Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Eventually the executive committee of the New York Zoological Society, through the Secretary of Agriculture, offered the United States and its people a special donation. They would give the government twelve to fifteen pure-blood bison (that is, animals that had not been interbred with cattle), provided that the government supplied enough money to fence in grazing grounds in the newly created Wichita preserve. And so, in due time, it was agreed. Roosevelt was able to keep his promise to Quanah Parker, at the same time that the ancient prophecy of the buffalo’s return was about to become manifest.20

  Now it was the autumn of 1907, and Quanah Parker stood in the windswept railroad siding in Cache, Oklahoma, to witness something he could scarcely have imagined thirty years earlier. He stood there watching as wranglers offloaded the contents of the Arms Palace horse cars: the shaggy, prehistoric silhouettes of fifteen bison, nine cows and six bulls, each in its own cage like a pampered show horse, emerged from the dimness of the rail cars. An audible sigh went up from the crowd. Old warriors peered through the bars into the cages, showing their grandsons the animals that they had once hunted from horseback in a world now receding into the dimness of memory.

  It was a crashing irony that these animals that were being sent back to repopulate the Great Plains from which they had vanished had been sent from, of all places, New York City, at the behest of a white man named Hornaday, of the New York Zoological Park. The whites who had nearly destroyed the buffalo were now attempting the first animal reintroduction in North American history.21 It was an effort to turn back the bloody pages of time and achieve, to whatever extent might be possible, a kind of redemption.

  Observers at the scene said the stone-faced Parker was momentarily overcome with emotion. Then he began helping the men load the caged bison onto open wagons to be transported the twelve miles to the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve.

  One big concern was an outbreak of tick-borne “Texas fever,” which had devastated cattle herds in the area. So once the bison arrived at their corral at the park (where they would spend the winter before being released into the reserve in the spring), a veteran cowpuncher named Frank Rush, who’d been put in charge of the operation, had them thoroughly fumigated with tick-killing crude petroleum.22 As a consequence, these “last representatives of a mighty race” would return to their ancestral prairie home reeking of oil and civilization.23

  But the herd thrived under the watchful eye of the old cowboy. Less than a month after their arrival, the first calf was born. Because it came into the world on November 16, 1907, the same day the Oklahoma Territory officially became a state, the calf was named “Oklahoma.” A second calf was born around the same time, and the little bull was named “Hornaday,” in honor of the man who, more than any other person, was responsible for pulling the buffalo back from the brink of extinction. Hornaday, the New York Times opined in 1907, “deserves the gratitude of the Nation as the chief preserver from extinction of the American Bison.”24

  By 1919, the American Bison Society had been directly involved in creating nine different bison herds across the United States. One of its most notable accomplishments was the creation of the Montana National Bison Reserve, at the foot of the Mission Range, in western Montana. At the society’s request, and with the backing of other conservation organizations, Congress was able to buy and fence in twenty-nine square miles of prime buffalo range. Hornaday spearheaded a massive national campaign to raise the $10,000 needed to buy the bison needed to seed the herd, browbeating the public with shame, coaxing them with the call of duty.

  Not everyone responded to his pleas. The Kansas City Journal ran a snide editorial deriding Hornaday and the Bison Society as self-important buffoons, pointing out that “President Hornaday is now in the position of having a government reserve in which to place bison, but he hasn’t any bison. He has appealed to the country to get him bison so he can protect them, but as yet not a single, solitary beast has been driven up to his front door. He thinks that if he had $10,000, he could buy bison, and then protect them with the money congress [sic] has set aside for the purpose; but this is not a cause that appeals strongly to the American public.”25

  In fact, though, it was a cause that did appeal to Americans, who contributed enough money for the reserve, and much more, over the ensuing years. By the end of its first decade, Professor Osborn was able to write: “The Society has accomplished the main object for which it was established ten years ago: not only is the American bison no longer in danger of extinction but it is firmly restablished in all parts of this country.”26

  The most vocal enemies of the bison, those men who had at one time sworn undying enmity toward the animals that were the primary source of material and spiritual sustenance for the savages, were now long dead. (The savages themselves were now mostly subdued and confined to reservations, so the immediate threat of war-whoops and tomahawks was receding, even as concern for the buffalo was growing.)

  General William Tecumseh Sherman died in 1891, at the age of seventy-one, never having renounced or softened his views on the buffalo. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano, with his fearsome eyebrows and apocalyptic glare, was forced to resign his position in 1875 for gross mismanagement, living out his last years as a self-satisfied bank president in Ohio. General “Little Phil” Sheridan, however—who once famously commented “let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated”—devoted the last days of his life to a personal crusade to save Yellowstone Park and its wildlife, chasing out unscrupulous developers and standing fast against thieves and poachers. When he died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-seven, Sheridan was fighting along with Hornaday on the side of the angels. Perhaps even more important, the mood of the country had begun to change, and—at the last possible moment—people began to realize the gravity of what they had very nearly lost.27

  Although a geyser of buffalo never issued from the mouth of Mount Scott, nevertheless “a great thing had happened,” historian Douglas Brinkley later wrote. The gift of bison to the people of Oklahoma, to the country, and to the world, engineered by Hornaday, enacted by Roosevelt, and blessed by Quanah Parker, “was a true token of peace, generosity, wisdom, and goodwill.”28

  CHAPTER 18

  Our Vanishing Wildlife

  The story of the return of the American bison from the verge of extinction was an inspiring one, certainly among the most moving and important stories in the history of American conservation. But Hornaday, who was widely credited with having been the most significant single person in that fight, was not one to rest on his laurels. In fact, he wrote, on every pioneer monument in the Great West, there should be a statue of a bronze bison or an antelope with the words “Lest we forget” engraved underneath.1 As if any more proof were needed, the murders of game wardens Guy Bradley, Columbus McLeod, and Pressly Reeves were lasting reminders that the war for wildlife was often bitter and sometimes bloody, and the outcome was never certain.

  Even so, by 1912, there had been huge and lasting battlefield victories in the war. Iowa senator John F. Lacey, an enthusiastic defender of Yellowstone National Park, had become incensed that game wardens were unable to punish poachers of the park’s wildlife, and in 1894 he sponsored a bill to empower to the Department of the Interior to arrest and prosecute game-thieves in the park. (He was well acquainted with the lawlessness inside the park; his stagecoach had been robbed there in 1887.)2 To Hornaday, it seemed incredible that this was progress—how can you have a national park if there were no real laws to protect its wildlife?—but progress it was. A few years later, in 1900, Senator Lacey became best known for the passage of the Lacey Act, which made it illegal to ship from one state to another birds killed in violation of state laws. This was the first truly effective, nationwide weapon against the plume hunters (though it was not enough to save the life of Guy Bradley). The same year, Bird-Lore magazine, started by Frank Chapman and later renamed Audubon, proposed having an annual Christmas Bird Count, to replace the shoot
ing competitions traditionally held on that sacred day.3

  The American public seemed to be waking from its long and deadly slumber, at long last. The National Audubon Society, born in 1886 when the crusading young editor of Forest and Stream magazine, George Bird Grinnell, harnessed the outrage of his readers over the feather trade, suggested a “model bird protection law” to state legislatures; and between 1895 and 1905, thirty-seven states adopted some variation of the law. Hornaday’s great friend William Dutcher helped create a national alliance of state Audubon Societies, and in 1905 he became its first president. In 1911, through Dutcher’s heroic and unflagging efforts, New York State—the nerve center of the global feather trade—passed the Audubon Act, more familiarly known as the Dutcher Law, prohibiting the sale of native wild birds in the state. As a result, soon after, the streets of New York began to empty of the eerie sight of exotic birds riding along as unwitting passengers on women’s heads (except for feathers of farm-raised birds like pheasants and ostriches, which remained legal).4

  But if an assault was beaten back in one place, the enemy seemed to mount another one somewhere else. In October 1910, one of Hornaday’s allies in the hunting world came down to the New York Zoo to bring the director some unsettling news. At that time, a few states had laws on the books prohibiting the sale of two or three species of native game, but not one state had a comprehensive law prohibiting sale of all birds and game. As a consequence, “market hunting”—the grim, relentless, year-round slaughter of birds and mammals for sale to groceries and restaurants—continued unabated. And nowhere were the market hunters more indefatigable, or more vocally opposed to any attempt to regulate them, than on Long Island.

  The sportsman told Hornaday that “the Long Island bunch,” apparently sensing that their days might be numbered, had formed three organizations whose intent was to “wipe off our statute books all the laws for the protection of feathered game. They are going to send a man to the legislature expressly to do whatever they tell him to do about game; and they intend to make a clean sweep of all the wild life protection laws they don’t like.”5

  To Hornaday, this grim news was like a bee in a bull’s ear.

  “Well, then, damn their souls, we will give them the fight of their lives!” the director thundered. “We will introduce a bill to stop the sale of game, and carry the war right into the enemy’s camp!”

  The old soldier sprang into action. With the blessing of Grant and Osborn, his bosses at the zoo, Hornaday turned out a blistering four-page circular meant to enrage the wildlife lovers of New York and raise money for a campaign to pass a comprehensive game law in New York State. He pointed out that New York City was not only the greatest market for ducks, geese, and shore birds that were being slaughtered along the Atlantic Coast, but it was also a “fence” for birds killed illegally in other states all across the Eastern seaboard. He mentioned the mausoleum of native birds found in one New York cold storage locker in 1902, including 8,058 snow buntings, 7,607 sandpipers, and 7,003 snipe. “I did not ‘beg’ for support,” Hornaday wrote later. “I demanded it!” Contributions poured in, including gifts from plutocrats like Henry Clay Frick and George Eastman.

  Once the campaign discretionary fund could pay for it, Hornaday hired a young lawyer named Lawrence Trowbridge, who drafted a bill, went up to the state capital in Albany, and began trying to enlist support among legislators. To sponsor the bill, Trowbridge and Hornaday chose Senator Howard Bayne, of Staten Island, who later confessed that at first he was “perfectly certain that [the bill] never would be passed.” But the bill gained momentum, and Governor John Dix even hosted a lavish state dinner at the executive mansion in support of what was now known as the Bayne bill.

  Sensing that the tide of popular opinion was beginning to turn against them, the market-gunners of Long Island sent Hornaday a proposed compromise, “to let the bill go through.” But when one of the Bayne bill’s supporters asked Hornaday what he thought of these proposed concessions, Hornaday bellowed, “No compromises with the enemy. Never! If we make any compromise now, it will be sure to rise up and plague us in the future.” When various friends and supporters began to lose their nerve, claiming the bill was “too drastic,” Hornaday declared that he would “go through with it if it killed me.” Eventually, when the bill came up for a vote in the legislature, it passed the Assembly unanimously, and with only one dissenting vote in the Senate.

  At 7:15 the next morning, in a Washington hotel room, Hornaday dashed off a letter to Josephine, addressing her as “My Dearly Beloved Empress Josephine and Queen of Hearts”:

  In 57 1/2 hours I will hear the Twinkledog’s honest bark bay in deepmouthed welcome as he heels it down the road to meet us! Roll Swift around, ye Wheels of Time, and bring the welcome Hour! . . . Yes, the Bayne bill has passed the Assembly and victory is ours! The hour to shout has now arrived . . .! I have refused to feel elated until the bill had passed both houses. Now, however, I feel thankful that such a sweet victory has been given us. This signal victory will lead to many others elsewhere. We will make drastic protection measures fashionable.6

  The Bayne bill was a huge victory for the game birds of the eastern United States, and similar laws were quickly passed in Massachusetts and California. Still, Hornaday could not resist a certain amount of ill-tempered grousing when he recalled this fight years later. “What did I get out of it?” he wrote in Thirty Years War for Wild Life. “Nothing but a few brief mentions of my name by my jealous rivals far down the list of those who ‘assisted in passing the Bayne law.’ Not one publication (so far as I am aware) ever gave me one-half the credit for initiative and leadership to which my efforts were entitled; and that same spirit has continued right down to this day—save in the inner circle of my most devoted and generous allies.”7

  Nevertheless, he and his army of partisans continued to rack up significant victories for wildlife. The Weeks-McLean migratory bird bill was passed into federal law in 1913, after first failing to pass Congress and seeming to be almost dead. It was followed by a treaty with Canada to restrict further the hunting and sale of migratory birds. At last, a web of regulations and restrictions that would protect the wildlife of the United States from poachers, pot-hunters, and plumers was beginning to take shape. There were even a few lonely and courageous men who volunteered to serve as wardens in the forgotten places where these crimes against nature were being committed.

  Yet still, everywhere Hornaday turned there seemed to be another alarming story unfolding—more dangerous, exhausting, upaid work to be done, fighting hunters, lobbyists, members of Congress, and the somnolent public to protect something that many of them might never see—a mountain sheep on a distant crag, an albatross far out at sea. The Bayne law was a great achievement, but it applied to only one state. What about all the other states?

  Through all these bitter battles, some victorious and some not, “Dearest Josie” remained Hornaday’s faithful companion and confidante. When they were apart, her letters arrived almost as punctually as the Sun. One day in April 1909, when he was at work in New York and Josephine and their daughter, Helen, were spending a few days at Bethany Beach, in Maryland, she wrote to him:

  Dearly Beloved,

  Helen suggests that I do not write you today since she is writing, but how can I allow a mail to go without writing some sort of tribute to you, my own . . . this distance makes one hopelessly helpless. . . .

  Last night we took a charming stroll through fragrant sighing pines, yet within sound of the booming ocean. Oh I longed for you, dear heart, and my sighs that it could not be seemed taken up and echoed by the pines. . . . Oh you must someday come here and wander hand in hand with me in these quiet, restful places. . . . No matter where I go, or what I see, there is a sense of incompleteness ever with me, but if my dear comrade were beside me, nothing more could I ask.

  Hornaday was by now a respected and well-known figure, constantly in the papers, and he used his growing national reputation as a soapbox from
which to preach the gospel of conservation. The downside of his prominence was that he was continually approached by people who came to him with some desperate story seeking his help to save a threatened marsh, a patch of woods, or yet another species that seemed to be under attack. Most of these worthy requests he had to turn down, simply because he was utterly consumed by all his duties, but in 1907, a gentle young watercolorist and amateur naturalist named Henry Wood Elliot came to him with a plea which Hornaday could not refuse.8

  In 1872, at the age of twenty-six, Elliot had been sent under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. government to the remote Pribilof Islands, 300 miles off the west coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea, to study the Alaskan fur seal. Elliot became the first person to study, paint—and become enchanted by—these complex and intelligent animals, whose scientific name, Ursus marinus, means “sea bear,” and which congregated in immense rookeries on the fogbound rocks of the Pribilofs.

  Little was known about them except that they had such luxuriant pelts that hundreds of thousands of them were being killed by American and Canadian sealers every year. Elliot became a firsthand observer of the massacre, and after he enlisted Hornaday’s help, the two men spent the next eight years waging what Hornaday later called a “war of the greatest bitterness ever waged in any fight over a wild animal species.” The seal population plummeted from 130,000 to less than 30,000, but at the end of the day, it was Elliot, Hornaday, and the sea bears of Alaska who emerged as the winners.