanity of which your family is subject.”2

  But although Sherman may have seen the darkness in other men’s souls, most Southerners said it was Sherman himself who was the man of bottomless darkness. This was the man who had said, after sacking and burning Atlanta in 1864, then burning and killing his way across Georgia on his way to the sea, “War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”3

  When the war finally ended, Grant made Sherman Commanding General of the Army, which meant that he was responsible for the ongoing Indian wars in the West. In some ways, the appointment was a curious choice: Sherman’s father had named him after the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh,4 who tried unsuccessfully to unify the Indian nations of the Ohio River Valley to fight the white man. Tecumseh (the name means “shooting star”) was as fearless as Sherman, forever rallying the tribes to war, even in the face of certain defeat and death:

  Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and the other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun. . . . Sleep not longer O Choctaws and Chickasaws. . . . Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?5

  Sherman did not particularly care for the Indian wars, which were a bloody, disorganized business that was not like real war at all. The enemy was absolutely ruthless, scalping and disembowelling those who were captured, then skulking away into the night. It was a kind of guerilla warfare, in which the enemy seemed more like a conspiracy of shadows than a regular uniformed army. Their desecration of bodies was part of their strategy of psychological warfare, meant to horrify and dishearten the white man at the same time it disguised the Indians’ smaller numbers. Sherman responded to these grisly tactics with the same methods he’d used to bring the Confederacy to its knees: total war. War not just against an army, but against a whole society. Utter desolation. Blackened earth, bare and without sustenance.

  To Sherman, the centerpiece of the fight against the Indian was the buffalo, who supplied the enemy with meat, hides, bones, and a way of life. Both the buffalo and the Indian were enemies of civilization, and both would have to be destroyed if the grand promise of America were to reach all the way to the western sea. Because the Indians not only depended on the buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter, but the animal also was tangled up somehow in that blasphemous “religion” of theirs, to take away the buffalo was to break their spirit as well as their bodies. And breaking the enemy’s spirit, he knew as well as anyone, was the key to victory. Sherman had once said to General Philip Sheridan that “it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America . . . for a Grand Buffalo Hunt, and make a grand sweep of them all.”6

  In 1874, Sherman convinced Grant, then president of the United States, to pocket-veto a bill that would have protected buffalo from commercial hunting. He and Grant were old friends from the war, and saw eye to eye on most things. Sherman had said of Grant, “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”7 Sherman argued that commercial hunting of buffalo was actually like a batallion of soldiers doing battle with the enemy, and Grant evidently agreed.

  During floor debate in the Texas State Legislature on another bill to protect the buffalo in 1874, Sherman dispatched General Sheridan to the Texas statehouse to spread his message of total war. Sheridan was as fearless as Sherman, having broken the Confederate line at Missionary Ridge and fought at Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest engagements of the war. Sheridan thundered:

  They [the buffalo-hunters] are destroying the Indian’s commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairie can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunters as the second forerunner of an advanced civilization.8

  The Texas legislature, like Grant, agreed. The bill died. The attitudes espoused by Sherman and Sheridan had enormous popular support in the country, especially among sportsmen. One hunter wrote in a large-circulation magazine in 1881: “The buffalo must go with the Red Man. Both are stumbling blocks to the improvement of this country.”9 Even some prominent conservationists began to believe that the extermination of the buffalo was inevitable. “We know now that the extermination [is] a necessary part of the development of the country,” admitted George Bird Grinnell.10 And rather than being shamed or shunned, at least one bison hunter—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—decked out in buckskins, waxed moustache, and long-barreled six-shooters, became a sort of nineteenth-century rock star, a glamorization of the war against the buffalo.

  The Secretary of the Interior himself, a man named Columbus Delano, was in full-throated agreement with the views of Sherman, Sheridan, and the general public. “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians,” Delano wrote in his department’s annual report in 1873.11 Delano, who had been appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant, was a peculiarly apt spokesperson for Western civilization. He had flinty, glittering eyes overshadowed by preposterously huge eyebrows, a lipless mouth set in an inverted U of permanent disapproval, and a slab-like beard, similar in size and shape to the tablet of the Ten Commandments.

  “In our intercourse with the Indians it must always be borne in mind that we are the most powerful party. . . . We are assuming, and I think with propriety, that our civilization ought to take the place of their barbarous habits,” Delano wrote. Later the next year, in testimony before Congress, he repeated these convictions: “I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them onto reservations, and compelling them to begin adopting the habits of civilization.”

  Although he tended to thunder like an Old Testament prophet, Delano was simply giving voice to the will of the commander-in-chief and, by extension, the views of a majority of the nation�
��s God-fearing populace. In truth, the plains peoples of the Western wilderness had provided people like Columbus Delano with plenty of ammunition. Sensing their own impending extinction along with the buffalo’s, the Blackfoot, the Sioux, and the Cheyenne were fighting back with such grim savagery that even a glancing description of their atrocities was enough to turn the stomach.

  If destroying the buffalo was the final solution to the “problem” of the Indian, so be it. The vast majority of Americans had never even laid eyes on an Indian, a buffalo, or the West, and never would, so there was little they would miss. They got most of their information about what was happening out there from the newspapers, which had come to treat the slaughter of the buffalo as something of a joke. A June 6, 1874, edition of Harper’s Weekly featured a cover cartoon of a buffalo removing its own skin and handing it to a white man, with the caption, “Don’t shoot, my good fellow! Here, take my robe, save your ammunition, and go in peace.”12

  Even so, not everyone in America was as intent on waging a holy war against the buffalo as Columbus Delano. There were a few angry and despairing voices being raised in the animal’s defense, though not nearly enough to constitute a movement. “Conservation,” whether of the buffalo or any other natural resource in America, was not a word that had yet come into popular usage.

  In the years to come, the loudest, most persistent, and most authoritative voice in opposition to the slaughter of the buffalo would be that of the U.S. National Museum’s chief taxidermist, William Temple Hornaday.

  There were so many buffalo in the West, of course, that their numbers appeared to be inexhaustible. Stripping the Indian of his food supply would be an enormous, perhaps impossible task. At one time, bison herds had roamed north from northern Mexico across the Great Plains all the way to the shores of the Great Slave Lake, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They extended west to the Sierra Nevadas, in California, and in the late 1700s, Daniel Boone had found vast herds of buffalo as far east as eastern Tennessee. The herds were so enormous that there were dozens of documented incidents in which trains, brought to a complete standstill by migrating herds, were actually knocked off the tracks. In 1868, a man named William Blackmore reported riding 120 miles from Ellsworth to Sheridan, Wyoming, and passing through an almost unbroken herd of buffalo the entire way. In another case, a herd was reported to take five days to pass a given point.13