Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  A heavy canvas privacy screen had been drawn around the four-sided exhibit to shield Hornaday and his assistants from rubberneckers trying to get a premature peek; but even so, Hornaday could still hear the laughter and footfalls of museumgoers echoing through the high-ceilinged hall. Unperturbed by these distractions, he devoted his tenderest attentions to re-creating the scene, an imagined moment on the northern Great Plains in which an alpha bull, several cows, and a calf stopped to drink at a little alkaline watering hole (re-created out of layered wax and glass to give the illusion of depth). Nearby lay a couple of bleached buffalo skulls, discarded by hunters who had lain in wait at the spring.

  Hornaday was not a man above wondering about his place in history. As he worked, in fact, he was nearly as enthralled by the idea that this six-figure habitat group would become the masterpiece for which he was remembered, as he was about celebrating a vanishing species. Before he was through with this exhibit, he would feel compelled to speak directly, though secretly, to future generations whom he feared might not remember him. One day almost seventy years later, in 1957, the curatorial staff at the Smithsonian was finally taking down Hornaday’s buffalo group—which had been on prominent display at the museum’s ground-floor entrance, greeting millions of visitors with forbidding glass eyes for more than six decades—when one of the curators discovered a small metal box embedded inside the floorboards at the foot of the great bull. Inside were a few yellowing newspaper clippings, a couple of sketches of buffalo, and a handwritten note, in Hornaday’s flamboyant script:

  To my illustrious successor: The old bull, the young cow, and the yearling calf you find here were killed by yours truly. When I am dust and ashes, I beg you to protect these specimens from deterioration and destruction as they are among the last of their kind. Of course they are crude productions in comparison with what you may now produce, but you must remember that at this time, the American School of Taxidermy had only just been recognized. Therefore give the devil his due and revile not Wm T. Hornaday3

  It was a jocular greeting to a new generation of taxidermists (if in fact there was one), an anguished warning of impending doom, and a look beyond the petty politics and recriminations of his own day. He was not unaware that his rapid rise to the top of such an august institution, at such a young age, coupled with his brash and sometimes strident manner, had created a dark undertow of criticism. By 1888, his detractors had begun grumbling (mostly in private) that Hornaday was simply a fame hog, constantly making bombastic public pronouncements to attract attention, constantly in the papers, railing about the coming calamity facing wildlife to get himself a few more column inches of glory. And it’s true that his name, face, and opinions were in the newspapers so frequently that he’d hired a clipping service and begun filling fat scrapbooks with all his public notices. “Vindication of America’s Greatest Wildlife Champion” read one; “Zoo Man Convinced of Evolution Theory” read another.4

  Well, so be it, he thought. What did he care what lesser men thought? What he was doing with his life got attention because it was urgently important. To his mind, nothing was more important than saving the natural world from the grim annihilation he’d seen in Montana and all across the west—the violated corpses, the acres of bones.

  The planet was burning! If he yelled “Fire!” did that make him an egotist?

  During the previous winter and spring, as he worked feverishly on the great bison display, he’d written an eight-part series called “The Last Buffalo Hunt,” about his adventures and discoveries in Montana, which had recently run in twelve major newspapers from New York to San Francisco. It had brought him a new round of acclaim, but it also drew attention to the awful crime in progress in the West. Since the articles appeared, a steady stream of curiosity-seekers, as well as the occasional important visitor, had begun showing up at the half-completed exhibit in the Hall of Mammals. Although the average gadabout was not allowed behind the privacy screen, official visitors would be ushered into the display case from time to time to be introduced to the museum’s chief taxidermist.

  Now, as Hornaday hastened to prepare the remaining buffalo for the exhibit’s opening in March 1888, the privacy screen was flung open and a stranger stepped boldly into the display space, unaccompanied by any official envoy.5 Hornaday flicked him a glance, with momentary irritation, and then returned to his work on a troublesome seam in the yearling’s hide.

  Professor Goode said you wouldn’t mind if I came down here and had a look, friend, the stranger said in a congenial sort of way.

  Hornaday bridled at this uninvited familiarity. The stranger wasn’t his “friend.” He had no idea who this fellow was: a hale-looking young man in his late twenties, with a bull-like head and a square jaw.

  My God, look at that thing, the young man said, gesturing at the bull. You bagged this animal?

  Hornaday grunted his assent.

  Stub-horn—an old one. Fourteen, fifteen hundred pounds, I’ll bet. That’s probably one of the biggest bulls ever taken. What did you use?

  .44–40 Winchester.

  Nice piece. Not much recoil. Anything over a hundred yards, you can practically see that bullet drop down like an artillery shell. Where’d you shoot ’im?

  Montana Territory. Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, north of Miles City. If you know that country.

  Sunday Creek Trail?

  Yep.

  Hornaday shot another glance at the man. Not many people in Washington, D.C., would have appreciated the sterling virtues of the new .44–40 center-fire Winchester rifle, or recognized that the bull was what the old hide-hunters called a “stub-horn,” much less known about the Sunday Creek Trail.

  How do you happen to know that country up the Sunday Creek Trail? Hornaday asked finally.

  Used to have a ranch on the Little Missouri, near Cannonball Creek. But I’m out of the business now, after the winter of ’86. No money in ranching, just a world of grief.

  Hornaday could contain himself no longer.

  I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.

  Oh, beg pardon, the young man said, shoving out a big, square hand. The name’s Theodore—Theodore Roosevelt.

  Although he was only twenty-eight years old at the time of their first meeting, Theodore Roosevelt was already marked for fame. Hornaday recognized his name because it had been all over the papers: he’d just been defeated in a highly publicized run for the mayoralty of New York City, having campaigned—honestly, but perhaps foolishly—as “The Cowboy from the Dakotas.” Hornaday also already knew that Roosevelt once owned a ranch near Medora, in the northern Dakota Territory on the Little Missouri, not far from the place where these animals had been taken.

  On that wan winter day when their paths first crossed, these two fierce and ambitious young men forged a bond that was to last for the rest of their lives. “In our first hour,” Hornaday later wrote of this first meeting, Roosevelt “told me a serious secret, and we dealt in secrets forever after. I think I proved that I knew how to keep things that should not be told—and he told me many mighty interesting things that, while new, never appeared in print.”6

  The two men were natural companions. They loved the West, wildlife, guns, horses, and the open air. They were both hunters and adventurers, men whose souls came alive under the blue sky. They knew what it was like to live rough and take risks, to work for days in the saddle, to confront a tiger or an elephant at close quarters, or to wade chest-deep through the snake-infested swamps of the Orinoco. They shared a cowboy’s scorn of effete Easterners (even though they’d both grown up east of the Mississippi, and Roosevelt was born in Gotham itself). They both sensed, at a gut level, that all across the continent, birds and game were being hunted down at a much faster rate than they could possibly reproduce, that the whole natural world was careening toward disaster. This was so seldom acknowledged in public that it was almost as if this was the great secret that they shared.

  There were many other things of a more personal nat
ure that the two had in common. They were about the same age (Hornaday, at thirty-four, was six years older than Roosevelt). Both men had lost their parents when they were still very young and had had to pull on a grown man’s boots prematurely. (Hornaday lost both his parents when he was only thirteen; Roosevelt was nineteen when his father—“the greatest man I ever knew”—died, and twenty-six when his mother died of typhoid fever). They were both writers. Hornaday’s book Two Years in the Jungle had created a huge following and a hunger for his further exploits, and Roosevelt—a man who seemed to pack ten times as much life into every hour as a normal man—had once written, in a period of less than three months, a biography of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton and a celebrated four-volume series called The Winning of the West.

  One other thing the two young men had in common was that they’d had to overcome physical frailty and vulnerability. Hornaday had always been smaller than his peers, and he was forever overcompensating with sheer pugnacity, as if he could will himself to be taller. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had been so sickly as a child—he suffered extremely from asthma—that his father built a gym at the family home in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street in New York City. “You have to make your body,” his father had demanded, and “Teedie,” as he was known as a child, struggled to pack muscle onto his quivering, twiglike frame. Teedie remained so frail, though, that he could not attend school and was taught instead by tutors at home until he enrolled at Harvard at age eighteen. A couple of years later, after attending law school, he served for three terms in the New York State Assembly. But he still appeared weak and effeminate and wore foppish side-whiskers, a gangly Harvard man trying to be a grownup. His fellow assemblymen ridiculed his “squeaky” voice and dandified dress, calling him “Punkin-Lilly,” “Jane-Dandy,” and “our new Oscar Wilde.”7

  Both of these men had found true love in their lives; but for only one of them would it last. Hornaday’s love affair with his wife, Josephine, would endure for almost six decades, until his last breath. “This morning—‘it bein’ Sunday’—I had a long think, all about you,” he wrote to her in 1899, “about our first acquaintance, the middle and the end of our courtship, and the 19 1/2 very happy years following. . . . Dear old Heart, dearest Love, the years have made me so fond of you, and so dependent on your love and your daily smiles that when you are gone I am lost!”8

  Roosevelt, too, experienced early love of a shattering intensity. He was twenty years old when he met Alice Hathaway Lee at her parent’s house in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.9 It was October 1878; she was seventeen. He was smitten as soon as he saw her, and he wooed her for over a year, during his senior year at Harvard, before he won her. They were engaged on January 25, 1880. A few days later, Roosevelt rode his sleigh through a snowstorm over to Chestnut Hill, “the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife,” he later confided to his diary. “My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and innocent and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune.” Perhaps because he was so beside himself with joy, on his way home the sleigh tipped over in a snowdrift and he was “dragged about 300 yards, holding onto the reins, before I could stop the horse.”10

  By summer, his feelings for Alice Hathaway Lee seemed only to have intensified. He wrote in his diary on July 4, 1880, a Sunday: “In the afternoon I took my darling on a long and beautiful walk through Fleet’s woods. How I love her! And I would trust her to the end of the world. Whatever troubles come upon me—losses or griefs or sickness—I know she will only be more true and tender and loving than ever; she is so radiantly pure and good and beautiful that I almost feel like worshipping her. Not one thing is ever hidden between us. No matter how long I live, I know my love for her will only grow deeper and tenderer by the day; and she shall always be mistress over all that I have.”11

  Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee were married four months later, on October 27, 1880, on his twenty-second birthday. But her radiance and goodness and beauty would illuminate his life for only a little more than three years. On the morning of February 12, 1884, Alice gave birth to their first child, a girl they named Alice Lee Roosevelt. But the child’s mother became gravely ill, and on the terrible morning of February 14, 1884, she died. By an awful irony, Roosevelt’s mother had died a few hours earlier, in the same house, on the same day.

  Beside an enormous scrawled “X,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary on the day of Alice’s death, “the light has gone out of my life.”12 He remained inconsolable and refused to talk about Alice, publicly or privately, for the rest of his life. His father had died at forty-six; his mother at forty-eight; and now his beloved Alice at twenty-two. The historian David McCullough wrote that for Roosevelt, “the sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life.”13

  A year before Alice’s death, in 1883, Roosevelt had gone West to the territories with the intention of bagging a buffalo before they were all gone. It was a kind of boyish lark. He succeeded in shooting his first buffalo, and it made him so happy he did a crazy little war dance. “I’ve never seen anybody so happy about anything,” a friend of his said. He had his picture taken in a foppish Western outfit, holding a muzzle-loading rifle—Oscar Wilde in buckskins. He even took off his rimless spectacles for the picture, even though he was nearsighted and could barely see without them (he often had several extra pairs sewn into his clothes). But something else happened on that trip to the Dakota Territory. Once Roosevelt got a look at that wide-open country, with its molten sundowns, its totemic buttes, and the seeming limitessness of the sky, he liked it so well that he threw in with a couple of other men and bought a small operation on the Little Missouri called Chimney Butte Ranch. He bought a few cattle and horses and called himself a cowboy.

  He was enormously pleased with himself when he returned to New York to his pregnant wife, Alice, and the house he’d built in Oyster Bay called Sagamore Hill. But just a few short months later, his wife and mother were both dead, and he was inconsolable with grief. He was only twenty-six years old, but “for joy or for sorrow, my life has now been lived out,” he confided to his diary.14

  Roosevelt began returning to the ranch in the Dakotas, sometimes four or five times a year, but now these visits no longer were merely youthful escapades. Those who knew him said that Roosevelt struggled to keep from sinking into a melancholy listlessness during this period. He withdrew from friends. He seemed distant and distracted. A man of action, he hardly seemed to know what to do. He threw himself into the bruising physical work of the ranch, into the West, into the possibility of oblivion in that enormous country. Now he seemed to be restlessly seeking a new life, some new purpose in his life, and even a new self.

  Roosevelt’s younger cousin, Nicholas, later observed that he “took obvious delight in the apparently pathological extremes” of his adventures in the Dakotas, “rides of seventy miles or more in a day, hunting hikes of fourteen to sixteen hours, stretches in the saddle in roundup as long as forty hours.”15 He was embracing what he called “the strenuous life,” a manly life of physical extremes and great personal risk, which was perhaps also a way of avoiding too much introspection.16

  In a sprawling country famous for transformations, and out of the bottomless grief of all his losses, Theodore Roosevelt began undergoing one of the most remarkable transfigurations in American history. Over two or three years, the effete, side-whiskered “Punkin-Lilly” of the Harvard Club and the Upper East Side morphed into a genuine Dakota cowboy—not the dandy faux cowpoke in the early posed photographs, but a lean and rangy cattleman, with a craggy, wind-burned face and a fighting physique. He had steeled his body and his soul to survive. He had been transformed by his grief. Alice Hathaway Lee was still there inside him, as she would always be, guttering like a radiant candle flame, but he chose never to mention her again, as if to do so might cause his rough-hewn co
wboy avatar to crumble like a tower of sand.

  One of his neighbors on the Little Missouri, a rancher named Frank Roberts, later said that Roosevelt “was rather a slim-lookin’ feller when he came out here, but after he lived out here his build got wider and heavier . . . he got to be lookin’ more like a rugged man.” He earned the cowboys’ respect by working long hours in the saddle, by lassooing and branding and sleeping on the ground like everybody else. He went up against cattle thieves and lawless gangs and learned to break and ride wild cow ponies. He became as robust and fearless as any frontiersman. His experiences in the Dakotas “took the snob out of me,” Roosevelt later said. It did something else, too: “I have always said I would not have been President, had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.”17

  Like Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday was a man of almost inhuman ambition. Back in the winter of 1886, before his train had even returned to Union Station in Washington after the “last buffalo hunt,” Hornaday had laid out four strategic tasks for himself. Together, they would involve enough effort to consume several lifetimes, but he immediately began pushing ahead on all four tasks simultaneously. Newly energized by abject fear, he became a blur of action.

  His first strategic task would be to organize, create, and complete the magnificent six-figure habitat group of bison for display at the National Museum. Nothing could communicate the almost transcendant nobility of these animals but the animals themselves, displayed in their natural habitat.