Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Respectfully yours,

  W. T. Hornaday17

  Ward, as amused as he was intrigued by Hornaday’s forwardness, wrote back immediately, and after some correspondence—during which he urged Hornaday to finish school before coming to work for him—he invited the young man to come to Ward’s as a kind of low-ranking apprentice. Hornaday took a train to Rochester the instant he graduated.

  Working at Ward’s, Hornaday would later write, was like spending every day in a “signal station,” in which invitations to romance from exotic locales all over the world came pouring in. Isadore Prevotel, Frederic Lucas, and the other older taxidermists not only seemed to have visited every remote place on the planet, they also had narrowly escaped death somewhere. Almost every day, a crate of skins or skeletons would arrive at the taxidermy shop from some steamy jungle or mountain fastness, like a summons from a lost world.

  In the Cast Building, Hornaday watched workmen making plaster replicas of prehistoric creatures, from the shambling, shaggy mastodon to the triceratops. There was even a fantastic casting of a Megatherium, or giant ground sloth, fourteen feet high and twenty feet long, as big as an elephant—proof that Professor Ward’s collection was on a par with the greatest museums in America. In the Osteology Building, a different kind of specialist pieced together the skeletons of animals living and long gone, from wolverines and tigers to immense prehistoric crocodiles. Another building served as a carpenter shop; the Long Museum—despite a disapproving placard at the compound’s entrance warning curiosity-seekers that “THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM”—was essentially a musuem or storehouse where finished specimens were kept; and Cosmos Hall was where Professor Ward kept his mineral and fossil collection, which was so extensive it was obvious to Hornaday that he must be one of the world’s greatest collectors.18

  But it was the Taxidermy Building that captured Hornaday’s interest with the swoon of young love. Reeking with the smell of camphor and creosote, chemicals used to store skins before they were mounted for exhibition, it was a regular Noah’s Ark of species from around the world. Hornaday later wrote that he couldn’t walk into that room without feeling he was being watched, by a black jaguar, a bull elephant, a wildebeest, or some other creature in the process of being resurrected on the mounting-tables. Years later, he described the thrill of it all:

  To me, the romance and glamour of Ward’s museum was as fascinating and compelling as the stage and footlights are to the confirmed actor. Up to that time, nothing else of the kind had entered into my life. At that one spot, the jungles of the tropics, the game-haunted mountains and plains, and the mysterious depths of the seas seemed to contest for the privilege of pouring in day by day their richest zoological treasures.19

  Hornaday had been working at Ward’s for six months, spending most of his waking hours in the company of older men who had exotic field experiences in far-off places. But Rochester was about as far-off a place as he’d ever been in his life. Now, he felt, he was ready to test his mettle against the world. After all, he was nineteen years old, a grown man. It was time to mount an expedition of his own, just like Paul Du Chaillu had in Africa. When Du Chaillu left on his first expedition, the one that made his name famous around the world, he had been only twenty.

  When Hornaday marched into Professor Ward’s office that May morning and dropped the name of Paul Du Chaillu, it was a name that was no doubt familiar to a majority of households in America. Fifteen years earlier, in 1859—the same year Charles Darwin published his famous book on the origin of species—the French-American explorer had emerged from the trackless jungles of Gabon after a four-year expedition with conclusive proof of the existence of the hairy, upright-walking “ape-man” of the jungle, which had long been rumored but never confirmed. Although the myth of such a creature had persisted since Roman times, it was not until 1847 that Dr. Thomas Savage, an American missionary in Africa, had produced an actual skull of the beast. The skull was shocking: heavy and low-slung, it looked vaguely human, but with thick ridges over the brows and a long sagittal crest across the top of the head. Then, two years later, another explorer produced an entire skeleton of the beast and put it on display at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London. That’s when Du Chaillu vowed to devote the rest of his life to finding an actual specimen of the creature, a living one if possible.20

  With funding from the National Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, he mounted an expedition to West Africa, where he’d spent time as a boy when his father was a trader there. The late nineteenth century was a time when a very young man, armed with nothing but pluck, a modest bankroll, and the vaguest of maps, could strike out into the unknown and come back with enough specimens and stories to make him world-famous. He might even bring back a major new discovery, some exotic species hitherto unknown to science. In an age of grand and glorious voyages of discovery, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Africa was one of the grandest of them all.

  Only a few white men had ever touched the shores of “the Gaboon,” as the small West African country was then known; few, if any, had ever penetrated more than a few miles into the interior, which was bisected by the equator—a steamy tangle later explorers called “the green hell.” Even David Livingstone, who was mounting large-scale expeditions deep into the interior of southern Africa at the same time, never set foot in Gabon. But Du Chaillu, who had learned one of the local languages as a boy, plunged into the Dark Continent seemingly without fear. He traveled alone and on foot, not even carrying a tent, because he expected to be sustained by the native peoples he met along his way.

  When he returned from Gabon, Du Chaillu published a book about his exploits, which had the swashbuckling title Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the chase of the Gorilla, Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus and other Animals. He maintained that he’d walked a total of about 8,000 miles on his trip. “I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine,” he wrote. “Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worthwhile to speak.”21

  His book was written with such breathless vividness that it electrified the world. But it also provoked widespread derision, with his preposterous tales of cannibals and a race of forest people so tiny they could be described as dwarves or pygmies. But the thing that excited the public more than anything else was his account of his first encounter with the legendary hairy ape-man of Africa:

  Suddenly, as we were yet creeping along, in a silence which made a heavy breath seem loud and distinct, the woods were at once filled with the tremendous barking roar of the gorilla. Then the underbrush swayed rapidly just ahead, and presently before us stood an immense male gorilla. He had gone through the jungle on his all-fours; but when he saw our party, he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face. He stood about a dozen yards from us, and was a sight I think I shall never forget. Nearly six feet high . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring, large, deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.22

  Although the book was greeted with disbelief by many, others found it so thrilling that it permanantly changed their lives. Years later, in 1933, an American filmmaker named Merian C. Cooper, who had come across an old copy of the book when he was a six-year-old boy in Florida, made a movie inspired by Du Chaillu’s adventures. It was called King Kong.23

  Henry Augustus Ward was now staring at a nineteen-year-old boy who seemed determined to outdo Paul Du Chaillu, one of the most famous explorers on the planet. Ward’s amusement began to fade in the face of the unmitigated gall of this lad. He was serious—dead serious, apparently. Well, Ward thought, the Establishment was always in need of specimens from Africa, and they were not easy to come by. What if he were to finance young Hornaday’s expedition
in exchange for a share of the specimens he brought back from the field?

  “All right,” Ward said abruptly. “What if I were to allow you to take a leave of absence from your work here for this undertaking? What if I were to put up, say, half the money required to finance a collecting expedition? We’d have to write a contract, of course, laying out our understandings, and freeing the Establishment of liability—”

  “Done!” Hornaday cried, momentarily letting loose the small boy, covered with mud and cockleburs, who had actually hatched the plot in the first place.24

  Hornaday could hardly wait to dash off a letter to his relations back in Indiana, a place that already had come to seem like a sad backwater in the glow of his new reknown as a world-famous adventurer. With the same elaborate casualness he’d used in his encounter with Professor Ward, he wrote his Uncle Allen that he was mounting a collecting expedition for gorillas to West Africa, just like Paul Du Chaillu. It was several weeks after he posted the letter that his Uncle Allen, hero of the Civil War, an enormous man whose eyes had seen death, showed up at the door of his boarding house in Rochester. Uncle Allen was not smiling. In fact, he was quite determined to prevent his intrepid, moronic nephew from vanishing forever into the mists of Africa.

  In his autobiography, Hornaday recalled how Uncle Allen told him, “I’m prepared to offer you a good position in a business office in Buffalo, run by an acquaintance of mine, at a starting salary of $75 a week.” That was more than eight times what Will made as an apprentice taxidermist. But the thought of going gray sitting in a business office in Buffalo made him want to die.

  “Thank you, uncle, but I’m sorry—I just can’t do that.”

  Then Uncle Allen upped the ante, offering the boy a flat-out bribe.

  “All right, I am prepared to offer you $500, outright, if you’ll abandon this crazy plan to go to Africa. Honestly, Will—you’ll get yourself killed over there.”25

  Will wavered, but still refused. Then, realizing that his Uncle Allen was here only because he cared about him, he gave ground. But not all of it.

  “Well, Uncle, if you feel that way about it,” he said, “I cannot go on, regardless of your feelings and judgement. I will not rob you of your $500, and I am willing to make my first venture abroad in some less dangerous place.”26

  With Uncle Allen’s approval, Will and Professor Ward settled on the coast of Cuba and the Florida Everglades, because—though they were both still largely unexplored—these places were safer, and because Ward was in particular need of Atlantic seaboard maritime specimens. In October 1874, Will Hornaday sailed for the Everglades. He was not quite twenty years old.

  CHAPTER 9

  Yearning, Too Much, for Fame

  When the sixteen-ton, three-masted mail schooner Liberty hove into Miami Harbor on a sparkling afternoon in early January 1875, with Will Hornaday at the rail, there was barely a Miami Harbor, or even a Miami, to be seen. The tiny neotropical settlement was not even incorporated as a town, and in fact, it wasn’t much more than a remote postal stop for mail ships. Hornaday wrote in a letter to a friend that “there is no town here atall, three houses at the mouth of the river, and others at intervals of one and two miles, scattered along the shore of the Bay.”1

  Standing beside Hornaday at the rail was a dishevelled-looking young man, a bit older and a bit taller than Hornaday, wearing filthy clothes and a look of wonderment on his face. Every lucky man eventually stumbles upon a best friend, and the starlight of good fortune seemed to follow Hornaday wherever he went. “I shall always believe I was born under a lucky star as a compensation for not having been born rich,”2 he would later say. A month earlier, in Key West Harbor, Hornaday had met Chester Jackson, a twenty-nine-year-old gallant from Racine, Wisconsin, who was taking a rambling winter trip through the South—Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida—and had wound up in Key West, as so many adventurers do, because it was as far south as you could get in the United States. That’s where Jackson had noticed an intense gentleman, his sleeves rolled up, sweat glistening on his brow, dressing out a freshly killed loggerhead turtle he’d bought from a fisherman on the docks. Loggerheads, one of the largest turtles in the world, have immense, heart-shaped, keeled shells and huge dark eyes filled with a kind of infinite sadness. They are like living submarines that can plunge to great depths and grow to eight feet long and weigh a thousand pounds or more (at least in those days, before the species was savaged to the edge of extinction). In his journal, Jackson later scribbled his first impressions of that first meeting:

  It was on a sunny morning when I wandered down to the fish market to see the great fish come in. . . . In the shade of the market near the wharf, a large Loggerhead laid on his back with an energetic young man taking off his carapace or breast plate. I thought him a fisherman at first, his working clothes (blue flannel shirt and light pants—straw hat, I believe) and occupation making me think so . . . in age he was about 20—Short in stature—roundly built—fine-shaped hands—head strongly set on a short neck—square shoulders—very dark hair—darkest brown eyes, bright, deep and quick—prominent nose, short upper lip that can easily turn into a sneer—firm mouth—with an expression over all of untiring energy—backed by a strong confidence in self and the desire to make the most of everything—he looked fully five years older than his age. A man’s face with a boy’s body, as it were.3

  When Hornaday struggled to turn over the great, glistening, reddish-brown shell, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of sorrow. Yet, if he didn’t prepare this specimen for museum display, its delectible flesh would simply be used to make turtle soup, and its huge carapace, broad as a sled, would be thrown away. To the local fishermen, the sea seemed bountiful and infinite. In fact, there were virtually no bag limits or restrictions on fishing, or even any licenses required, to dip a net into an ocean that appeared to be as boundless as the sky. Bringing the sea turtle back to Rochester and “restoring” it to life for Professor Ward would at least bring people face to face with something that was, to Hornaday, more beautiful and perfect than a Mozart concerto.

  Jackson watched the intense young man at a distance for awhile and then approached him. Jackson was curious about what he was doing, for one thing, but he was also “bursting for congenial company.” Chatting while he worked, Hornaday told Jackson he was a collecting naturalist for Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester, New York, and that he had delayed an expedition to Africa to undertake a specimen expedition into the Everglades, Cuba, and perhaps other places farther south. Maybe even to the Amazon. He asked if Jackson knew anything about a mail schooner called the Liberty, which was supposed to be headed north to Miami in a couple of days. Jackson, as it turned out, had already booked passage on the boat himself. Taking this serendipitous coincidence as a sign of traveller’s luck, Jackson decided to abandon his plans (such as they were) and throw in his lot with young Hornaday, accompanying him for the rest of his expedition—possibly all the way to the Amazon. It seemed just too delicious a chance to pass up. Huck Finn had met his Tom Sawyer.4

  When the two young adventurers arrived in the ragged settlement of Miami a couple of days later, Hornaday and Jackson pitched a tent on the sandy shore of Biscayne Bay and managed to scrounge a meal at a nearby farmhouse. They immediately set about getting ready to hunt specimens by sighting their rifles. They’d just met a local man, who walked around with a rifle casually slung under one arm, so the three of them set up targets at a distance of forty yards. Hornaday, armed with the trusty .40-caliber Maynard rifle that his half-brother David had given him, took aim and nailed four bull’s-eyes, one right after another. Chester hit just one, and so did the local gun-toter. Hornaday had boasted to Professor Ward that he was a “crack shot,” and that was proving to be true.5

  In the following days, the two aspiring naturalists asked around to learn where they might go to find specimens, but everyone they met told them that even around this lonely outpost at the edge of the Everglades, the “river
of grass,” the flamingoes, spoonbills, scarlet ibis, magnificent frigatebirds, and other flamboyant avifauna had largely disappeared. Even in places where humanity had established only the most fragile foothold, nature seemed to be in full retreat. One day, Hornaday met a Seminole man who’d come into the settlement to trade, but he was disappointed to learn from him that most of the tribe had gone into the Everglades on a hunt, and their chief had instructed that no one be told the location of their wilderness camp. The man also declined to serve as guide into the swamp, as if it were a secret society to which the two young white men were not admitted.

  Stymied in their attempt to penetrate the swamp, Hornaday and Jackson rented a little flat-bottomed dinghy with oars for a dollar a week and crossed Biscayne Bay to the narrow spit of sand that would one day become the glittering high-rise metropolis of Miami Beach. In 1875, it was just a fragile dune and mangrove swamp flung between bay and ocean, where for the next couple of days, the two young men collected maritime specimens for Professor Ward. They found sponges, seashells, sea turtle eggs, about ten scorpions living in the sand not far from their tent, a leatherback turtle that they bought from another Seminole, and even the decomposing carcass of a manatee, one of the strange, bewhiskered “sea cows” thought to have given rise to the myth of mermaids. Rolling in the surf, the corpse was so rotten it could not be salvaged, but they managed to extract its skeleton for science. Still, picking up bones and shells on the beach was a far cry from hunting ape-men in Africa, as Hornaday had imagined himself doing.