Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  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, McNaney 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.8

  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.”9

  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.10

  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-square-mile 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 thundering away down the ravine, unharmed. The party pursued them for miles, eventually galloping alongside them and then, one by one, shot all seven animals. Hornaday shot two, a cow and an immense, shaggy-bearded old bull, likely the patriarch of the herd. By then it was getting dark, so the hunters left the buffalo where they lay and returned the next morning. The Indians had not disturbed the prize, but to Hornaday’s amazement, the big bull was still breathing. He later recalled:

  [The bull] was still alive, and in a terrible rage. He stood up on his fore legs, pawed the ground, and tore around as far as he could. Tried hard to get up, but could not. His eyes fairly flashed fire. We stood at a safe distance awhile and studied him, then, as it was getting late, I drew up, aimed for his heart, and fired. The blood gushed out of the hole, and the old fellow gave a great shudder. He struggled mightily for a moment, then his head slowly sank until it touched the ground. Rising on his fore legs, he threw his head high into the air until his nose pointed at the sun, and his eyes rolled in agony toward the sky. He opened his mouth and the blood ran out. An instant later, he fell suddenly prone upon his side, and his left fore leg, by a strange coincidence, pointed straight at me and shook like a mighty arm in reproach and condemnation.12

  Finally, after two months in the field, the Smithsonian party had reached a total of nineteen buffalo skins, one shy of their target of twenty. They decided to pack up and head back towards Miles City, hunting and camping along the way.

  By now it was late November; they’d already had one forty-eight-hour Montana blizzard, which kept them huddled in their camp for two days, feeding firewood into the little Sibley camp stove, supplying oats to the storm-beaten horses and playing draw poker for gun-wads. Finally, the weather cleared, but the hunters decided it was about time to call it quits. They packed up the wagon and prepared to head south. But before they did, Hornaday told the cowpokes, he was going to let them pilot the wagon because he wanted to kill another big bull “before this thing is over.” On November 22, Harvey Brown noted uneasily in his diary that it had snowed all night and was five below zero at dawn; two degrees at one p.m.; and already four below at nine p.m. “The terrors of a Montana winter” were fast approaching.

  But the light s
now made conditions perfect for tracking, so Hornaday and McNaney rode out away from the wagon train in search of game. They had crossed two or three snowy ridges, then began descending through steep country toward a dry river bottom, when Hornaday spotted the light-brown humps of three buffalo, about 200 yards away.

  The buffaloes appeared to be a youngster, perhaps two years old; an old cow; and an immense bull, the largest Hornaday had ever seen. He and McNaney jumped off their horses and ducked behind a clump of sagebrush, but the animals spotted them and took off through the snowy ravine at a slow trot, kicking up a spray of snow as they ran. Hornaday stood up, squared himself into a wide stance, and got off a couple of shots with his .44–40 Winchester buffalo rifle, but both bullets missed.13

  McNaney had better luck, or better aim. Hornaday saw a cow go down, and watched as the other cow and the great bull hightailed it over the hill. He slammed a few more cartridges into his Winchester, leaped onto his Indian pony, Brownie, and took off at a gallop through the snowcovered sagebrush. Brownie was a splendid, high-spirited animal, and he mounted the hill and flew down the other side like the wind until he drew even with the fleeing pair of buffalo, who were tearing away down the ravine with wads of snow flying up from their hooves. The bull, seeming to sense that he’d been caught, stopped suddenly and whirled around to fight, his head lowered, shovel-shaped horns thrust outward like an invitation to death. Hornaday fired once for his lungs, but the shot was low. He fired a second time at his shoulder, and the beast went down, head foremost, in the snow. Without waiting to watch what happened next, Hornaday took off in pursuit of the cow, but she escaped. He reined Brownie back around sharply, and trotted back to the fallen bull. The bull was still alive and sitting up where he’d fallen.

  As the bull saw Hornaday coming back, he staggered to his feet—despite what appeared to be a broken leg—and began trundling off over the snowy hill. Just over the crest, the bull halted again, panting, blood pouring down his shoulder, head lowered for a fight. When he panted, a spray of bright blood appeared on the white snow. Hornaday pulled Brownie up to within thirty yards of him and “gazed upon him with genuine astonishment. Not until that moment had I realized what a grand prize had fallen to me.” He continued:

  He seemed to me then, ay, and he did later on, the grandest quadruped I ever beheld, lions, tigers, and elephants not excepted. His huge bulk loomed up like a colossus, and the height of his great shaggy hump, and the steepness of its slope down to his loins, seemed positively incredible. . . . His massive head was crowned by a thick mass of blackish-brown hair lying in a tumble of great curly tufts, sixteen inches long, piled upon on each other, crowding back upon his horns, almost hiding them, and quite onto his shoulders. . . . The upper half of each foreleg was lost in a huge bunch of long, coarse black hair, in which scores of cockleburs had caught and hopelessly tangled. The body itself and the loin quarters were covered with a surprisingly thick coat of long, fine, mouse-colored hair, without the slightest flaw or blemish. From head to heel, the animal seemed to possess everything the finest buffalo in the world should have, and although by that time no stranger to his kind, I sat gazing upon him so completely absorbed by wonder and admiration that had he made a sudden charge he might easily have bowled me over.14

  The immense bull stood there in the snow with his feet braced apart, head lowered, eyeing the hunter fiercely, with the whites of his eyeballs showing. His head sank very low a couple of times, then he abruptly lifted it and glared at Hornaday, panting. He pawed the wet snow with his wounded foreleg. He was a formidable adversary, a truly noble combatant, and he was not prepared to surrender.

  “With the greatest reluctance I ever felt about taking the life of an animal,” Hornaday wrote later, “I shot the great beast through the lungs, and he fell down and died.”15

  When he and McNaney laid the big bull out in the snow and took measurements, he turned out to be five feet eight inches in vertical height at the shoulder; nine feet two inches end to end, from the tip of his nose to the back of the thigh; eight feet four inches in girth around the chest; and according to Hornaday’s reckoning, must have weighed about 1,600 pounds. When he dressed the animal out, he turned out to have four old bullets buried in his body; more than one hunter had aimed to have him as a trophy but failed. The horns of bulls taken in their prime were smooth and glossy-black, almost as if they’d been rubbed with oil, but this was what the old buffalo hunters called a “stub-horn.” That meant that this was an old bull whose horns had begun to peel off in layers at the base, leaving a thick, blunt stub, with only the tip of what was once a glossy horn showing through at the end. Because bison add a ring each year around the base of the horn, just as domestic cattle do, Hornaday judged that the bull was about eleven or twelve years old (in an animal whose natural lifespan was roughly twenty-five years). His tongue and lips were bluish-purple; his hooves were jet black; and his eyes, with a pear-shaped iris, were reddish brown.

  Hornaday lovingly noted all these details as he prepared the skin for mounting. Later, this superb animal would become the principal figure in Hornaday’s famous bison group that was displayed for sixty years at the Smithsonian. Later still, the bull became even more famous when he was used by the Treasury Department as the model for the bison depicted on the ten-dollar bill that went into production in 1901. Greengrocers, housewives, gamblers, shopkeepers, and petty criminals all made contact, however fleetingly, with the great bull who went down in the Montana snow that long-ago afternoon. The mighty bull, though fallen, served Hornaday’s larger purpose of bringing “wildlife to the millions” and so played his role in halting the extermination of his species.

  On the night of November 25, a ferocious blizzard came shrieking down from the north country, temporarily trapping the museum party in their camp on Porcupine Creek. The temperature dropped to sixteen below zero that night; Hornaday watched a pail of water standing within four feet of a blazing campfire freeze over solid in ten minutes. That dreadful winter, which came to be known as the Winter of the Blue Snow, would later be remembered in plaintive lines from a cowboy song:

  I may not see a hundred

  Before I see the Styx,

  But, coal or ember, I’ll remember

  Eighteen eighty-six

  The stiff heaps in the coulees

  The dead eyes in the camp

  And the wind about, blowing fortunes out,

  Like a woman blows out a lamp.16

  The Smithsonian Expedition broke camp on December 15, during a brief thaw in the weather, packing the wagons with boxes of specimens, food, and camp supplies, saddling up the horses and ponies and heading back home. Hornaday knew that if the museum party did not get out of camp very soon, they could be in serious trouble. It was bitterly cold; they were running out of food for both men and horses; the snow made the Sunday Creek Trail almost impassable; and the Yellowstone River would soon be so choked with treacherous running ice that the ferry to Miles City would be closed for the season.

  Despite the hunt’s lingering sorrow, it had been hugely successful, producing twenty-two fresh buffalo skins, forty-four skulls, eleven skeletons, and various other skins and bones collected along the way. Hornaday reported to Secretary Baird that it was “the finest and most complete series of buffalo skins ever collected by a museum.” The buffalo, of all ages and sexes, would be an extremely valuable addition to the Smithsonian collection, with enough left over to distribute to other museums.

  Even so, Hornaday’s grim prediction, in 1889, that all the wild buffalo would be gone within ten years proved prophetic. In the winter of 1893–94, poachers killed 114 of the last band of wild buffalo cowering in the newly created Yellowstone National Park. And in 1897, the last four free-roaming buffalo were found in a high mountain valley in Colorado and shot. The hunters must have been exultant. They had succeeded in killing off the very last wild buffalo on the planet. It was only because there were a few animals still sheltered in private reserves or zoos, which would la
ter be used to seed new herds, that the buffalo survived at all.17

  CHAPTER 6

  A Mysterious Stranger

  One winter afternoon in 1888, about two years after his return from the Montana Territory, William Temple Hornaday was kneeling in the ersatz buffalo grass and sage of an immense museum display in the Hall of Mammals, at the National Museum in Washington. The diorama, the most ambitious undertaking of his celebrated career as a taxidermist, was housed in the largest display case ever made for the museum: sixteen feet wide, twelve feet deep, and ten feet high, surrounded by a burnished mahogany frame. In addition to its size, what was genuinely new about the exhibit was that it was an immense glass cube, its contents visible from all sides. Virtually all other museum displays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were visible from only one side, or at most two sides. This was to be, Hornaday hoped, his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel of celebration for a vanishing—and perhaps vanished—species.1

  The museum’s chief taxidermist had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and was wearing a full-length oilcloth apron. As was the Victorian custom, he also was absurdly overdressed for the occasion, wearing a white turnover collar and tie. On his face, along with brushstrokes of plaster of paris, gray sculptor’s clay, and genuine Montana dirt (brought back for this exhibit on the 1886 expedition) was a look of ferocious focus, like a surgeon preparing to make an exacting incision. Scattered around him in the grass were a carpenter’s bag of taxidermy tools—flat pliers, cutting-pliers, two kinds of forceps, three-cornered files of various sizes, a huge glover’s needle stuck in a bar of soap, a glue-pot.2 They were the tools with which he was conjuring the dark arts of resurrection. Towering above him, stuffed and mounted but so real it seemed ready to snort, was the lordly bison bull he had brought down in the Montana snow two winters before. Nearby stood the half-completed figures of a two-year-old “spike” bull, a yearling, two cows, and Sandy, the little blond calf who had perished, making this whole display a kind of sepulchre of innocence.