Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  When Hornaday got word that a social club in Rome, New York, was staging a merry three-day side-hunt in November 1902, he fired off an angry protest to the local newspaper. The paper printed Hornaday’s broadside, along with an editorial that took the side of. . . the hunters. “If any wild creature of any sort remains alive in the vicinity of Rome on November 5th, it will not be the fault of the ‘Noble Three Hundred,’ ” the editors fired back.24

  Yet when Hornaday’s report describing such attitudes and their consequences was published, it was largely met with disbelief. Two of Hornaday’s own bird-loving friends quietly scoffed that it was “greatly exaggerated.” A review of the report in the Auk, a publication of the American Ornithologists’ Union, concluded that “game and plume birds are unquestionably on the high road to extermination, and certain species of our small birds are decreasing, but the general destruction in the latter class is probably not nearly so great as Mr. Hornaday’s figures imply.”25

  If his report were greeted with this kind of skepticism by bird-lovers, how would it be greeted by the general public? As it turned out, with a yawn, if it was greeted at all. At least William Dutcher, the gallant president of the National Audubon Societies (later Society), had two thousand copies of the report printed and sent out to state legislators around the country.

  The numbers in the survey were just the sort of firebombs that Hornaday loved to lob at the sleeping public, and he made wide use of them, hoping to stoke the public’s fury at what was happening. “We need all the ammunition that we can possibly get,” Hornaday wrote to a colleague, Dr. Theodore Palmer of the U.S. Biological Survey, “and everything that we get, we will use over and over again.”26 Hornaday’s use of facts and figures as propaganda tools rather than instruments of scientific understanding was something for which he was criticized throughout his life. But such was his fear and rage at what was happening to wildlife that he felt that nothing but fire and brimstone would capture the public’s attention. Madison Grant, one of the founders of the Zoological Society, eventually forbade Hornaday from printing “yellow pamphlets” on society stationary.

  More than a century after the fact, it’s difficult to say whether Hornaday’s numbers were inflated for the purpose of “scaring America”; but—as he always did—Hornaday defended the numbers in his survey until the end of his life. At that time, he wrote in his autobiography, “it was clearly evident (1) that the wild life of the nation . . . was being very generally and very [viciously] attacked by deadly enemies, (2) that some of it was in desperate straits, (3) that it was NOWHERE being given the humane and courageous protection that its rights demanded, and (4) that it would be a herculean task to save about a hundred important species from quick extermination.”27

  Warming to his task, Hornaday went on to say that, in 1898, “while there had been a lot of talk about game protection, the American spirit of protection and square-dealing with game was so weak and puerile that not one single species of game was being conserved on an adequate and permanent basis. I challenge history to disprove this sweeping statement.” (Later, in a version of his unpublished autobiography, this “sweeping statement” was crossed out, as though Hornaday had stepped back, ever so slightly, from the fight.)28

  To the public at large, and many ornithologists in particular, his survey might have seemed alarmist. But Hornaday had, after all, witnessed something that few people in New York society had ever seen—the near-extermination of a noble species in an astonishingly short period of time. And he was damn well determined never to let it happen again.

  CHAPTER 17

  Empire of the Buffalo

  A few days after the first frost of October 1907, as the wind across the Great Plains stirred the tallgrass prairie in fifty-mile waves, a steam locomotive pulling two Arms Palace horse cars chugged into the station in the tiny cowtown of Cache, Oklahoma, not far from the Wichita Mountains. An enormous crowd had gathered in the station—mud-spattered cowboys; ranchers; and hundreds of Plains Indians, with their spotted ponies and open wagons known as “Indian hacks,” the women wearing their brightest ceremonial blankets, many with papooses on their backs. Some had been waiting for days. They were waiting for something that they had hardly dared could ever really happen, something that had been foretold in dreams and prophecies.1

  Standing apart and seemingly above the crowd was the great warrior Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches, a statuesque and silent figure with a fierce, impenetrable face, eyes narrowed to slits, and black hair twisted into a pair of braids extending down below his waist. Parker had been born nearby, in the Wichitas, six decades earlier, and his life was the stuff of legend. His father had been the feared Comanche war chief Peta Nocona; his grandfather, Iron Jacket, was said to be able to blow away bullets with his breath. But Quanah was born with one foot in the white man’s world: his mother was a white woman named Cynthia Ann Parker who’d been kidnapped by a Comanche war party when she was nine years old and renamed Nautdah, or “Someone Found.”2 She came of age among the Comanche, learned their language, married a Comanche, and had three children. When she was kidnapped back into the white world at the age of thirty-three, by Texas Rangers, she was so completely Comanche she had forgotten how to speak Engish, or at least she refused to do so. When the Rangers attacked a Comanche buffalo camp along the Pease River, killing Peta Nocoma and eleven others, she’d been taken captive—a squaw so covered with dirt and buffalo grease that it was only after she’d been cleaned up that the officers noticed she had pale blue eyes.3

  Only two Comanche horsemen escaped the Rangers that day: Nautdah’s son Quanah, who was only twelve years old, and his younger brother. Newly orphaned and straddling two worlds as a mixed-blood “half breed,” Quanah Parker quickly became a dauntless hunter, superb horseman, and cunning tactician. He burned with hatred for the whites who had killed his father and kidnapped his mother and sister. As he grew older, he began staging ever more daring raids, with larger and larger war parties, farther and farther into the white man’s land. He stole horses and pillaged towns, killing and terrorizing with such fearlessness that he became known as the greatest war chief of the Comanches.4

  Parker was especially outraged at the massacre of the buffalo because without them, the Comanches would be unable to survive. In 1874, he led a war party of 250 Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Kiowa braves in an attack on a white trading post at Adobe Walls, in the Texas panhandle, which supplied the 300-odd buffalo hunters fast at work exterminating the once-enormous southern herd. Parker had managed to electrify much of the Comanche nation and neighboring tribes, partly because of his own reputation and partly because a medicine man named Isa-tai swore that his protective magic, or puha, was so powerful that it would repel the white men’s bullets. Yet despite Quanah’s fearless leadership, astounding horsemanship, and courage under fire, the Indians were vastly outgunned. What became known as the Second Battle of Adobe Walls ended inconclusively; but spiritually, it was a devastating defeat. Even the tribes’ greatest warrior and its most revered medicine man could not defeat the buffalo-butchering whites. Quanah Parker, who had never lost a battle with the white man, became the last chief to enter the reservation when he and a weary band of 400 entered Fort Sill in 1875. He could see what was happening to the buffalo, and to his people, and had come to realize that to resist any further was futile.5

  Two decades later, in a far-off world, one of the earliest and most popular exhibits at the newly opened New York Zoological Park was a twenty-acre naturalistic enclosure with a small herd of several dozen bison. It was Director Hornaday’s attempt to suggest the epic tableaus of the Western territories and the enormous emptiness of places like the Staked Plain of Texas and New Mexico, which the Spanish conquistadore Coronado had described as “plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.”6

  Very few people in the East had actually seen a live buffalo, much less a landscap
e that looked like Coronado’s endless ocean of grass. But perhaps partly because the buffalo in the New York Zoological Park were so far away from their native habitat, Hornaday struggled to keep them alive in the early days. He’d been attracted to the site on the Bronx River partly because the lush grass would provide natural forage for the buffalo, deer, antelope, and other ungulates, but it turned out that the bison had trouble digesting the grass, and several became painfully bloated and nearly died. Although Hornaday had the native grass burned off and even removed the topsoil, it was several years before the problem of forage was solved and the herd began to thrive in its ersatz prairie in the Bronx.7

  But even if captive breeding did turn out to be possible, Hornaday wrote, “in view of the well-known fact that no large species of quadruped can be bred and perpetuated for centuries in the confinement of zoological gardens, even large ones such as the New York Zoological Park . . . the only way to insure the perpetuation of the bison species permanently is to create large herds” in natural reserves, perhaps in the West.8 He began trying to find such a location, a protected buffalo Eden in which a small nucleus herd could thrive, reproduce, and eventually bring the species back from the brink.

  At the same time, Hornaday was taking the first steps toward forming some kind of political organization that would harness the power of public outrage, as well as the gold in the nation’s treasury, to save the bison. From almost the time they first met in the half-completed buffalo display at the National Museum in 1887, Hornaday and Theodore Roosevelt had been talking about this. But their inchoate ideas had been tabled mainly because both men were too busy to attend to them. Hornaday was running the New York Zoological Park, writing books, and conducting a war; and Roosevelt had thrown his energies into another conservation organization, the Boone and Crockett Club, but now he was too busy even for that. In 1901, with the assasination of President William McKinley, Vice President Roosevelt had taken up residence at a palatial new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  It was an eccentric young naturalist and former New York Times reporter named Ernest Harold Baynes who helped kick-start the creation of an organization that would come to be called the American Bison Society.9 In 1904, Baynes was living in a rented cottage on a vast game reserve in New Hampshire where the owner, railroad magnate Austin Corbin, kept 160 head of bison. Baynes became enthralled with the history, biology, and majesty of the American bison, and he began writing and lecturing on the subject. Like Hornaday, Baynes had come to see that the bison’s existence in the wild was in grave peril. He came to believe that the only way to save them from extinction was to create some sort of national organization that would (among other things) put private herds like Corbin’s under government control.10 Baynes wrote to President Roosevelt suggesting this idea, and Roosevelt wrote back enthusiastically, even agreeing to become honorary president of such an organization, provided that the other slate of officers met with his approval. When Baynes approached Hornaday, he too responded enthusiastically, and after a flurry of correspondence between the two men, on the evening of December 8, 1905, in the reception room of the Lion House at the half-finished New York Zoological Park, the first official meeting of the American Bison Society was held. Two hundred invitations had been sent out, but only fourteen people showed up. There were thirteen men (including Baynes and Hornaday) and one woman in attendance at that first meeting. Later, Hornaday was elected president, with Roosevelt as honorary president and Baynes as secretary.

  The group quickly set about raising money, expanding its membership, clanging the bell about the perilous state of the buffalo, and trying to find a place to establish a free-roaming, semi-wild herd that would ultimately lead to the return of the American bison.11 Baynes was indefatigable, one summer giving more than 150 lectures about the buffalo in small towns from New Hampshire to Nebraska. One of the most popular parts of his talk consisted of slides of bison calves in harness, pulling a wagon. He claimed to drive the only team of harness-broken bison in the world. But Martin Garretson, a later secretary of the American Bison Society, was skeptical of Baynes’s theatrics. In his book The American Bison, he wrote, “The general opinion expressed in the rural community in that neighborhood was: ‘Baynes hitches ’em up, and they take him where they d– please.’ ”12

  Hornaday, meanwhile, was growing annoyed with what he felt was Baynes’ amateurishness, and he moved to take control of the organization. He intensified his efforts to find a bison range, first trying, and failing, to establish one in New York State’s Adirondacks. Then he began looking into the possibility of establishing a bison range on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, but that also failed. Hornaday then began focusing on the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. In 1901, shortly before his death, President McKinley had designated a large tract of land in the Wichitas as a national forest. Hornaday knew that this land had been among the richest grazing grounds of the great southern herd and that Oklahoma, with its light snowfall, would provide a relatively mild climate for bison to overwinter. The Wichitas were also something of a natural curiosity, with low, eerie, dome-shaped mountains of red granite, a thick forest of black-jack and post-oak, and an odd confluence of East and West. They were one of the few places where the Eastern bluebird might cross paths with the Western bluebird, and the Eastern meadowlark might overhear the warbling of its kin, the Western meadowlark.13

  In February 1905, through the federal Lacey Act, Congress authorized President Roosevelt to create a game reserve in the Wichitas—the first big-game reserve in the United States, in fact—and Roosevelt had the unmitigated joy of creating, with one stroke of the pen, a 60,800-acre sanctuary for big-game animals. In his comments about the Wichita National Forest and Game Reserve, Roosevelt spoke of deer, elk, and antelope, but he did not specifically mention buffalo. But back in New York, Hornaday was already mentally trying to figure out where to build the buffalo fences and calculating how much it would cost.14

  One other thing about the Wichitas that Hornaday probably did not know: the mountains had long been considered sacred to the Comanche and other plains people. According to prophetic revelations revered by the Kiowa, it was into Mount Scott, the highest of the granite domes, that the buffalo had disappeared, and from which they would reappear one day, pouring forth like rivers of living water.15

  In April 1905, the popular young “cowboy president,” Teddy Roosevelt, arranged a four-day hunting holiday into the Oklahoma Territory, coursing for wolves near Sheridan’s Fort Sill. Like everything else he did, this lark was accompanied by huge publicity and mobs of onlookers. As his train, the “Roosevelt Special,” stopped at stations on its way west from Washington, enormous crowds turned out, and when it arrived in Frederick, Oklahoma, on April 5, a throng of 6,000 people crowded into a specially built grandstand to see him. Besides looking forward to “four days’ fun under God’s blue heaven,” hunting game birds and “prairie wolves” (coyotes), Roosevelt had a couple of other things in mind. For one thing, he wanted to look over the Wichita reserve as a possible home for the nation’s first reintroduced free-ranging bison herd. Going out there to look the place over, Roosevelt, in a sense, was acting as an “advance scout” for Hornaday.16

  The other thing Roosevelt wanted to do on this trip was get to know Quanah Parker a bit better and see him on his home ground. A month earlier, in March, Quanah had ridden in an open car, wearing buckskins and a war bonnet, in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. When Roosevelt and Parker first met, the two men seemed to feel a profound kinship. Roosevelt loved Parker’s reverence for the buffalo, his dauntless courage, and his almost mystical presence, in which his every utterance seemed to have some sacred import. Parker, for his part, could sense that Roosevelt shared his reverence for the glories of the grassland and all its inhabitants.17

  Roosevelt asked Parker what he could do for the Indian chief, and Parker told the president that he wanted the last of the tribe’s grazing lands in Oklahoma to be preserved. When Roo
sevelt told Parker about the American Bison Society’s vision of bringing buffalo back to the west, perhaps to the Wichitas, the old warrior’s eyes rimmed with tears. What Quanah had been unable to do with sheer courage and force of arms, perhaps this white man could do with his wealth, power, and laws.

  Like Roosevelt, Quanah Parker was an extraordinary man who transcended his time and place. He understood that unless he and his people were able to change, they would be destroyed, and he ably led them into a changed and hostile world, profoundly transforming himself along the way. He adopted the white man’s clothing, often wearing a bowler hat with his long black braids, negotiated grazing rights with Texas cattlemen, became fluent in English as well as several Indian dialects, and even became part owner of a railroad (the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific).18

  Back in New York, meanwhile, Hornaday pored over maps of the Wichita reserve. He decided that one particularly choice spot, called “Winter Valley” because it provided rich grasses for forage and sheltered canyons for warmth in winter, would be the centerpiece of a fenced-in reserve of about 8,000 acres, or 12 square miles.19 Hornaday also began selecting animals from the New York herd, choosing bulls and cows from four different bloodlines to avoid inbreeding and using his understanding of genetic integrity and herd dynamics to maximize the chances of reproductive success in the new herd. He had hand-fed most of these animals and grown fond of them; he even named four of them after great Indian chiefs—Lone Wolf, Blackdog, Geronimo, and, ironically, Quanah.