Mr. Hornaday's War (9 page)

Even so, Hornaday's grim prediction, in 1889, that all the wild buffalo would be gone within ten years proved prophetic. In the winter of 1893–94, poachers killed 114 of the last band of wild buffalo cowering in the newly created Yellowstone National Park. And in 1897, the last four free-roaming buffalo were found in a high mountain valley in Colorado and shot. The hunters must have been exultant. They had succeeded in killing off the very last wild buffalo on the planet. It was only because there were a few animals still sheltered in private reserves or zoos, which would later be used to seed new herds, that the buffalo survived at all.
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One winter afternoon in 1888, about two years after his return from the Montana Territory, William Temple Hornaday was kneeling in the ersatz buffalo grass and sage of an immense museum display in the Hall of Mammals, at the National Museum in Washington. The diorama, the most ambitious undertaking of his celebrated career as a taxidermist, was housed in the largest display case ever made for the museum: sixteen feet wide, twelve feet deep, and ten feet high, surrounded by a burnished mahogany frame. In addition to its size, what was genuinely new about the exhibit was that it was an immense glass cube, its contents visible from all sides. Virtually all other museum displays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were visible from only one side, or at most two sides. This was to be, Hornaday hoped, his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel of celebration for a vanishing—and perhaps vanished—species.
1

The museum's chief taxidermist had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and was wearing a full-length oilcloth apron. As was the Victorian custom, he also was absurdly overdressed for the occasion, wearing a white turnover collar and tie. On his face, along with brushstrokes of plaster of paris, gray sculptor's clay, and genuine Montana dirt (brought back for this exhibit on the 1886 expedition) was a look of ferocious focus, like a surgeon preparing to make an exacting incision. Scattered around him in the grass were a carpenter's bag of taxidermy tools—flat pliers, cutting-pliers, two kinds of forceps, three-cornered files of various sizes, a huge glover's needle stuck in a
bar of soap, a glue-pot.
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They were the tools with which he was conjuring the dark arts of resurrection. Towering above him, stuffed and mounted but so real it seemed ready to snort, was the lordly bison bull he had brought down in the Montana snow two winters before. Nearby stood the half-completed figures of a two-year-old “spike” bull, a yearling, two cows, and Sandy, the little blond calf who had perished, making this whole display a kind of sepulchre of innocence.

A heavy canvas privacy screen had been drawn around the four-sided exhibit to shield Hornaday and his assistants from rubberneckers trying to get a premature peek; but even so, Hornaday could still hear the laughter and footfalls of museumgoers echoing through the high-ceilinged hall. Unperturbed by these distractions, he devoted his tenderest attentions to re-creating the scene, an imagined moment on the northern Great Plains in which an alpha bull, several cows, and a calf stopped to drink at a little alkaline watering hole (re-created out of layered wax and glass to give the illusion of depth). Nearby lay a couple of bleached buffalo skulls, discarded by hunters who had lain in wait at the spring.

Hornaday was not a man above wondering about his place in history. As he worked, in fact, he was nearly as enthralled by the idea that this six-figure habitat group would become the masterpiece for which he was remembered, as he was about celebrating a vanishing species. Before he was through with this exhibit, he would feel compelled to speak directly, though secretly, to future generations whom he feared might not remember him. One day almost seventy years later, in 1957, the curatorial staff at the Smithsonian was finally taking down Hornaday's buffalo group—which had been on prominent display at the museum's ground-floor entrance, greeting millions of visitors with forbidding glass eyes for more than six decades—when one of the curators discovered a small metal box embedded inside the floorboards at the foot of the great bull. Inside were a few yellowing newspaper clippings, a couple of sketches of buffalo, and a handwritten note, in Hornaday's flamboyant script:

To my illustrious successor: The old bull, the young cow, and the yearling calf you find here were killed by yours truly. When I am dust and ashes, I beg you to protect these specimens from deterioration and destruction as they are among the last of their kind. Of course they are crude productions in comparison with what you may now produce, but you must remember that at this time, the American School of
Taxidermy had only just been recognized. Therefore give the devil his due and revile not Wm T. Hornaday
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It was a jocular greeting to a new generation of taxidermists (if in fact there was one), an anguished warning of impending doom, and a look beyond the petty politics and recriminations of his own day. He was not unaware that his rapid rise to the top of such an august institution, at such a young age, coupled with his brash and sometimes strident manner, had created a dark undertow of criticism. By 1888, his detractors had begun grumbling (mostly in private) that Hornaday was simply a fame hog, constantly making bombastic public pronouncements to attract attention, constantly in the papers, railing about the coming calamity facing wildlife to get himself a few more column inches of glory. And it's true that his name, face, and opinions were in the newspapers so frequently that he'd hired a clipping service and begun filling fat scrapbooks with all his public notices. “Vindication of America's Greatest Wildlife Champion” read one; “Zoo Man Convinced of Evolution Theory” read another.
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Well, so be it, he thought. What did he care what lesser men thought? What he was doing with his life got attention because it was urgently important. To his mind, nothing was
more
important than saving the natural world from the grim annihilation he'd seen in Montana and all across the west—the violated corpses, the acres of bones.

The planet was burning! If he yelled “Fire!” did that make him an egotist?

During the previous winter and spring, as he worked feverishly on the great bison display, he'd written an eight-part series called “The Last Buffalo Hunt,” about his adventures and discoveries in Montana, which had recently run in twelve major newspapers from New York to San Francisco. It had brought him a new round of acclaim, but it also drew attention to the awful crime in progress in the West. Since the articles appeared, a steady stream of curiosity-seekers, as well as the occasional important visitor, had begun showing up at the half-completed exhibit in the Hall of Mammals. Although the average gadabout was not allowed behind the privacy screen, official visitors would be ushered into the display case from time to time to be introduced to the museum's chief taxidermist.

Now, as Hornaday hastened to prepare the remaining buffalo for the exhibit's opening in March 1888, the privacy screen was flung open and a stranger stepped boldly into the display space, unaccompanied
by any official envoy.
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Hornaday flicked him a glance, with momentary irritation, and then returned to his work on a troublesome seam in the yearling's hide.

Professor Goode said you wouldn't mind if I came down here and had a look, friend,
the stranger said in a congenial sort of way.

Hornaday bridled at this uninvited familiarity. The stranger wasn't his “friend.” He had no idea who this fellow was: a hale-looking young man in his late twenties, with a bull-like head and a square jaw.

My God, look at that thing,
the young man said, gesturing at the bull.
You bagged this animal?

Hornaday grunted his assent.

Stub-horn
—
an old one. Fourteen, fifteen hundred pounds, I'll bet. That's probably one of the biggest bulls ever taken. What did you use?

.44–40 Winchester.

Nice piece. Not much recoil. Anything over a hundred yards, you can practically see that bullet drop down like an artillery shell. Where'd you shoot 'im?

Montana Territory. Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, north of Miles City. If you know that country.

Sunday Creek Trail?

Yep.

Hornaday shot another glance at the man. Not many people in Washington, D.C., would have appreciated the sterling virtues of the new .44–40 center-fire Winchester rifle, or recognized that the bull was what the old hide-hunters called a “stub-horn,” much less known about the Sunday Creek Trail.

How do you happen to know that country up the Sunday Creek Trail?
Hornaday asked finally.

Used to have a ranch on the Little Missouri, near Cannonball Creek. But I'm out of the business now, after the winter of '86. No money in ranching, just a world of grief.

Hornaday could contain himself no longer.

I don't believe we've been properly introduced.

Oh, beg pardon,
the young man said, shoving out a big, square hand.
The name's Theodore
—
Theodore Roosevelt.

Although he was only twenty-eight years old at the time of their first meeting, Theodore Roosevelt was already marked for fame. Hornaday
recognized his name because it had been all over the papers: he'd just been defeated in a highly publicized run for the mayoralty of New York City, having campaigned—honestly, but perhaps foolishly—as “The Cowboy from the Dakotas.” Hornaday also already knew that Roosevelt once owned a ranch near Medora, in the northern Dakota Territory on the Little Missouri, not far from the place where these animals had been taken.

On that wan winter day when their paths first crossed, these two fierce and ambitious young men forged a bond that was to last for the rest of their lives. “In our first hour,” Hornaday later wrote of this first meeting, Roosevelt “told me a serious secret, and we dealt in secrets forever after. I think I proved that I knew how to keep things that should not be told—and he told me many mighty interesting things that, while new, never appeared in print.”
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The two men were natural companions. They loved the West, wildlife, guns, horses, and the open air. They were both hunters and adventurers, men whose souls came alive under the blue sky. They knew what it was like to live rough and take risks, to work for days in the saddle, to confront a tiger or an elephant at close quarters, or to wade chest-deep through the snake-infested swamps of the Orinoco. They shared a cowboy's scorn of effete Easterners (even though they'd both grown up east of the Mississippi, and Roosevelt was born in Gotham itself). They both sensed, at a gut level, that all across the continent, birds and game were being hunted down at a much faster rate than they could possibly reproduce, that the whole natural world was careening toward disaster. This was so seldom acknowledged in public that it was almost as
if this
was the great secret that they shared.

There were many other things of a more personal nature that the two had in common. They were about the same age (Hornaday, at thirty-four, was six years older than Roosevelt). Both men had lost their parents when they were still very young and had had to pull on a grown man's boots prematurely. (Hornaday lost both his parents when he was only thirteen; Roosevelt was nineteen when his father—“the greatest man I ever knew”—died, and twenty-six when his mother died of typhoid fever). They were both writers. Hornaday's book
Two Years in the Jungle
had created a huge following and a hunger for his further exploits, and Roosevelt—a man who seemed to pack ten times as much life into every hour as a normal man—had once written, in a period of less than three months, a biography of
Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton
and
a celebrated four-volume series called
The Winning of the West.

One other thing the two young men had in common was that they'd had to overcome physical frailty and vulnerability. Hornaday had always been smaller than his peers, and he was forever overcompensating with sheer pugnacity, as if he could
will
himself to be taller. Roosevelt, on the other hand, had been so sickly as a child—he suffered extremely from asthma—that his father built a gym at the family home in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street in New York City. “You have to
make
your body,” his father had demanded, and “Teedie,” as he was known as a child, struggled to pack muscle onto his quivering, twiglike frame. Teedie remained so frail, though, that he could not attend school and was taught instead by tutors at home until he enrolled at Harvard at age eighteen. A couple of years later, after attending law school, he served for three terms in the New York State Assembly. But he still appeared weak and effeminate and wore foppish side-whiskers, a gangly Harvard man trying to be a grownup. His fellow assemblymen ridiculed his “squeaky” voice and dandified dress, calling him “Punkin-Lilly,” “Jane-Dandy,” and “our new Oscar Wilde.”
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Both of these men had found true love in their lives; but for only one of them would it last. Hornaday's love affair with his wife, Josephine, would endure for almost six decades, until his last breath. “This morning—‘it bein' Sunday'—I had a long think, all about you,” he wrote to her in 1899, “about our first acquaintance, the middle and the end of our courtship, and the 19 1/2 very happy years following. . . . Dear old Heart, dearest Love, the years have made me so fond of you, and so dependent on your love and your daily smiles that when you are gone I am lost!”
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Roosevelt, too, experienced early love of a shattering intensity. He was twenty years old when he met Alice Hathaway Lee at her parent's house in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
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It was October 1878; she was seventeen. He was smitten as soon as he saw her, and he wooed her for over a year, during his senior year at Harvard, before he won her. They were engaged on January 25, 1880. A few days later, Roosevelt rode his sleigh through a snowstorm over to Chestnut Hill, “the horse plunging to his belly in the great drifts, and the wind cutting my face like a knife,” he later confided to his diary. “My sweet life was just as lovable and pretty as ever; it seems hardly possible that
I can kiss her and hold her in my arms; she is so pure and innocent and so very, very pretty. I have never done anything to deserve such good fortune.” Perhaps because he was so beside himself with joy, on his way home the sleigh tipped over in a snowdrift and he was “dragged about 300 yards, holding onto the reins, before I could stop the horse.”
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