Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Ward, seated in a comfortable swivel chair, glanced up from the papers on his desk and leveled his frosty gray eyes at the young man standing in front of him. Ward wore a distinguished-looking graying beard that framed a handsome, refined face, and his suit, bought in London, was far more sumptuous than that of nearly any other man in Rochester. He was quite small, with tidy, acquisitive little hands, but he had the commanding presence of a diminutive man overcompensating for his size. It was said that Ward’s voice could split the air like a foghorn and was capable of being heard a quarter-mile away.2

  “Professor Ward,” Hornaday announced, with elaborate casualness, “I’m going to du Chaillu’s country in West Africa on a collecting expedition for gorillas. Is there anything in particular that I can do for you over there?”3

  Ward could hardly believe his ears. He’d hired this young stripling as an underpaid “assistant workman”—basically a tub-scrubber—all of six months ago, and now Hornaday was proposing to mount an expedition to one of the most remote and dangerous places in the world. It was like an eighth-grader proposing to row across the ocean.

  “I’ve got $800 in cash saved up, and I could get $1,000 more to finance the trip,” the boy went on, with an air of supreme confidence. “I’m competent to be a collecting naturalist. I’m a crack shot, I’m good in the woods, I don’t mind roughing it, and now I know how to prepare skins and skeletonize specimens. I want to go to Africa because I want to go someplace where I could be sure to make the investment count.”

  When Ward had hired Hornaday, fresh out of Iowa State University with limited experience as a taxidermist in the college museum, he did not quite recognize what he was getting. Determined to excel at his new job, Hornaday had thrown himself into his labors (however menial) with a vengeance, working from seven in the morning to six at night, or even later, and in his spare time, he read zoology textbooks or pored over Professor Ward’s catalogs, which, being Ward’s life work, were marvels of scientific precision even as they radiated the deep luminosity of true passion, like radioactive minerals. The catalogs were a sort of Sears, Roebuck of natural history specimens and were in fact so comprehensive and entertaining that they were used as textbooks in some college classrooms. One cast of a fossil skeleton of a prehistoric Plesiosaurus, for instance, was described this way:

  SKELETON on slab. The Plesiosaurus was first discovered in 1822, by Conybeare and De la Bleche. Cuvier thought “its structure the most singular and its characters the most anomalous that had been found amid the ruins of a former world.” “To the head of a Lizard (wrote Buckland) it united the teeth of a Crocodile, a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent, a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale.”4

  When Professor Ward had agreed to give Hornaday a job, the aspiring young naturalist could hardly believe his good fortune. He didn’t mind if his salary was barely a pittance, or that he had to live in a drafty rooming house in Rochester. He would be getting invaluable training for his life’s calling. A few years earlier, as a still-aimless sophomore at Iowa State, he’d been walking across the campus one day when he’d suddenly struck on a direction for his life: “I will be a zoologist, I will be a museum builder!” Later in life, he recalled this realization bursting upon him. “I will fit myself to be curator. I will learn taxidermy under the best living teachers—I will become one of the best in that line. That settles it! I will bring wild animals to the millions of people who cannot go to them!”5

  Will Hornaday’s grandfather, Ezekiel, settled the family farm in Indiana back in 1823. At that time, Indiana was the edge of the Western frontier. Ezekiel built a small, tidy farmhouse near the little town of Plainfield, just outside Indianapolis, underneath a grove of immense shade trees that were the remnants of the primeval forest that covered Indiana in ancient days. Will’s father, William, was born in that farmhouse and grew up working the farm. But gradually the poor, claylike soil grew increasingly infertile and William began casting a restless eye westward. Eighty acres of tired dirt was simply not enough land to support the family, William realized, but land in Indiana was too expensive to increase the farm’s productivity by simply buying more acreage. He also wanted to help his boys buy farms of their own when they were grown, and land prices made that impossible as well. Then, in quick succession, a severe drought and a cholera epidemic swept through the Ohio River Valley. Farmers began putting their old played-out farms up for sale, cheap, and going west.

  In the spring of 1857, William Hornaday, his wife Martha, and their seven children—including two-year-old Will—climbed onto a creaking buckboard wagon and headed west to Iowa, with their horses, cows, goats, and chickens trailing out behind like a small-town circus. Iowa, with its inexpensive farmland and its legendary topsoil—three feet deep, black as tar, and with the consistency of chocolate cake—was what California would become to a later generation of restless Americans: the Western frontier, the promised land. Farmers flooded out of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in astounding numbers, heading west. Huge traffic jams of wagons, horses, and cattle clogged roads passing through southern Illinois, women in their scoop-shaped sun-bonnets, pots and pans clattering from the wagon-bows. At one point near Peoria, Illinois, in the late 1850s, an observer counted more than 1,700 wagons passing in one month.6

  William and Martha were a bit of an oddity in the 1850s: a blended family. Both of them had lost previous spouses to illness, and both brought children from the previous marriage to the new one. William had had five children by his previous wife, four boys and a girl; and Martha brought with her two boys, including Will.

  When the family got to Iowa, William succeeded in buying a 270-acre farm near the town of Eddyville, on the Des Moines River. People had warned that hucksters were overselling Iowa, but for William Hornaday, the place stood up to the promise. The farm in Eddyville was where William Temple Hornaday came of age (although he made frequent trips back East to visit relations in Indiana), and where he came to love the natural world, the deep timber and river thickets filled with birds and animals and the thrill of discovery. “It was game country in those days and I loved the woods,” he recalled later in life. “Love of all wild things came naturally.”

  Older people, especially hunters, said the wildlife in Iowa just wasn’t what it once was. But to Will Hornaday, the farm and surrounding woods and fields seemed to be teeming with life. It was easy to miss the fact that the last remnants of a forgotten world were passing away in plain sight. Droves of American elk were not uncommon on the prairie in those days.7 Bobcats and “prairie wolves,” or coyotes, were so widespread that it wasn’t until the 1880s that farmers in Iowa could succeed in raising sheep profitably, according to a history of Dickinson County in the nineteenth century. There were even a few buffalo left in Iowa when Will was a boy—the last pair of wild bison were thought to have been shot while resting on a bluff overlooking the Little Sioux River, in northwest Iowa, in 1863. Once Will even saw a wolf—not a skulking coyote, but a shaggy gray timber wolf—loping across a distant field in broad daylight. He did not quite grasp that this lurking marauder, denizen of the darkest woods of the human imagination, was an artifact of the fast-fading wilderness.

  The Civil War years marked the beginning of a long, sad downward spiral for the Hornaday family.8 Will’s two big brothers, Clark and Calvin, both enlisted in the Union Army with great enthusiasm when President Abraham Lincoln put out the first call for troops. Clark joined the Seventh Regiment in Indiana, but a few years later, while fighting with the army of the Potomac, he was grievously wounded and later died in a hospital in Philadelphia. Calvin came home from the war unhurt, but by then he and Will were the only ones left to help their father run the farm, all the other siblings having grown up and moved away. Then Calvin became crippled with rheumatism and became bedridden. The burden of running the sprawling farm fell on Will’s parents, who were getting on in years, and on Will, who was stil
l just an adolescent mostly interested in roaming the woods and fields. His father’s grand American dream of buying a big spread that he could one day share with his sons now seemed like nothing but a boulder on his back. The health and spirit of both his parents seemed very nearly broken by the struggle of keeping up the farm, as well as by the sorrow of Clark’s death in the war. His father was forced to sell the farm in Eddyville and moved what was left of the family to a much smaller place, on a twenty-acre parcel of land near Knoxville, Iowa.

  In 1866, when Will was eleven, his mother died. Three years later, his father also died, and the Knoxville farm was sold and all the family’s possessions were auctioned off. The dream had come to an end. Will was fourteen years old and quite alone; by then, all his brothers and sisters had moved away or were dead. He went to live with relatives in Indiana temporarily, but eventually he wound up living on an enormous stock and hay farm near Paris, Illinois, owned by his uncle, Allen Varner, a Civil War veteran known as “the hero of Chickamauga.” Will Hornaday proved a willing hand, but after a year, he was clear about one thing: he never wanted to be a farmer.9

  It was when he was living with his Uncle Allen in Indiana that Will Hornaday first made the discovery that something called “taxidermy” existed. His older half-brother, David Miller, had taken him into Indianapolis on a shopping trip, and they walked into a bustling gun and tackle store operated by a man named Ambrose Ballweg. The store was filled with wonders, from Kentucky squirrel rifles to fly-casting rods to shelves of sparkling fishing lures, line, and sinkers. To his astonishment, Will saw, in a glass case on a high shelf, a half-dozen ducks, all mounted and “stuffed” so realistically they looked as if they were about to quack. Riveted by this discovery and compelled to understand the spell that made it possible, he convinced David to ask Mr. Ballweg how it had been done. But Mr. Ballweg was no help. He told the boys that he’d just bought the ducks somewhere back East, and had no idea how taxidermy worked at all. But that moment remained seared in Will’s memory, like a brand.

  Like most nineteenth-century boys raised on a farm, especially one near what was then the Western frontier, Hornaday grew up shooting a rifle. Learning how to shoot and hunt was considered part of a boy’s natural education, so it was practically an automatic reflex to lock and load at the sight of any creature other than domestic livestock spotted on the farm. Woodchucks, crows, hawks, foxes, rabbits, deer—they all became a target of flying lead if they got close enough. But Hornaday’s father and two older brothers, Clark and Calvin, who taught Will to hunt, were more compassionate than their Iowa neighbors. They were, Hornaday remembered, “kind-spirited and humane,” and they never hunted animals they did not intend to eat, nor did they harm the birds around the house that became almost tame during the winter months while feeding on kitchen scraps.

  Still, Will became a lethal shot almost as soon as he’d grown out of short pants, and once or twice, he couldn’t resist pulling the trigger when he knew he shouldn’t. Over the years, he confessed later, he shot a prairie chicken (also known as the pinnated grouse), a woodpecker, and a little green heron. The heron especially fascinated him, and he studied its wings, beak, legs, and underplumage in awe “to see how they were made and put together and what they were fitted to do.”10 But each time he killed one of these living things without good reason, he was tortured by pangs of doubt and guilt. A child’s emotional response to the killing of a bird or animal is a kind of Rorschach test of character: some children feel remorse; some don’t. Will Hornaday was one of those who did.

  Seeing the mounted duck at the sporting goods store in Indianapolis was deeply significant for Hornaday because it seemed to provide a solution to the “problem” of guilt and death, historian Gregory Dehler argues in a dissertation about Hornaday’s later years as a wildlife crusader. Dehler points out that Hornaday had grown up in a household permeated with the tenets of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a faith that preached the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the absolute truth of the Ten Commandments. In fact, the Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in the family home, and a white-bearded Seventh-day Adventist preacher was a frequent visitor at the Hornaday house while conducting revivals in the area. Still, Hornaday remembered his upbringing as “profoundly moral; and significantly but not painfully religious.” As a boy, he learned not to be drunk, dishonest, lazy, or quarrelsome, and not to lie, cheat, or steal (though he also loved a good brawl, sometimes played cards in the living room, and once, in an act of flagrant rebellion, even flew a kite on Sunday).11

  Nevertheless, his shame at the deaths of birds and animals that died in his hands was tinged with the soul-sickness of sin. When he discovered that taxidermy existed, it was as if a light went on: here was a way of “resurrecting” dead birds and animals, bringing them back to life as Christ had been brought back to life. At the same time, the bird could serve to educate the masses—millions, perhaps—about the beauty and importance of wild things. The inner shame and torment he felt about hunting could be channeled into a noble purpose.

  At this and other moments in American history, Dehler points out, it was not uncommon for crusaders of various kinds to transfer evangelism to “pseudo-religious social causes.” Will’s Seventh-day Adventist upbringing taught him that ethics and values were absolute, and that evangelism was the highest and most important calling of humankind. It was not too much of a stretch to substitute the well-being of nature for the spiritual suffering of humanity. “Although he never assumed the pulpit,” Dehler writes, “William Temple Hornaday spent his life preaching his causes in the most absolute terms, requiring the most immediate response from his ‘congregation.’”12

  By the time he was sixteen, Hornaday was casting about, trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. His legal guardian, Benjamin Auten—a confirmed bachelor who was one of the wisest, kindest, and most loveable of men—suggested dentistry,13 but Will hated the idea and succeeded in avoiding it. He considered becoming a new-paper editor because he liked “reading, writing and declaiming.” He applied for a job at a local newspaper by boasting in a letter to his prospective boss that he was “a corking good speller and could write some,” and concluding, “What can you do for me?” “Not a thing,” the editor replied.14

  He went to another editor, who seemed amazed and delighted by the boy’s gumption but who made him realize he really wasn’t sufficiently well educated to be a newspaperman. After all, Will Hornaday—like so many other young men of his day—had never even been to high school.

  Finally, Will decided to see if he could get into college. He enrolled at nearby Oskaloosa College, even though he did not qualify for a scholarship. For a year, he struggled with his studies and with his bills, knowing full well that he had no family to fall back on if he failed. The next year, he qualified for a county scholarship and transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State).

  One day in his first year at Iowa State, he heard that the college president, A.S. Welch, had offered a ten-dollar award and a job as a taxidermist to any student who could mount a specimen suitable for the college museum. Hornaday borrowed a small-bore rifle, went out and shot a squirrel, then stuffed it full of tow. He mounted it in a sitting position with small black buttons for eyes and a hickory nut in its paws. When he proudly presented his trophy to the president, Welch just chuckled and told him it was “not good enough for the museum.” It was then that the veil fell from Hornaday’s eyes, and he realized what he’d created was a “monstrosity.”15

  Later, Hornaday became a pupil of Professor Charles Bessey, the distinguished botanist and zoologist. Bessey liked Hornaday’s fire and his great enthusiasm for anything having to do with natural history. It was Bessey who gave the boy his second chance at taxidermy. A farmer had shot an American White Pelican on its migratory passage over Iowa, and he’d brought the immense white carcass to Bessey because he thought it might be stuffed for the campus museum. Laying out the fallen bird on a dissecting table
in front of Hornaday, Professor Bessey had taken down an enormous volume from his bookshelf—the majesterial Birds of America, by John James Audubon. Using Audubon’s color plate of the white pelican as a template, he showed Hornaday how to bring the bird back to life with wire, stuffing, glue, glass eyes, and a sense of reverence for the splendor and complexity of birds.16

  Though the plates in Audubon’s famous book seemed to vibrate with life, in order to paint his subjects in such detail, Aubudon had been forced to shoot the birds with small shot (or pay someone else to shoot them) and then prop their lifeless bodies up in realistic positions. His devotion to nature and his desire to share it with the world required that Audubon—like Hornaday—first strike a dark bargain with death.

  It was Professor Bessey who first told Hornaday about Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester, and the very same day he heard about it, Will Hornaday wrote Professor Ward a letter:

  Ames, Iowa

  11 April, 1873

  Prof Henry A. Ward

  Rochester, N.Y.

  Dear Sir,

  I want to learn taxidermy in all its branches. I understand that you are doing a large business in that line, and so think it likely that I can gain useful information as to the best place or chance of studying the art. Wish to ask in the first place is there is any chance of learning in your establishment. I have considerable knowledge of mounting birds, and stuffed many specimens for the College museum last year. But my knowledge of the art is limited and it is my wish and determination to make a first class taxidermist. What can you do for me?