Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Mr. B. C. McCormick, of Arizona, read into the record an article from the Santa Fe New Mexican, which called the buffalo slaughter “wantonly wicked, and should be stopped by the most stringent enactments and vigilant enforcements of the law. . . . One party of sixteen hunters report having killed twenty-eight thousand buffaloes during the past summer. It seems to us there is quite as much reason why the Government should protect the buffaloes as the Indians.”

  McCormick went on to say, “It would have been well both for the Indians and the white man if an enactment of this kind had been placed on our statute-books years ago. . . . I know of no one act that would gratify the red man more.”

  Charles Eldredge, of Wisconsin, offered that “there would be just as much propriety in killing the fish in our rivers as in destroying the buffalo in order to compel the Indians to become civilized.”

  Mr. Conger said, “As a matter of fact, every man knows the range of the buffalo had grown more and more confined year after year; that they have been driven westward before advancing civilization. . . . There is no law that Congress can pass that will prevent the buffalo from disappearing before the march of civilization . . . They eat the grass. They trample upon the plains upon which our settlers desire to herd their cattle and their sheep. They are as uncivilized as the Indian.”

  Despite all the debate and recriminations, in the end, H.R. 921 passed the House.

  In the Senate, there was some haggling about the clause “who is not an Indian,” with some senators arguing that it showed favoritism to the red man, but ultimately, it passed the Senate after a third reading. Then it went to the desk of President Ulysses S. Grant, that dear old friend of William Tecumseh Sherman. And there the bill was “pocket-vetoed”—it died simply by being ignored. Inaction became action. In despair, Hornaday realized that the enemy’s power extended all the way to the very pinnacle of the U.S. government, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

  It revealed worlds about Hornaday that, observing the ineffectualness of Congress and the indifference of the president, he concluded that the problem was democracy itself. “The necessary act of Congress was so hedged in and beset by obstacles that it never became an accomplished fact,” he wrote. If this had been a monarchy—if, for instance, William Temple Hornaday had been king—a reasonable law to protect the buffalo would have been created within the hour. The fear and sorrow of the approaching extermination made him long for unlimited power to change the world. But he didn’t have that power. And the slaughter went on.

  A few of the Western states and territories passed vague, feeble laws attempting to protect the buffalo, but like most other game laws in the West, they amounted to nothing at all. “I have never been able to learn of a single case, save in the Yellowstone Park, wherein a western hunter was prevented by so simple and innocuous a thing as a game law from killing game,”13 Hornaday wrote. The Western “ethic” of hunting was, essentially, to kill as much as you could before the other man did, and do so quickly before your game was all killed off.

  By the early 1880s, it was even increasingly argued that stopping the slaughter was impossible—that extermination was inevitable. Even George Bird Grinnell, one of the most prominent conservationists, had begun to say so. And, of course, there was General Philip Sheridan, Sherman, and Delano arguing that extermination would actually be a good thing, by decimating the heathen Indian and opening up the West to the golden possibilities of white civilization. Hornaday railed against all of this as “weakness and imbecility.” It all came down to national will, he said, and to money. If a code of game laws were put in place, and game wardens were paid a salary (a fifty-cent tax on every buffalo robe would pay for all the wardens needed), the slaughter could be brought under control in short order.

  But it wasn’t. So the slaughter went on, year in and year out, even though the ultimate outcome became more and more inevitable as time went by. Far from the marble palaces of power in Washington, meanwhile, the people whose lives would be most affected by the fate of the buffalo—the Indians—were almost entirely drowned out. Few spoke English. They were embattled; they were starving; they were desperate. Knowing full well the peril of their situation, the native peoples had turned their eyes to the ancient gods and the ancient myths. In the fall of 1885, a young surgeon named O. C. McNary, stationed with A Troop, Fifth Cavalry, in the Indian territory, was present when several ragged bands of Cheyenne came into the stockade. Through sign language, McNary was able to communicate with the Cheyenne’s chiefs, Stone Calf and Little Robe.

  “The chiefs were greatly troubled over the disappearance of the buffalo,” McNary wrote later. “They told me that the great spirit created the buffalo in a large cave in the panhandle of Texas; that the evil spirits had closed up the mouth of the cave and the buffalo could not get out. They begged me to get permission from the great father in Washington for them to go and open the cave, and let the buffalo out. They claimed to know the exact location of the cave. They even wanted me to accompany them.”14

  By 1887, when Hornaday was engrossed in writing his book, he and a few other naturalists had begun to ask a basic question, by which to measure the extent and speed of the slaughter: “What was the original number of bison who once roamed the great plains?” The answer that would eventually work its way into the popular imagination was “Sixty million.” And the origin of this almost unimaginable number—later disputed—was Mr. Hornaday’s book.

  One of the first people to actually begin doing the math on the original numbers of buffalo in the West, as well as the numbers of the great slaughter, was Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, former aide-de-camp to General Sherman and commanding officer of a remote outpost called Fort Dodge, in southwest Kansas near the Cimarron River. In 1871, Dodge took a trip in a light wagon along the Arkansas River, Hornaday wrote. During twenty-five miles of this thirty-four-mile trip, Dodge said he passed through an immense herd of buffalo travelling perpendicular to his route.15

  In 1927, the details of Dodge’s trip, mentioned in Hornaday’s book, caught the attention of Ernest Thompson Seton, the popular nature writer and illustrator, who was struggling to come up with an estimate of the original size of the buffalo population in the Americas. He studied historical accounts of early explorers and the accounts of hide-hunters, tried to calculate the number of hides shipped East in old rail records, and attempted to calculate the number of animals the Western grasslands could support. Ultimately, he fell back on Dodge’s story. Like a mathematical sleuth, he calculated that a herd could travel twenty miles in a day, and since Dodge was in the herd most of the day, he deduced that the herd must have covered an area of about twenty-five miles by at least twenty miles. Making the very conservative estimate that there were about twelve buffalo per acre, Seton concluded that the herd comprised “at least” 4 million animals. By drawing a line around every reported location of bison herds in North America, he came up with a total potential range of 3 million square miles. If the herd that Dodge saw represented all the animals in 200,000 square miles, and 200,000 square miles goes into 3 million square miles fifteen times, the resulting number, he concluded, would be 60 million.16

  (More recently, zoologist and author Tom McHugh, in his 1972 book The Time of the Buffalo, suggests that estimate may be too high by half. By computing the entire range of the great Western grassland—about 1.25 million square miles—by the “grazing capacity” of the land—a term that ranchers use to measure how many animals can graze in a given area without overgrazing it, which averages out to about 25 acres per buffalo, or 26 buffalo per square mile—McHugh came up with a total of about 34 million. Subtracting 4 million to account for other browsers like pronghorn antelope, elk, and deer, he came up with 30 million buffalo.)

  Whatever the actual number, however, it was stupendous. The awe of the earliest white observers, who described the herds with phrases like “numberless numbers,” “teeming multitudes” and “like the fishes in the sea” seemed apt, though feeble and inadequate to
the task of naming such a glory.17

  It may well have been that the whole compulsion to attempt a census of something as seemingly incalculable as the bison herds was brought to the great plains by white settlers. The native peoples existed in a state of ritual or cyclic time, time without beginning or end, and the great herds were the living embodiment of this sense of limitlessness, of infinity, of superabundance. They did not need to count. But white settlers, with their belief in linear time, of beginning and end, were compelled to count the buffalo in an effort to quantify, describe, and somehow control them. Ironically, once the counting began, so did the countdown toward extinction.

  Richard Dodge was also a math sleuth, and he began attempting to calculate, in raw numbers, the magnitude of the bison slaughter in the west. He began his investigation by focusing on the three years of 1872, 1873, and 1874, during the heyday of the massacre. He contacted the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad and was informed that, during that three-year period, the railroad had shipped 469,453 buffalo skins to market back East. But that was only a part of the total. When he tried to discover what the other railroads had shipped during those same three years, he was met with caginess and obfuscation. The railroads did not want to tell him, he concluded, for fear that this lucrative trade might be curtailed by legislation. Nevertheless, Dodge ultimately came up with numbers similar to those earlier calculated by Hornaday—more than 3 million killed in one three-year period alone.18

  Colonel Dodge seemed to grasp the consequences of this saturnalia of blood, and he wrote feelingly about the effects it had had on the native peoples. “Ten years ago, the Plains Indians had an ample supply of food,” he wrote in 1882. “Now everything is gone, and they are reduced to the condition of paupers, without food, clothing, shelter, or any of those necessaries of life which came from the buffalo.” Professional white hunters, he observed, often “too lazy or shiftless to make a living in civilization,” were encamped in rough huts on the plains, and “in season or out of season, they kill everything that comes in their way. . . . It is sad to reflect that there is [an] enemy against which nature has made no provision, and from whose ravages there is no escape, and that in a very few years all the larger animals of the plains must inevitably be extinct. This enemy is man.”19

  In Hornaday’s bitter “war for wildlife,” Colonel Dodge was clearly on the side of the friends. Not only had he grasped the majesty and magnitude of their original population, he had seen and described what was happening to the buffalo more precisely than any other man, white or red. He had not only seen but felt the impact of this terrible profligacy on the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arikara, the Pawnee, and the Crow. He had peered into the book of the future and seen the awful calamities that were waiting there.

  But wait. For in one of several books that Dodge wrote, called The Hunting Grounds of the Great West: A Description of the Plains, Game and Indians of the Great North American Desert, he also described a jolly twenty-day hunt in October 1872. Besides himself, there were four other members of the hunting party—three British visitors and another office of the post. Hunting was the primary amusement for soldiers garrisoned at bleak outposts in the West, and when there were visitors, especially those from overseas, the hunting parties lasted for weeks. Colonel Dodge dearly loved to hunt; General Sherman, in an introduction to another of Dodge’s books, later called him “a capital sportsman.”

  In this case, Dodge’s five-man party ranged down along the Cimarron River watershed to the southwest of the post, and when they returned, they had joyful news. They had shot not 1, not 10, not 100, but 127 buffalo, or more than 6 each day. As if that were not enough, they had also shot 2 deer. And 11 pronghorn antelope. Also 154 wild turkeys, 223 teal, and 84 field-plover. They encountered 7 raccoons and shot them all. Also 2 badgers. And 9 hawks. And 3 owls. Also 5 geese, 45 mallards, 49 shovelbills, 57 wigeons, 38 butter-ducks, 3 shell-ducks, and 17 herons. They also shot 187 quail; 32 grouse; 6 cranes; 12 jack-snipes; 33 yellowleg snipes; a pigeon; a few doves and robins; a bluebird, “for his sweetheart’s hat”; and 11 rattlesnakes. Oh, and 143 meadowlarks—meadowlarks!—whose only crime was to warble like glory and be a target. In all, the total number of carcasses produced by Colonel Dodge’s merry hunting party was 1,262. It was such a successful hunt that the next year, the Brits came back and the same group (minus one) hunted the Cimarron River drainage and killed almost the same number of birds, mammals, and reptiles. They were a little puzzled that there wasn’t quite as much game the second year, but they must have been pleased nevertheless.

  If this wanton hunter was on Hornaday’s side, who was against him? Those enemies became ever more strident as time went by, as reports from the Indian wars became ever more disturbing. The voices of General Sherman, Interior Secretary Delano, and President Grant (by his silence) had now been joined by other influential voices, such as Senator James Throckmorton of Texas, who, in a calm, seemingly reasonable voice, observed to his fellow congressmen that “it would be a great step forward in the civilization of the Indians and the preservation of the peace on the [frontier] if there was not a buffalo in existence.”20

  It was as if the enemy were providing every farmer, every settler, every hide-hunter, and every sportsman, with a sanctimonious rationale for locking, loading, and blasting away at anything that moved without remorse or restraint. “Shoot a buffalo, starve an Indian,” General Sheridan had said, which was like a simple how-to manual for the Indian wars in the West. But now it was even the reasonable people, the “friends,” the “conservationists,” who seemed to lack any sense of restraint or respect for wildlife. There seemed to be absolutely no sense of natural limits, much less remorse at what they’d done.

  And, if the truth be told, in his younger days, William Temple Hornaday had been entirely too quick on the trigger himself. He was not beyond blame. His rationale was that game was plentiful when he was a young man, and all the animals he shot (or almost all of them) were procured in the service of science. Still, he confessed in 1913, “When game was plentiful, I believed that it was right for men and boys to kill a limited amount of it for sport and for the table. I have been a sportsman myself; but times have changed, and we must change also.”21

  These lines were the closest William Temple Hornaday would ever come (at least in print) to repentance. They were a veiled admission of his own guilt, although he never did admit guilt directly, and a frank acknowledgment of the transformation that was underway in his own life. Even though the hour was late, William Temple Hornaday was waking up. He had begun to see, perhaps more clearly than anyone in the country, what was happening to the wildlife of the United States. A single hunting party could blithely kill more than 1,200 living things, with no thought at all that they might be committing a crime. Such a bloody spree was not considered a massacre—it was considered a successful hunt. It wasn’t a crime against any particular manmade hunting law—because in most places there weren’t any laws to speak of at all (or if there were laws, only laughable “enforcement”). Whatever laws there were had been written by hunters, or their lackeys in Congress. A British sportsman could come to the New World, go out each morning, lay waste to every living thing in sight, and then go back to camp and hoist a brandy to a day’s work jolly well done. It was as if the New World seemed to be so overflowing with game that it was necessary to invite a few friends in from the Old World to assist in the slaughter.

  The crime was against something much more ephemeral and far away. It was a crime against the whole natural world, the entire web of life. It was a crime against the people of the United States, and against the native peoples of North America. If ownership is nine-tenths of the law, one also could say it was a crime of ownership, because the tiny fraction of people who were hunters were treating the game of the United States as if it belonged to them alone, and not to the Sioux, the Pawnee, and the Crow; to the people of Cleveland and Portland and Boston and Peoria and Miami; and even, in some sense, to the people of London, Mad
rid, and Singapore. It was a vague, strange, overarching concept that was new in the New World—an ethic of morality toward the natural world.

  The ethic of moral outrage would be one of William Temple Hornaday’s finest contributions to the growing war for wildlife. And, like Colonel Dodge, so would doing the math. In his book Thirty Years War for Wild Life, Hornaday calculated that by 1931, 6,493,454 licensed hunters, plus more than a million unlicensed ones, took to the woods during every hunting season in the United States in search of game. This, he pointed out, was more armed men and women than all the active standing armies in the world. Even so, all these hunters represented only about 3 percent of the total population, and “the game of North America does not belong wholly and exclusively to the men who kill! The other ninety-seven percent of the People have vested rights in it, far exceeding those of the three percent. Posterity has claims on it that no honest man can ignore.”22

  Combine the fearsome firepower of this army of hunters with their misplaced sense of entitlement, and the result was inevitable. The story of the bison in the West was simply the most conspicuous tragedy that was unfolding; all across the country, other, smaller tragedies were unfolding at the same time—sometimes as small as a single meadowlark. But taken together, all the individual crimes amounted to a great dark shadow, still as death and unfathomably huge, slipping down over the world.

  PART TWO

  The Heedless Hunter

  CHAPTER 8

  Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa

  Will Hornaday was all of nineteen years old when he marched into his employer’s office in Rochester, New York, one morning in May 1874. His new boss, Professor Henry Augustus Ward of the famous Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, was the most renowned merchant naturalist in the United States, whose firm supplied gemstones, fossils, bones, and skins to museums, schools, and private collectors across the country and overseas. His office was a huge, tin-ceilinged room with books lining the walls and a cozy litter of maps, scientific papers, photographs, drawings, and all the detritus of a life spent gathering scientific specimens of all kinds. A small curiosity cabinet held geodes and fossils; iridescent African butterflies, identified by their scientific names, in a glass case; a jaguar skull from the Matto Grosso; and a plaster cast of a fragment of mammoth tusk, shattered in some ancient duel.1