Mr. Hornaday's War (13 page)

Combine the fearsome firepower of this army of hunters with their misplaced sense of entitlement, and the result was inevitable. The story of the bison in the West was simply the most conspicuous tragedy that was unfolding; all across the country, other, smaller tragedies were unfolding at the same time—sometimes as small as a single meadowlark. But taken together, all the individual crimes amounted to a great dark shadow, still as death and unfathomably huge, slipping down over the world.

Will Hornaday was all of nineteen years old when he marched into his employer's office in Rochester, New York, one morning in May 1874. His new boss, Professor Henry Augustus Ward of the famous Ward's Natural Science Establishment, was the most renowned merchant naturalist in the United States, whose firm supplied gemstones, fossils, bones, and skins to museums, schools, and private collectors across the country and overseas. His office was a huge, tin-ceilinged room with books lining the walls and a cozy litter of maps, scientific papers, photographs, drawings, and all the detritus of a life spent gathering scientific specimens of all kinds. A small curiosity cabinet held geodes and fossils; iridescent African butterflies, identified by their scientific names, in a glass case; a jaguar skull from the Matto Grosso; and a plaster cast of a fragment of mammoth tusk, shattered in some ancient duel.
1

Ward, seated in a comfortable swivel chair, glanced up from the papers on his desk and leveled his frosty gray eyes at the young man standing in front of him. Ward wore a distinguished-looking graying beard that framed a handsome, refined face, and his suit, bought in London, was far more sumptuous than that of nearly any other man in Rochester. He was quite small, with tidy, acquisitive little hands, but he had the commanding presence of a diminutive man overcompensating for his size. It was said that Ward's voice could split the air like a foghorn and was capable of being heard a quarter-mile away.
2

“Professor Ward,” Hornaday announced, with elaborate casualness,
“I'm going to du Chaillu's country in West Africa on a collecting expedition for gorillas. Is there anything in particular that I can do for you over there?”
3

Ward could hardly believe his ears. He'd hired this young stripling as an underpaid “assistant workman”—basically a tub-scrubber—all of six months ago, and now Hornaday was proposing to mount an expedition to one of the most remote and dangerous places in the world. It was like an eighth-grader proposing to row across the ocean.

“I've got $800 in cash saved up, and I could get $1,000 more to finance the trip,” the boy went on, with an air of supreme confidence. “I'm competent to be a collecting naturalist. I'm a crack shot, I'm good in the woods, I don't mind roughing it, and now I know how to prepare skins and skeletonize specimens. I want to go to Africa because I want to go someplace where I could be sure to make the investment count.”

When Ward had hired Hornaday, fresh out of Iowa State University with limited experience as a taxidermist in the college museum, he did not quite recognize what he was getting. Determined to excel at his new job, Hornaday had thrown himself into his labors (however menial) with a vengeance, working from seven in the morning to six at night, or even later, and in his spare time, he read zoology textbooks or pored over Professor Ward's catalogs, which, being Ward's life work, were marvels of scientific precision even as they radiated the deep luminosity of true passion, like radioactive minerals. The catalogs were a sort of Sears, Roebuck of natural history specimens and were in fact so comprehensive and entertaining that they were used as textbooks in some college classrooms. One cast of a fossil skeleton of a prehistoric
Plesiosaurus,
for instance, was described this way:

SKELETON on slab. The Plesiosaurus was first discovered in 1822, by Conybeare and De la Bleche. Cuvier thought “its structure the most singular and its characters the most anomalous that had been found amid the ruins of a former world.” “To the head of a Lizard (wrote Buckland) it united the teeth of a Crocodile, a neck of enormous length, resembling the body of a Serpent, a trunk and tail having the proportions of an ordinary quadruped, the ribs of a Chameleon, and the paddles of a Whale
.”
4

When Professor Ward had agreed to give Hornaday a job, the aspiring young naturalist could hardly believe his good fortune. He
didn't mind if his salary was barely a pittance, or that he had to live in a drafty rooming house in Rochester. He would be getting invaluable training for his life's calling. A few years earlier, as a still-aimless sophomore at Iowa State, he'd been walking across the campus one day when he'd suddenly struck on a direction for his life: “I will be a zoologist, I will be a museum builder!” Later in life, he recalled this realization bursting upon him. “I will fit myself to be curator. I will learn taxidermy under the best living teachers—I will become one of the best in that line. That settles it! I will bring wild animals to the millions of people who cannot go to them!”
5

Will Hornaday's grandfather, Ezekiel, settled the family farm in Indiana back in 1823. At that time, Indiana was the edge of the Western frontier. Ezekiel built a small, tidy farmhouse near the little town of Plainfield, just outside Indianapolis, underneath a grove of immense shade trees that were the remnants of the primeval forest that covered Indiana in ancient days. Will's father, William, was born in that farmhouse and grew up working the farm. But gradually the poor, claylike soil grew increasingly infertile and William began casting a restless eye westward. Eighty acres of tired dirt was simply not enough land to support the family, William realized, but land in Indiana was too expensive to increase the farm's productivity by simply buying more acreage. He also wanted to help his boys buy farms of their own when they were grown, and land prices made that impossible as well. Then, in quick succession, a severe drought and a cholera epidemic swept through the Ohio River Valley. Farmers began putting their old played-out farms up for sale, cheap, and going west.

In the spring of 1857, William Hornaday, his wife Martha, and their seven children—including two-year-old Will—climbed onto a creaking buckboard wagon and headed west to Iowa, with their horses, cows, goats, and chickens trailing out behind like a small-town circus. Iowa, with its inexpensive farmland and its legendary topsoil—three feet deep, black as tar, and with the consistency of chocolate cake—was what California would become to a later generation of restless Americans: the Western frontier, the promised land. Farmers flooded out of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in astounding numbers, heading west. Huge traffic jams of wagons, horses, and cattle clogged roads passing through southern Illinois, women in their scoop-shaped sun-bonnets, pots and pans clattering from the wagon-bows. At one point
near Peoria, Illinois, in the late 1850s, an observer counted more than 1,700 wagons passing in one month.
6

William and Martha were a bit of an oddity in the 1850s: a blended family. Both of them had lost previous spouses to illness, and both brought children from the previous marriage to the new one. William had had five children by his previous wife, four boys and a girl; and Martha brought with her two boys, including Will.

When the family got to Iowa, William succeeded in buying a 270-acre farm near the town of Eddyville, on the Des Moines River. People had warned that hucksters were overselling Iowa, but for William Hornaday, the place stood up to the promise. The farm in Eddyville was where William Temple Hornaday came of age (although he made frequent trips back East to visit relations in Indiana), and where he came to love the natural world, the deep timber and river thickets filled with birds and animals and the thrill of discovery. “It was game country in those days and I loved the woods,” he recalled later in life. “Love of all wild things came naturally.”

Older people, especially hunters, said the wildlife in Iowa just wasn't what it once was. But to Will Hornaday, the farm and surrounding woods and fields seemed to be teeming with life. It was easy to miss the fact that the last remnants of a forgotten world were passing away in plain sight. Droves of American elk were not uncommon on the prairie in those days.
7
Bobcats and “prairie wolves,” or coyotes, were so widespread that it wasn't until the 1880s that farmers in Iowa could succeed in raising sheep profitably, according to a history of Dickinson County in the nineteenth century. There were even a few buffalo left in Iowa when Will was a boy—the last pair of wild bison were thought to have been shot while resting on a bluff overlooking the Little Sioux River, in northwest Iowa, in 1863. Once Will even saw a wolf—not a skulking coyote, but a shaggy gray timber wolf—loping across a distant field in broad daylight. He did not quite grasp that this lurking marauder, denizen of the darkest woods of the human imagination, was an artifact of the fast-fading wilderness.

The Civil War years marked the beginning of a long, sad downward spiral for the Hornaday family.
8
Will's two big brothers, Clark and Calvin, both enlisted in the Union Army with great enthusiasm when President Abraham Lincoln put out the first call for troops. Clark joined the Seventh Regiment in Indiana, but a few years later, while fighting with the army of the Potomac, he was grievously wounded and later died in a hospital in Philadelphia. Calvin came
home from the war unhurt, but by then he and Will were the only ones left to help their father run the farm, all the other siblings having grown up and moved away. Then Calvin became crippled with rheumatism and became bedridden. The burden of running the sprawling farm fell on Will's parents, who were getting on in years, and on Will, who was still just an adolescent mostly interested in roaming the woods and fields. His father's grand American dream of buying a big spread that he could one day share with his sons now seemed like nothing but a boulder on his back. The health and spirit of both his parents seemed very nearly broken by the struggle of keeping up the farm, as well as by the sorrow of Clark's death in the war. His father was forced to sell the farm in Eddyville and moved what was left of the family to a much smaller place, on a twenty-acre parcel of land near Knoxville, Iowa.

In 1866, when Will was eleven, his mother died. Three years later, his father also died, and the Knoxville farm was sold and all the family's possessions were auctioned off. The dream had come to an end. Will was fourteen years old and quite alone; by then, all his brothers and sisters had moved away or were dead. He went to live with relatives in Indiana temporarily, but eventually he wound up living on an enormous stock and hay farm near Paris, Illinois, owned by his uncle, Allen Varner, a Civil War veteran known as “the hero of Chickamauga.” Will Hornaday proved a willing hand, but after a year, he was clear about one thing: he never wanted to be a farmer.
9

It was when he was living with his Uncle Allen in Indiana that Will Hornaday first made the discovery that something called “taxidermy” existed. His older half-brother, David Miller, had taken him into Indianapolis on a shopping trip, and they walked into a bustling gun and tackle store operated by a man named Ambrose Ballweg. The store was filled with wonders, from Kentucky squirrel rifles to fly-casting rods to shelves of sparkling fishing lures, line, and sinkers. To his astonishment, Will saw, in a glass case on a high shelf, a half-dozen ducks, all mounted and “stuffed” so realistically they looked as if they were about to quack. Riveted by this discovery and compelled to understand the spell that made it possible, he convinced David to ask Mr. Ballweg how it had been done. But Mr. Ballweg was no help. He told the boys that he'd just bought the ducks somewhere back East, and had no idea how taxidermy worked at all. But that moment remained seared in Will's memory, like a brand.

Like most nineteenth-century boys raised on a farm, especially one
near what was then the Western frontier, Hornaday grew up shooting a rifle. Learning how to shoot and hunt was considered part of a boy's natural education, so it was practically an automatic reflex to lock and load at the sight of any creature other than domestic livestock spotted on the farm. Woodchucks, crows, hawks, foxes, rabbits, deer—they all became a target of flying lead if they got close enough. But Hornaday's father and two older brothers, Clark and Calvin, who taught Will to hunt, were more compassionate than their Iowa neighbors. They were, Hornaday remembered, “kind-spirited and humane,” and they never hunted animals they did not intend to eat, nor did they harm the birds around the house that became almost tame during the winter months while feeding on kitchen scraps.

Still, Will became a lethal shot almost as soon as he'd grown out of short pants, and once or twice, he couldn't resist pulling the trigger when he knew he shouldn't. Over the years, he confessed later, he shot a prairie chicken (also known as the pinnated grouse), a woodpecker, and a little green heron. The heron especially fascinated him, and he studied its wings, beak, legs, and underplumage in awe “to see how they were made and put together and what they were fitted to do.”
10
But each time he killed one of these living things without good reason, he was tortured by pangs of doubt and guilt. A child's emotional response to the killing of a bird or animal is a kind of Rorschach test of character: some children feel remorse; some don't. Will Hornaday was one of those who did.

Seeing the mounted duck at the sporting goods store in Indianapolis was deeply significant for Hornaday because it seemed to provide a solution to the “problem” of guilt and death, historian Gregory Dehler argues in a dissertation about Hornaday's later years as a wildlife crusader. Dehler points out that Hornaday had grown up in a household permeated with the tenets of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, a faith that preached the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the absolute truth of the Ten Commandments. In fact, the Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in the family home, and a white-bearded Seventh-day Adventist preacher was a frequent visitor at the Hornaday house while conducting revivals in the area. Still, Hornaday remembered his upbringing as “profoundly moral; and significantly but not painfully religious.” As a boy, he learned not to be drunk, dishonest, lazy, or quarrelsome, and not to lie, cheat, or steal (though he also loved a good brawl, sometimes played cards in the
living room, and once, in an act of flagrant rebellion, even flew a kite on Sunday).
11