Mr. Hornaday's War (14 page)

Nevertheless, his shame at the deaths of birds and animals that died in his hands was tinged with the soul-sickness of sin. When he discovered that taxidermy existed, it was as if a light went on: here was a way of “resurrecting” dead birds and animals, bringing them back to life as Christ had been brought back to life. At the same time, the bird could serve to educate the masses—millions, perhaps—about the beauty and importance of wild things. The inner shame and torment he felt about hunting could be channeled into a noble purpose.

At this and other moments in American history, Dehler points out, it was not uncommon for crusaders of various kinds to transfer evangelism to “pseudo-religious social causes.” Will's Seventh-day Adventist upbringing taught him that ethics and values were absolute, and that evangelism was the highest and most important calling of humankind. It was not too much of a stretch to substitute the well-being of nature for the spiritual suffering of humanity. “Although he never assumed the pulpit,” Dehler writes, “William Temple Hornaday spent his life preaching his causes in the most absolute terms, requiring the most immediate response from his ‘congregation.'”
12

By the time he was sixteen, Hornaday was casting about, trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. His legal guardian, Benjamin Auten—a confirmed bachelor who was one of the wisest, kindest, and most loveable of men—suggested dentistry,
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but Will hated the idea and succeeded in avoiding it. He considered becoming a new-paper editor because he liked “reading, writing and declaiming.” He applied for a job at a local newspaper by boasting in a letter to his prospective boss that he was “a corking good speller and could write some,” and concluding, “What can you do for me?” “Not a thing,” the editor replied.
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He went to another editor, who seemed amazed and delighted by the boy's gumption but who made him realize he really wasn't sufficiently well educated to be a newspaperman. After all, Will Hornaday—like so many other young men of his day—had never even been to high school.

Finally, Will decided to see if he could get into college. He enrolled
at nearby Oskaloosa College, even though he did not qualify for a scholarship. For a year, he struggled with his studies and with his bills, knowing full well that he had no family to fall back on if he failed. The next year, he qualified for a county scholarship and transferred to Iowa State Agricultural College (later Iowa State).

One day in his first year at Iowa State, he heard that the college president, A.S. Welch, had offered a ten-dollar award and a job as a taxidermist to any student who could mount a specimen suitable for the college museum. Hornaday borrowed a small-bore rifle, went out and shot a squirrel, then stuffed it full of tow. He mounted it in a sitting position with small black buttons for eyes and a hickory nut in its paws. When he proudly presented his trophy to the president, Welch just chuckled and told him it was “not good enough for the museum.” It was then that the veil fell from Hornaday's eyes, and he realized what he'd created was a “monstrosity.”
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Later, Hornaday became a pupil of Professor Charles Bessey, the distinguished botanist and zoologist. Bessey liked Hornaday's fire and his great enthusiasm for anything having to do with natural history. It was Bessey who gave the boy his second chance at taxidermy. A farmer had shot an American White Pelican on its migratory passage over Iowa, and he'd brought the immense white carcass to Bessey because he thought it might be stuffed for the campus museum. Laying out the fallen bird on a dissecting table in front of Hornaday, Professor Bessey had taken down an enormous volume from his bookshelf—the majesterial
Birds of America,
by John James Audubon. Using Audubon's color plate of the white pelican as a template, he showed Hornaday how to bring the bird back to life with wire, stuffing, glue, glass eyes, and a sense of reverence for the splendor and complexity of birds.
16

Though the plates in Audubon's famous book seemed to vibrate with life, in order to paint his subjects in such detail, Aubudon had been forced to shoot the birds with small shot (or pay someone else to shoot them) and then prop their lifeless bodies up in realistic positions. His devotion to nature and his desire to share it with the world required that Audubon—like Hornaday—first strike a dark bargain with death.

It was Professor Bessey who first told Hornaday about Ward's Natural Science Establishment, in Rochester, and the very same day he heard about it, Will Hornaday wrote Professor Ward a letter:

Ames, Iowa

11 April, 1873

Prof Henry A. Ward

Rochester, N.Y.

Dear Sir,

I want to learn taxidermy in all its branches. I understand that you are doing a large business in that line, and so think it likely that I can gain useful information as to the best place or chance of studying the art. Wish to ask in the first place is there is
any chance
of learning in your establishment. I have considerable knowledge of mounting birds, and stuffed many specimens for the College museum last year. But my knowledge of the art is limited and it is my wish and determination to make a first class taxidermist. What can you do for me?

Respectfully yours,

W. T. Hornaday
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Ward, as amused as he was intrigued by Hornaday's forwardness, wrote back immediately, and after some correspondence—during which he urged Hornaday to finish school before coming to work for him—he invited the young man to come to Ward's as a kind of low-ranking apprentice. Hornaday took a train to Rochester the instant he graduated.

Working at Ward's, Hornaday would later write, was like spending every day in a “signal station,” in which invitations to romance from exotic locales all over the world came pouring in. Isadore Prevotel, Frederic Lucas, and the other older taxidermists not only seemed to have visited every remote place on the planet, they also had narrowly escaped death somewhere. Almost every day, a crate of skins or skeletons would arrive at the taxidermy shop from some steamy jungle or mountain fastness, like a summons from a lost world.

In the Cast Building, Hornaday watched workmen making plaster replicas of prehistoric creatures, from the shambling, shaggy mastodon to the triceratops. There was even a fantastic casting of a
Megatherium,
or giant ground sloth, fourteen feet high and twenty feet long, as big as an elephant—proof that Professor Ward's collection was on a par with the greatest museums in America. In the Osteology
Building, a different kind of specialist pieced together the skeletons of animals living and long gone, from wolverines and tigers to immense prehistoric crocodiles. Another building served as a carpenter shop; the Long Museum—despite a disapproving placard at the compound's entrance warning curiosity-seekers that “THIS IS NOT A MUSEUM”—was essentially a musuem or storehouse where finished specimens were kept; and Cosmos Hall was where Professor Ward kept his mineral and fossil collection, which was so extensive it was obvious to Hornaday that he must be one of the world's greatest collectors.
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But it was the Taxidermy Building that captured Hornaday's interest with the swoon of young love. Reeking with the smell of camphor and creosote, chemicals used to store skins before they were mounted for exhibition, it was a regular Noah's Ark of species from around the world. Hornaday later wrote that he couldn't walk into that room without feeling he was being watched, by a black jaguar, a bull elephant, a wildebeest, or some other creature in the process of being resurrected on the mounting-tables. Years later, he described the thrill of it all:

To me, the romance and glamour of Ward's museum was as fascinating and compelling as the stage and footlights are to the confirmed actor. Up to that time, nothing else of the kind had entered into my life. At that one spot, the jungles of the tropics, the game-haunted mountains and plains, and the mysterious depths of the seas seemed to contest for the privilege of pouring in day by day their richest zoological treasures.
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Hornaday had been working at Ward's for six months, spending most of his waking hours in the company of older men who had exotic field experiences in far-off places. But Rochester was about as far-off a place as he'd ever been in his life. Now, he felt, he was ready to test his mettle against the world. After all, he was nineteen years old, a grown man. It was time to mount an expedition of his own, just like Paul Du Chaillu had in Africa. When Du Chaillu left on his first expedition, the one that made his name famous around the world, he had been only twenty.

When Hornaday marched into Professor Ward's office that May
morning and dropped the name of Paul Du Chaillu, it was a name that was no doubt familiar to a majority of households in America. Fifteen years earlier, in 1859—the same year Charles Darwin published his famous book on the origin of species—the French-American explorer had emerged from the trackless jungles of Gabon after a four-year expedition with conclusive proof of the existence of the hairy, upright-walking “ape-man” of the jungle, which had long been rumored but never confirmed. Although the myth of such a creature had persisted since Roman times, it was not until 1847 that Dr. Thomas Savage, an American missionary in Africa, had produced an actual skull of the beast. The skull was shocking: heavy and low-slung, it looked vaguely human, but with thick ridges over the brows and a long sagittal crest across the top of the head. Then, two years later, another explorer produced an entire skeleton of the beast and put it on display at the Royal College of Surgeons, in London. That's when Du Chaillu vowed to devote the rest of his life to finding an actual specimen of the creature, a living one if possible.
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With funding from the National Academy of Natural Sciences, in Philadelphia, he mounted an expedition to West Africa, where he'd spent time as a boy when his father was a trader there. The late nineteenth century was a time when a very young man, armed with nothing but pluck, a modest bankroll, and the vaguest of maps, could strike out into the unknown and come back with enough specimens and stories to make him world-famous. He might even bring back a major new discovery, some exotic species hitherto unknown to science. In an age of grand and glorious voyages of discovery, Du Chaillu's expedition to Africa was one of the grandest of them all.

Only a few white men had ever touched the shores of “the Gaboon,” as the small West African country was then known; few, if any, had ever penetrated more than a few miles into the interior, which was bisected by the equator—a steamy tangle later explorers called “the green hell.” Even David Livingstone, who was mounting large-scale expeditions deep into the interior of southern Africa at the same time, never set foot in Gabon. But Du Chaillu, who had learned one of the local languages as a boy, plunged into the Dark Continent seemingly without fear. He traveled alone and on foot, not even carrying a tent, because he expected to be sustained by the native peoples he met along his way.

When he returned from Gabon, Du Chaillu published a book
about his exploits, which had the swashbuckling title
Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the chase of the Gorilla, Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus and other Animals.
He maintained that he'd walked a total of about 8,000 miles on his trip. “I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine,” he wrote. “Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worthwhile to speak.”
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His book was written with such breathless vividness that it electrified the world. But it also provoked widespread derision, with his preposterous tales of cannibals and a race of forest people so tiny they could be described as dwarves or pygmies. But the thing that excited the public more than anything else was his account of his first encounter with the legendary hairy ape-man of Africa:

Suddenly, as we were yet creeping along, in a silence which made a heavy breath seem loud and distinct, the woods were at once filled with the tremendous barking roar of the gorilla. Then the underbrush swayed rapidly just ahead, and presently before us stood an immense male gorilla. He had gone through the jungle on his all-fours; but when he saw our party, he erected himself and looked us boldly in the face. He stood about a dozen yards from us, and was a sight I think I shall never forget. Nearly six feet high . . . with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with fiercely-glaring, large, deep gray eyes, and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision: thus stood before us this king of the African forest.
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Although the book was greeted with disbelief by many, others found it so thrilling that it permanantly changed their lives. Years later, in 1933, an American filmmaker named Merian C. Cooper, who had come across an old copy of the book when he was a six-year-old boy in Florida, made a movie inspired by Du Chaillu's adventures. It was called
King Kong
.
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Henry Augustus Ward was now staring at a nineteen-year-old boy who seemed determined to outdo Paul Du Chaillu, one of the most famous explorers on the planet. Ward's amusement began to fade in
the face of the unmitigated gall of this lad. He was serious—dead serious, apparently. Well, Ward thought, the Establishment was always in need of specimens from Africa, and they were not easy to come by. What if he were to finance young Hornaday's expedition in exchange for a share of the specimens he brought back from the field?

“All right,” Ward said abruptly. “What if I were to allow you to take a leave of absence from your work here for this undertaking? What if I were to put up, say, half the money required to finance a collecting expedition? We'd have to write a contract, of course, laying out our understandings, and freeing the Establishment of liability—”