Stefan Bechtel - Mr. Hornadays War: How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife That Changed the World

How a Peculiar Victorian Zookeeper

Waged a Lonely Crusade for Wildlife

That Changed the World

Stefan Bechtel

BEACON PRESS, BOSTON

For my grandfather,

Earl S. Krom,

who taught me to love the woods.

This is a work of nonfiction. So far as possible, all assertions of fact in this book are supported by original source material, including William Temple Hornadays private letters and papers, books (both published and unpublished), news clippings, and official documents. Dialogue that appears in direct quotations is taken from an account of the conversation by someone who was present (usually Hornaday). Dialogue that appears in italics is a reasonable reconstruction of conversations whose substance was described by someone who was there (for instance, Hornadays description of his first meeting with Theodore Roosevelt). All errors of fact or inference, of course, are mine.

1854 Born on a farm near Plainfield, Indiana.

1871 Attends Okaloosa College and the Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State).

1873 Hired by Wards Natural Science Establishment of Rochester, New York.

1874 First collecting expedition to Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas. First zoo in the United States opens in Philadelphia.

1875 Meets Josephine Chamberlain at a dinner party. Collecting expedition to the Orinoco River delta, Venezuela.

187677 Two-year collecting expedition to India, Ceylon, Malaya, and Borneo.

1879 Marries Josephine in Battle Creek, Michigan. The marriage lasts fifty-eight years, until his death.

188290 Appointed chief taxidermist at the U.S. National Museum (the Smithsonian).

1885Two Years in the Jungle published.

1886The Last Buffalo Hunt published.

1889 Becomes founder and first director of the National Museum in Washington. Publication of The Extermination of the American Bison.

18961926 Serves as director of the New York Zoological Park (the Bronx Zoo).

1900 Lacey Law, the first federal law protecting wild birds, game, and plants from illegal trafficking, passed; repeatedly amended, it remains in effect today.

1906 Ota Benga incident at the Bronx Zoo.

190710 Serves as president of the American Bison Society.

1907 First bison sent to Wichita National Forest and Game Reserve, in Oklahoma. By 1919, Hornaday and the American Bison Society have established nine herds across the West.

1911 Hay-Elliot Fur Seal Treaty, which saves the Alaskan fur seal from extinction.

1913 Hornaday creates the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund, which he uses to finance his crusade for wildlife until his death. Publication of Our Vanishing Wild Life.

1937 Dies in Stamford, Connecticut, at age eighty-two.

Long after the early dark had fallen on the evening of December 1, 1934, an old man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and fierce, slightly accusatory eyes sat down in the library of the rambling, comfortable home he called The Anchorage, in Stamford, Connecticut, rolled a sheet of blank paper into a typewriter, and began to write the story of his life.

It was his eightieth birthday. Earlier in the day, there had been a small celebration attended by a few of his colleagues from the wars and, of course, by his sweet and long-suffering wife, Josephine, the one he liked to call the Empress Josephine because of her grand, highborn manner and discerning intelligence, and because, quite simply, he adored her. Shed been by his side for nearly six decades, since a long-ago dinner party in Battle Creek, Michigan, when both of them had been twenty-one. Shed been a comely young schoolteacher wearing her best black silk dress; he, a naturalist and adventurer preparing to depart on a collecting expedition into the dark and fateful Orinoco River delta in Venezuela. Hoping to win her sympathy, hed regaled her with the dangers that he would soon face on the Orinoco, with its flesh-eating fish, giant electric eels, and forty-foot snakes. Hed gazed directly into her eyes. Hed reached out and lightly touched her arm. In the corseted Victorian age, his boldness and presumption, verging on rudeness, was shocking. At one point, hed even corrected her grammar. She had been taken aback, but when he pressed for her address, so he might perhaps write to her from some lonely outpost on the dark river, shed relented. That was his manner: blunt, aggressive, acquisitive. If he saw something or someone he liked, he just put his head down and went for it, like a country boy tackling a calf. Life was short, and those who hesitated lost.

His audacity, as well as his boundless love of the natural world, eventually carried him to some of the remotest places on the planet. Hed been one of the first white men to penetrate the interior of Borneo, voyaged up the Malay Archipelago not long after the young naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had been so astounded by the profusion of life there that it had led to the theory of evolution he cofounded with Darwin, and hunted big game on the Indian subcontinent, the Amazon basin, Trinidad, the Everglades, the Canadian Rockies, and the Montana Territory. In the Everglades, hed tried to grab an immense alligator by the tail. Hed stalked man-eating tigers on foot, nearly drowned, starved, perished of tropical fever, or otherwise died on multiple occasions, and told people hed always felt more at home in a remote hunting camp than in any of the finest salons of New York.

Pugnacious, intrepid, and blessed with amazing physicial stamina, he had survived all manner of escapades and adventures, but nowand he found this difficult to admithis long life had begun to catch up with him at last. Both his feet were crippled by a mysterious form of neuritis, which his doctors were struggling to overcome but which left him virtually unable to get around except with a walker. Now the old adventurer and naturalist spent a good deal of time in bed or in his chair, with a blanket over his lap. The pain was continuous, like a grinding noise.

Tonight as I sit in the glow of my library fire, William Temple Hornaday began, with a perfectly clear mind, and a memory for these events almost as good as new, I see the main features of the past years more sharply than contours of terrain are seen from an airplane. From these heights, his life looked like a Civil War battlefield, with smoking battlements, the clash of advancing infantry lines, strategic retreats, desperate regrouping, and dauntless charges against impossible odds.

Glaring down the corridors of history at his many critics, living, dead, and yet unborn, Hornaday spat in their eyes: I now give notice that in writing the stories of my own campaigns I am perfectly indifferent to all the scoffs and charges of egotism that my enemies can

Yet, at the same time, with this declaration of war against his detractors and implied promise of ruthless truth-telling, there was one enormous thing in particular that he would fail to mention at all. The document that he was now writing, which would grow into a full-blown, three-hundred-page autobiography called