Mr. Hornaday's War (22 page)

He did not waste a moment getting to work.

As soon as he had the idea for the zoo, Hornaday sat down and wrote a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who was also his boss, Professor Baird, a man he liked and respected immensely. Although Baird had recently been very ill and was often absent from the office, he dropped the letter by Baird's office anyway. Only a few hours later, Baird's assistant, Dr. G. Brown Goode, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, showed up at Hornaday's office door. He was enthusiastic about Hornaday's big idea but cautioned him that Baird was a very sick man, and the idea would have to be put aside for the present. “Later on, I'll take it up with you,” he said, somewhat mysteriously.
4

Hornaday dearly hoped that Professor Baird would recover soon because he seemed the perfect man to champion the idea through the complex hierarchy of the Smithsonian and Congress, which would have to approve both the idea and the funding. Baird was a nineteenth-century scientific generalist at a time when a single man could straddle most of the different disciplines of science comfortably. At Dickinson College, he had taught natural history, chemistry, mathematics, and physiology; his published writings covered geology, minerology, botany, iconography, zoology, and anthropology as well. At the age of seventeen, he'd written to John James Audubon and described two kinds of flycatchers that proved to be new to science. Later he had been instrumental in creating the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, and as fish commissioner, he had studied the decline in coastal fisheries in the southern New England states. Baird
had begun to see in the seas what Hornaday had seen on the land: a vast, steady, and alarming decline in wild populations.
5

Unfortunately, only a couple of months after Hornaday sent his letter, Baird died. Professor Goode took over until a permanent successor could be appointed. Hornaday described Goode as “a progressive and daring museum-builder, a most lovable man, ready to try any good idea once.” Goode made good on his promise to “take it up later on,” and in the fall of 1887, he and Hornaday “threw in together on the development of the idea [of the national zoo], and we worked like beavers, with no ambition beyond the successful accomplishment of a Big Thing.”
6

Brown proposed that they start “a little tryout zoo” on the Smithsonian grounds to test the public's interest. In one stroke, Brown created a “Department of Living Animals” at the National Museum, with Hornaday as curator. Now, in addition to stuffing and mounting skins as realistically as possible, Hornaday would be providing food, water, and habitats for real, living animals on the mall in Washington.

Professor Goode was also appointed acting U.S. fish commissioner, temporarily taking over another of Baird's duties, and one of the first things he did was direct the new curator of living animals, William Temple Hornaday, to ride a Fish Commission railroad car across the American West to collect specimens of American mammals, birds, and reptiles for the “little tryout zoo.”

A Fish Commission employee would be in charge of distributing 800 pails of young fish, mainly carp, to ranchmen across the West as the train made its way toward the Pacific. As the fish tanks emptied, Hornaday could use them to begin bedding down the future residents of the National Zoo.
7

(It may seem curious that the Fish Commission was distributing carp, of all things, a fish often considered a nuisance. But in a department bulletin from 1874, Baird made what he considered an important distinction between the related “junk” species such as suckers and chubbs, and the common or German carp, or
Cyprinus carpio,
which has been cultivated as a food fish for centuries. Its flesh was “firm, flaky, and in some varieties almost equal to the European trout,” according to Baird. These fish were not meant to be introduced to water already stocked with good native species, but only for ponds and streams where no better fish could be raised. Even so, it was an
early foray into ill-advised introductions of invasive species into places nature had not intended them to be.)
8

Travelling west through the Dakotas and the Montana and Washington territories, Hornaday bought or was given a cinnamon bear, a white-tailed deer, a Columbia black-tailed deer, five prairie dogs, a Cross fox, a mule deer, two badgers, a red fox, and two spotted lynx. The fifteen animals, all species indigenous to the United States or its territories, were reasonably well behaved once they were bedded in the converted fish tanks. The lone exception was a big badger with a fat, flattened body and huge paddle-like paws, which slept in a tank directly beneath Hornaday's berth. Every night about bedtime, the badger began attempting to dig his way out of the railroad car, scratching away at the glass of the tank with such determination that Hornaday had to get up and slap the tank with a wooden lath to frighten it into submission.
9

One day when the train stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming, hundreds of people swarmed around the railroad car, which was stopped on a siding, “just as hungry to see some wild-western beast as if none ever had existed outside that car.” It brought home to Hornaday with the force of a hammer blow the grave peril facing the natural world. But that was not the only experience that did so. In Salt Lake City, stacked and ready to be loaded onto a railcar, he saw the skins of 140 little spotted mule deer fawns, and he was told matter-of-factly that they were to be made into men's vests.
10
In Denver, when he saw seventy mountain goat skins stacked in the same way, he decided to buy them (for fifty cents apiece) for use as part of the “extermination exhibit” that he was planning at the National Museum. It would become part of his great propaganda war in the battle for wildlife.

At the beginning, the grandly designated “Department of Living Animals of the National Museum” was a ramshackle affair, really just a collection of small wire pens and paddocks in the western shadow of the Smithsonian castle, which sat on the edge of the broad pedestrian walkway known as the “national mall.” At first, the fifteen animals Hornaday had collected on his rail trip out west, including four prairie dogs, were the sum total of the animal population of the National Zoo.

But that changed rapidly. From the very start, the public was fascinated
by the zoo, and people began showing up to see the animals in great numbers, just as the people of Wyoming had showed up to peer at the badgers, foxes, and deer in the railcar on a siding in Cheyenne. People began bringing animals as gifts, like the magi bearing frankincense and myrrh. One of the first benefactors of the Department of Living Animals, in fact, was the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland had been given a golden eagle as a Christmas present, and rather than return it to the sender, as was customary, he gave it to Hornaday for the new zoo. A benefactor in Texas contributed two black bears and a jaguar. Then Hornaday bought a grizzly bear cub from the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. And so on and so on, until between the early winter of 1887 and the early spring of 1888, the zoo had grown from 15 to 172 animals. In fact, it had grown so rapidly that it was bursting at the seams, in need of space, accomodations, funding, and staff.
11

Of all the new residents at the Department of Living Animals, the rarest and most wonderful were four American bison, contributed by a rancher in Nebraska. In December 1887, Hornaday wrote Professor Goode a letter to propose formally that the institution begin attempting to preserve the buffalo by breeding them in captivity, something he'd been thinking about ever since the death of Sandy:

In view of the fact that thus far, this government has done nothing to preserve alive any specimens of the American Bison, the most striking and conspicuous species on this continent, I have the honor to propose that the Smithsonian Institution or the National Museum, one or both, take immediate steps to procure . . . the nucleus of a herd of live buffaloes . . . which may, in a small measure, atone for the national disgrace that attaches to the heartless and senseless extermination of the species in a wild state.
12

The four bison, consisting of a breeding pair and two of their calves, one male and one female, were a gift from Dr. Valentine T. McGillicuddy, a legendary frontier surgeon who was also the Indian agent of the Sioux Reservation in the Dakota Territory.
13
The animals had been captured in the Black Hills, which was sacred land to the Sioux. In fact, during a vision quest, the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk, who had fought Custer at the Battle of Little Big-horn,
had ascended the great stone monolith called Harney Peak, at the center of the Black Hills, and declared that it was “the center of the universe.” He'd been only a nine-year-old boy at the time, but what he learned there that day shaped the rest of his life. From Harney Peak, Black Elk saw “more than I can tell and understood more than I saw,” he later told John C. Neihardt for a famous book called
Black Elk Speaks
. “For I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together like one being.”
14
In some supernatural sense, it was almost as if McGillicuddy's gift of a breeding pair of buffalo had been sent by Black Elk and the Sioux, from the center of the universe, to populate the new zoo in the country's capital.

In September 1888, Dr. Samuel Pierpont Langley was appointed to succeed the deceased Baird as secretary of the Smithsonian. Hornaday greeted this news warily, describing Langley in his autobiography as “an austere physicist from Pittsburgh.”
15
Langley took an office up in the tower of the Smithsonian castle so that he could peer down on the goings-on below, including the somewhat unsightly shanties and cages of Hornaday's little proto-zoo. A celebrated inventor, Langley was one of the leading innovators in the quest to solve “the problem of flight,” as it was then called. As the new head of the institution, his primary interest was in establishing an astrophysical laboratory at the Smithsonian. He had no great interest in this motley collection of cages and all their braying, barking, shrieking inhabitants down there.

Goode suggested to Langley that, given the great interest in the “tryout zoo,” the Smithsonian begin scouting out a bigger, better location for the
real
zoo, the National Zoo of the United States. Goode suggested Rock Creek Park, an area of picturesque hill and dale, mostly forested, beside a small rocky river very close to downtown Washington. Hornaday loved the idea—it would provide visitors with a feel for the wild places where the wild things roamed. Langley seemed to assent to this, if only by lack of objection.

But as the weeks and months went by, Hornaday grew increasingly disenchanted with the Smithsonian's new secretary. Langley was, Hornaday wrote, a preeningly proud, deeply private man, a “seasoned bachelor of lonely habits, a domineering temper, and the congeniality of an iceberg . . . his ‘no' was like the snap of a steel trap.”
16
Hornaday, himself a proud, quirky, and sometimes difficult man, had met his match in Samuel Langley. But this time he was outranked.

It's quite possible that Hornaday found Langley hostile to his zoo plans because the secretary was simply not very interested in them. His mind was elsewhere. Langley was a brilliant, self-taught astronomer who as a boy had designed and built advanced telescopes with which he'd mapped the Sun and the Galilean moons of Jupiter. But what fired his passion more than anything else was the great race to build a heavier-than-air flying machine, a feat more than one respected student of aerodynamics said was not possible. Over a period of sixteen years, Langley built repeated iterations of a craft he called an “aerodrome,” which grew ever more elaborate, more expensive, and more ungainly.
17
Most of the money was provided by the government; Langley got the funding at least partly because of all his prestigious academic degrees and appointments, which now included being the administrator of the Smithsonian. Langley launched his awkward-looking airships off a houseboat floating in the Potomac River. For the first few launches, Langley was unwise enough to allow the press to be present, who duly noted that the “flights” lasted only a few moments and ended in spectacular crashes into the river. The reporters' pens began to drip poison. The papers started calling these seemingly ridiculous experiments “Langley's Folly,” and questioning the expenditure of taxpayer money on something that would very likely prove a bust. Langley, wounded, withdrew into himself.

Meanwhile, Hornaday and Goode kept trying to push the idea of a genuine National Zoo in Congress, which would have to approve and fund the project. Recognizing that Congress served at the behest of the public, Hornaday began his campaign by going directly to the press, giving a series of newspaper interviews in which he pointed out that the United States was the only great country without a national zoo, and that having one might be the only way to save the buffalo from annihilation.
18

Newspaper editorial pages around the country picked up on Hornaday's tone of alarm, so that the whole idea of a national zoo seemed to take on a life of its own. In the spring of 1888, the
New York Public Opinion
summed up the popular mood regarding the zoo:

With all our great game animals being swept out of existence by modern breech-loaders, a magnificent site within two miles of the
Executive Mansion, a huge surplus in the Treasury, gifts of live animals pouring into the Smithsonian, the public clamoring for a National Zoo, and a competent naturalist ready and anxious to build it up, what reason is there why the bill should not be passed and work begun at once?
19