Mr. Hornaday's War (10 page)

By summer, his feelings for Alice Hathaway Lee seemed only to have intensified. He wrote in his diary on July 4, 1880, a Sunday: “In the afternoon I took my darling on a long and beautiful walk through Fleet's woods. How I love her! And I would trust her to the end of the world. Whatever troubles come upon me—losses or griefs or sickness—I know she will only be more true and tender and loving than ever; she is so radiantly pure and good and beautiful that I almost feel like worshipping her. Not one thing is ever hidden between us. No matter how long I live, I know my love for her will only grow deeper and tenderer by the day; and she shall always be mistress over all that I have.”
11

Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee were married four months later, on October 27, 1880, on his twenty-second birthday. But her radiance and goodness and beauty would illuminate his life for only a little more than three years. On the morning of February 12, 1884, Alice gave birth to their first child, a girl they named Alice Lee Roosevelt. But the child's mother became gravely ill, and on the terrible morning of February 14, 1884, she died. By an awful irony, Roosevelt's mother had died a few hours earlier, in the same house, on the same day.

Beside an enormous scrawled “X,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary on the day of Alice's death, “the light has gone out of my life.”
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He remained inconsolable and refused to talk about Alice, publicly or privately, for the rest of his life. His father had died at forty-six; his mother at forty-eight; and now his beloved Alice at twenty-two. The historian David McCullough wrote that for Roosevelt, “the sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life.”
13

A year before Alice's death, in 1883, Roosevelt had gone West to the territories with the intention of bagging a buffalo before they were all gone. It was a kind of boyish lark. He succeeded in shooting his first buffalo, and it made him so happy he did a crazy little war dance.
“I've never seen anybody so happy about anything,” a friend of his said. He had his picture taken in a foppish Western outfit, holding a muzzle-loading rifle—Oscar Wilde in buckskins. He even took off his rimless spectacles for the picture, even though he was nearsighted and could barely see without them (he often had several extra pairs sewn into his clothes). But something else happened on that trip to the Dakota Territory. Once Roosevelt got a look at that wide-open country, with its molten sundowns, its totemic buttes, and the seeming limitessness of the sky, he liked it so well that he threw in with a couple of other men and bought a small operation on the Little Missouri called Chimney Butte Ranch. He bought a few cattle and horses and called himself a cowboy.

He was enormously pleased with himself when he returned to New York to his pregnant wife, Alice, and the house he'd built in Oyster Bay called Sagamore Hill. But just a few short months later, his wife and mother were both dead, and he was inconsolable with grief. He was only twenty-six years old, but “for joy or for sorrow, my life has now been lived out,” he confided to his diary.
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Roosevelt began returning to the ranch in the Dakotas, sometimes four or five times a year, but now these visits no longer were merely youthful escapades. Those who knew him said that Roosevelt struggled to keep from sinking into a melancholy listlessness during this period. He withdrew from friends. He seemed distant and distracted. A man of action, he hardly seemed to know what to do. He threw himself into the bruising physical work of the ranch, into the West, into the possibility of oblivion in that enormous country. Now he seemed to be restlessly seeking a new life, some new purpose in his life, and even a new self.

Roosevelt's younger cousin, Nicholas, later observed that he “took obvious delight in the apparently pathological extremes” of his adventures in the Dakotas, “rides of seventy miles or more in a day, hunting hikes of fourteen to sixteen hours, stretches in the saddle in roundup as long as forty hours.”
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He was embracing what he called “the strenuous life,” a manly life of physical extremes and great personal risk, which was perhaps also a way of avoiding too much introspection.
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In a sprawling country famous for transformations, and out of the bottomless grief of all his losses, Theodore Roosevelt began undergoing one of the most remarkable transfigurations in American history. Over two or three years, the effete, side-whiskered “Punkin-Lilly” of
the Harvard Club and the Upper East Side morphed into a genuine Dakota cowboy—not the
dandy faux
cowpoke in the early posed photographs, but a lean and rangy cattleman, with a craggy, wind-burned face and a fighting physique. He had steeled his body and his soul to survive. He had been transformed by his grief. Alice Hathaway Lee was still there inside him, as she would always be, guttering like a radiant candle flame, but he chose never to mention her again, as if to do so might cause his rough-hewn cowboy avatar to crumble like a tower of sand.

One of his neighbors on the Little Missouri, a rancher named Frank Roberts, later said that Roosevelt “was rather a slim-lookin' feller when he came out here, but after he lived out here his build got wider and heavier . . . he got to be lookin' more like a rugged man.” He earned the cowboys' respect by working long hours in the saddle, by lassooing and branding and sleeping on the ground like everybody else. He went up against cattle thieves and lawless gangs and learned to break and ride wild cow ponies. He became as robust and fearless as any frontiersman. His experiences in the Dakotas “took the snob out of me,” Roosevelt later said. It did something else, too: “I have always said I would not have been President, had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.”
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Like Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday was a man of almost inhuman ambition. Back in the winter of 1886, before his train had even returned to Union Station in Washington after the “last buffalo hunt,” Hornaday had laid out four strategic tasks for himself. Together, they would involve enough effort to consume several lifetimes, but he immediately began pushing ahead on all four tasks simultaneously. Newly energized by abject fear, he became a blur of action.

His first strategic task would be to organize, create, and complete the magnificent six-figure habitat group of bison for display at the National Museum. Nothing could communicate the almost transcendant nobility of these animals but the animals themselves, displayed in their natural habitat.

The ideal thing, of course, would be to show the American public the living, breathing animal, just as Hornaday had seen them on the great plains—the big bulls breaking into a gallop, throwing up clots of snow; the frightened cows, crowding together to protect their young;
the sound and the smell and the thrill of them. But that was impossible—and even seeing them in a zoo was improbable because there was only one real zoo in America at that time, and that one was only twelve years old—so Hornaday would have to show the American public six mounted animals, re-created with as much realism as his talents could conjure.

To reconstruct these animals out of the formless skins and bones the party had brought back from Montana, Hornaday would use the multistage “clay manikin process” that he had developed at the taxidermy table, which was a dramatic improvement over the primitive “rag-and-stuff method” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, he completely discarded all the bones and innards of the animal (in the process, eliminating the skeleton as a source of support). Then he carefully cleaned, dried, and preserved the skin, cutting around bloodstains, bullet holes, and other evidence of a violent death. Then he sculpted a plaster cast of the buffalo's body, supported by a wooden frame or armature wrapped in rope. This artful creation, called a
manikin,
then was coated with textured clay to give the animals' forms their final contours. Essentially, he had created a life-size statue of a buffalo, over which the preserved skin, head, hooves, and other parts were stretched. In his famous 1891 textbook
Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting,
Hornaday maintained—with his usual bravado—that the clay manikin method was the only proper way to “produce a specimen which fitly represents the species.” But not everybody could do it. The task required the field observations of a wildlife biologist, the deft artistic hand of a sculptor, and the practical ingenuity of an engineer, especially when it came to re-creating the 1,600-pound bull.

What Hornaday wanted to do was, as far as possible, simply “bring 'em back alive”—to display birds, mammals, and now buffalo as he had actually seen them in their natural habitat, in a scientifically responsible way, so that the public could actually
see
things that they had never seen before. Even seeing live animals in a zoo did not really convey what the animals looked like in their natural habitat. Animals were so embedded in their habitats, having actually been
created
by their surroundings, that the two could not really be separated, Hornaday believed.

This was especially true of the American bison, which was a creature of the immense vastnesses of the great plains. To a large extent,
the buffalo was a physical embodiment of those huge spaces, that vaulting sky, those unimaginable distances. It was a touching irony that, in actuality, Hornaday was re-creating this sense of imagined immensity inside a sixteen-foot-by-twelve-foot-by-ten-foot glass box, in a museum, in a city more than two thousand miles away from the place these animals had lived once. Even so, what Hornaday was trying to do in this exhibit was communicate what he had seen out on the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, glimpsing the last remnants of the buffalo herds in mixed groups of bulls, cows, and calves. He wanted to bring museum visitors from all over the country closer than they had ever come—perhaps, regrettably, closer than anyone
would ever
come—to
Bison americanus
in the wild. His great aspirations seemed fulfilled when, in 1888, a scholarly survey of American museum taxidermy called Hornaday's buffalo group “a triumph of the taxidermist's art, and, so far as known, it surpasses in scientific accuracy, and artistic design and treatment, anything of the kind yet produced.”
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Hornaday's second strategic task was to write an angry book about the history of the buffalo slaughter and distribute it as widely as possible. He'd call it
The Extermination of the American Bison,
as if the end of the species were a fait accompli. On the train back home, and later in his small upstairs study in Washington, late at night, he began pounding out this furious testament and call to arms.

The third, and perhaps most ambitious, task was to take the first steps toward creating a national zoo in Washington, D.C. All the great cities of Europe had public zoological gardens, but there was nothing of the kind in the young nation's capital. He began imagining that a small herd of live bison might be kept in a spacious enclosure and perhaps, if captive breeding proved possible, the herd might grow to the point where some animals could be released into the wild. It would be the first reintroduction of captive-bred animals into a wild population ever attempted.

Last, Hornaday felt that he neeeded to create some kind of a political organization that would draw attention to the deadly peril facing the buffalo and harness the public's outrage in order to
do something.
He'd lobby Congress to draft legislation that would stop the buffalo slaughter and create reserves and ranges in the West to the bring the bison back from the precipice of extinction, if possible.

But the task of setting up a political organization, Hornaday recognized, was not one that he was terribly well suited for. He felt far
more at home at a taxidermy worktable or in a rude hunting camp than hobnobbing with the muckety-mucks on Capital Hill or the power brokers of Wall Street.

Enter his new friend, Theodore Roosevelt (who hated the name “Teddy,” because that's what Alice had called him). With more of a natural instinct for politics and better connections in high places, Roosevelt also was envisioning one of the first conservation organizations in America. The year before he and Hornaday met, Roosevelt had formed an organization he called the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation group named after two of Roosevelt's heroes, Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. These men, who were exemplars of “ethical hunting,” the notion of the “fair chase,” and lovers of wilderness, would stand as the guiding lights for a group of a hundred affluent New York big-game hunters, which would later became one of the most influential conservation groups in the United States.

But Hornaday wanted to create an organization that would address the terrible plight of the buffalo specifically. So in the months following their initial meeting at the National Museum, Hornaday and Roosevelt began laying the groundwork for creating an organization to be called the American Bison Society. Hornaday would serve as the organization's first president, running its day-to-day affairs and being its public face and spokesperson. The “honorary president” would be the up-and-coming political powerhouse Theodore Roosevelt, a man who seemed destined for great things indeed, but whose dance card was already almost completely full. Roosevelt began lunging up the ladder of power, often taking two steps at a time. He was appointed New York City police commissioner, then assistant secretary of the Navy, then elected governor of New York, then vice president, and then (after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901), president of the United States. The inauguration took place six weeks before his forty-third birthday.

Even in his ascent to the pinnacle of power, Roosevelt never forgot William Temple Hornaday or left him behind. “Whenever you really,
really
need me, when you can't get any further, call me,” Roosevelt had told Hornaday.
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Throughout his two terms in the Oval Office, Roosevelt regularly sent Hornaday invitations to lunch so that the old hunter-naturalists could dine in luxurious privacy and talk shop. But such access to power had come only in the nick of time. In the summer of 1887, inspired by Hornaday's successful bison hunt
for the Smithsonian, a collecting party from the American Museum of Natural History had gone West to procure a few specimens of
Bison americanus
of its own. Using local guides, these seasoned hunters scoured the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide for three solid months.