Mr. Hornaday's War (4 page)

He was already envisioning a magnificent habitat grouping of perhaps six or eight mounted bison, a big bull, a couple of cows, several yearlings, and calves, which would enthrall visitors to the Smithsonian for years to come and, more importantly, galvanize them to action when they read about the slaughter of the living bison in Montana or the Dakotas. It grieved him to be westward bound on a mission of death. But all those birds depicted so lovingly by John James Audubon in
Birds of America
—the radiant scripture of the New World—had all been shot first, their feathered corpses tenderly arranged in lifelike poses. Audubon's book was a chronicle of death, a hunting diary, but its ultimate purpose was noble: to awaken the American public to the glories of their country and awaken their hearts to the crying need for preservation.
16

On the third day out of Washington, in the western Dakota Territory, Hornaday awoke in his nest of temporary dark-green luxury and peered out of the window. “Houses few and far apart, & the country looks dreadfully lonesome,”
17
he confided to his journal. The country was deserted partly because the train was passing through the ancient borderlands of the fierce plains peoples, the people of the buffalo—the Santee and Yankton Sioux, the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara, and the Crow. This country had never been hospitable to humans—too dry, too infertile, too hot in summer, too cold in winter—and the Indians only made white settlers feel more unwelcome.

In all of his dismal correspondence with ranchers and hunters, Hornaday had stumbled across a few reasons to hope that he and his small hunting party might be able to find some buffalo, somewhere. One army doctor named J. C. Merrill, stationed in the windswept northeastern reaches of the Montana Territory, wrote to Hornaday that he felt it still might be possible to find a few scattered buffalo, but only in three places—on the headwaters of the Powder River, in Wyoming; and in the Judith Basin and along the Big Dry Creek, both in Montana.
18

Along the banks of the Little Missouri River, the train passed
through the tiny cow town of Medora. Theodore Roosevelt, then a twenty-eight-year-old New York assemblyman and author who had abandoned his political career temporarily to become a Dakota rancher, had bought a place near here recently. It was still lawless country, plagued by cattle rustlers, and just a month before Hornaday's train passed through Medora, Roosevelt had made the much-celebrated capture of a notorious horse and cattle thief named Mike Finnegan. Roosevelt walked forty-five miles with Finnegan in custody to deliver him to the local jail. At one point, Roosevelt borrowed the rustler's dime Western to read, so he could stay up all night while guarding his prisoner at gunpoint.
19

The Montana Territory in 1886 was still a raw, wild, and dangerous place. It was only ten years earlier, in June 1876, that a reckless cavalry officer whom the Crow called “Son of the Morning Star” attacked an enormous gathering of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors under chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, in the Montana Territory. General George Armstrong Custer, who had graduated dead last in his class at West Point, was slaughtered by the Indians, along with 268 of his men.
20
Elsewhere, rustlers and outlaws were commonplace. In many places, the Northern Pacific Railroad line into the territory was so new that the rails were still shiny as mint dimes.
21
People back East, extravagantly overdressed in their
fin de siecle
hats, crinolines, corsets, frock coats, and twenty-button shoes, were fascinated by this almost unimaginable openness and wildness. A teenage boy from St. Louis named Charles M. Russell became so obsessed with sketching cowboys and Indians that his parents allowed him to go out to the Montana Territory in 1880, at the age of sixteen, where he got work as a cowhand and began sending back a steady stream of drawings and paintings of Western life to the people of New York, Chicago, and Boston. The images of wranglers, rustlers, and feathered braves in war paint were as startling as pictures from another planet.
22

But there was another story unfolding in the United States at the same time, a story that very few people had heard or seen. It was a story that William Temple Hornaday was determined to shout from the rooftops, even if it made him look like a kook, a crank, or a busybody. It was a story that was not readily apparent to others because
few men of his day had spent as much time as Hornaday had in such remote places—from the Orinoco River delta, to Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. He had been appalled to realize that, even in these wild places, enormous regions had been almost completely “shot out”—where the forest had been emptied of birds, mammals, reptiles, and almost everything else that breathed. Returning from these exotic locales to the United States, he'd been able to see that here too, a virtual war of extinction was in progress, and the war was going very badly indeed.

On two successive winter afternoons in 1886, an ornithologist from the American Museum of Natural History named Frank Chapman took a stroll down Fourteenth Street, in Lower Manhattan. In the course of this ramble through the crossroads of New York fashion, Chapman observed more than 700 extravagant Gilded Age women's hats, bearing the plumage of forty different species of birds, from the white-throated sparrow to the bobolink, the laughing gull to the sanderling. Was anyone paying attention? Was anyone outraged?
23

There was a bitter, bloody war going on—what Hornaday called a “war for wildlife,” but it was more accurately a war
against
wildlife—and very few people seemed to realize how badly outgunned the friends of wildlife were. In fact, according to Hornaday's own calculations, the enemies of wildlife outnumbered the friends by at least 500
to 1.
Worst of all, the enemies included enormously influential people like General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, and even, by his failure to act, the former president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant.
24

Meanwhile, gun manufacturers were churning out ever more deadly and efficient weapons, like the new Winchester Autoloader, which could get off five shots in four seconds and was loaded and cocked by its own recoil. These weapons were like machine guns, more suited for war than for sport. At the same time, in states and localities across the United States, the legal system for protecting wildlife was like a defensive perimeter made of sticks and leaves—bag limits, hunting laws, hunting seasons—almost all of them had been dictated by hunters and hunting lobbies to ensure that they could kill as much game as they liked. A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.

Now, hurtling westward, Hornaday could think only of the great
quest that lay ahead. Were the ranchers and hunters right? Had the “extinction event” already overtaken the few buffalo that were left in the wild? Would this journey turn out to be a requiem? All he knew for sure was that the gauntlet had been thrown down, and he intended to answer the battle call. There was not a moment to be lost.

Even in the full dress blues of the Union Army, General William Tecumseh Sherman tended to look dishevelled, as if he'd slept in a tent. The hair on the back of his head was crazed, like a wild dog's; and there was a strange, clenched muscle that crossed his cheek on the diagonal like a scar left by some primitive ritual of war. One soldier recollected that Sherman “generally looked like some old farmer; his hat all slouched down and an old brown overcoat.” Another observed that Sherman was “a very nervous man and can't keep still a minute,”
1
forever fidgeting with his hands and feet, glancing about sharply as if someone were after him, which generally was the case.

But it was Sherman's eyes that riveted you. They were a predator's eyes, and once they locked on you, it was clear that you were the prey. They were eyes that had seen things no man should ever have to see, eyes that had peered into the darkness of which men are capable and seen no end to it.

The net effect was one of ferocious intensity and near-derangement, an impression that was augmented by the well-known fact that, after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Sherman had had a nervous breakdown and been temporarily relieved of his command. The papers reported that he'd gone insane. Even his wife, Ellen, had written in a letter to Sherman's brother that Sherman suffered from “that melancholy insanity of which your family is subject.”
2

But although Sherman may have seen the darkness in other men's souls, most Southerners said it was Sherman himself who was the
man of bottomless darkness. This was the man who had said, after sacking and burning Atlanta in 1864, then burning and killing his way across Georgia on his way to the sea, “War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
3

When the war finally ended, Grant made Sherman Commanding General of the Army, which meant that he was responsible for the ongoing Indian wars in the West. In some ways, the appointment was a curious choice: Sherman's father had named him after the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh,
4
who tried unsuccessfully to unify the Indian nations of the Ohio River Valley to fight the white man. Tecumseh (the name means “shooting star”) was as fearless as Sherman, forever rallying the tribes to war, even in the face of certain defeat and death:

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and the other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun
. . . .
Sleep not longer O Choctaws and Chickasaws
. . . .
Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?
5

Sherman did not particularly care for the Indian wars, which were a bloody, disorganized business that was not like real war at all. The enemy was absolutely ruthless, scalping and disembowelling those who were captured, then skulking away into the night. It was a kind of guerilla warfare, in which the enemy seemed more like a conspiracy of shadows than a regular uniformed army. Their desecration of bodies was part of their strategy of psychological warfare, meant to horrify and dishearten the white man at the same time it disguised the Indians' smaller numbers. Sherman responded to these grisly tactics with the same methods he'd used to bring the Confederacy to its knees: total war. War not just against an army, but against a whole society. Utter desolation. Blackened earth, bare and without sustenance.

To Sherman, the centerpiece of the fight against the Indian was the buffalo, who supplied the enemy with meat, hides, bones, and a way of life. Both the buffalo and the Indian were enemies of civilization, and both would have to be destroyed if the grand promise of America were to reach all the way to the western sea. Because the Indians not only depended on the buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter,
but the animal also was tangled up somehow in that blasphemous “religion” of theirs, to take away the buffalo was to break their spirit as well as their bodies. And breaking the enemy's spirit, he knew as well as anyone, was the key to victory. Sherman had once said to General Philip Sheridan that “it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America . . . for a Grand Buffalo Hunt, and make a grand sweep of them all.”
6

In 1874, Sherman convinced Grant, then president of the United States, to pocket-veto a bill that would have protected buffalo from commercial hunting. He and Grant were old friends from the war, and saw eye to eye on most things. Sherman had said of Grant, “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”
7
Sherman argued that commercial hunting of buffalo was actually like a batallion of soldiers doing battle with the enemy, and Grant evidently agreed.

During floor debate in the Texas State Legislature on another bill to protect the buffalo in 1874, Sherman dispatched General Sheridan to the Texas statehouse to spread his message of total war. Sheridan was as fearless as Sherman, having broken the Confederate line at Missionary Ridge and fought at Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest engagements of the war. Sheridan thundered:

They [the buffalo-hunters] are destroying the Indian's commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairie can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunters as the second forerunner of an advanced civilization.
8

The Texas legislature, like Grant, agreed. The bill died. The attitudes espoused by Sherman and Sheridan had enormous popular support in the country, especially among sportsmen. One hunter wrote in a large-circulation magazine in 1881: “The buffalo must go with the Red Man. Both are stumbling blocks to the improvement of this country.”
9
Even some prominent conservationists began to believe that the extermination of the buffalo was inevitable. “We know now that the extermination [is] a necessary part of the development of
the country,” admitted George Bird Grinnell.
10
And rather than being shamed or shunned, at least one bison hunter—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—decked out in buckskins, waxed moustache, and long-barreled six-shooters, became a sort of nineteenth-century rock star, a glamorization of the war against the buffalo.