Mr. Hornaday's War (25 page)

Unlike Hornaday, both Grant and Osborne were patricians to the bone, having been born into the closest thing to an aristocracy the United States ever had. Madison Grant grew up spending summers and many weekends at his grandfather's Long Island estate, Oatlands, with its turreted mansion and massive stone fireplaces, and surrounded by elegant flower gardens, stables, and a tropical conservatory.
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Grant's love of nature began here, by collecting fish and reptiles. “I began by collecting turtles as a boy and never recovered from the prediliction,” he once wrote to Osborn. Grant's mother was descended from the first Dutch colonists who settled New York, and his father's relations included a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Grant went on to graduate from Yale and Columbia Law School, but—a sure sign of his pedigree—never needed to hold a job at all.

Henry Fairfield Osborn also was born into a wealthy New York family, and he grew up roaming the grounds of Castle Rock, his family's palatial estate on the Hudson. His father had made his fortune in railroads, but Osborn was always more interested in natural history, and after graduating from Princeton, he became head of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, eventually becoming the museum's president.
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He was, like Grant, a member of all the most exclusive men's clubs—the Metropolitan, the Century, the University, and of course the Boone and Crockett Club, Teddy Roosevelt's cabal of big-game hunters whose membership was limited to a hundred. Both these men shared a passion for conservation, and—like Roosevelt and other exemplars of their class—loved hunting in exotic places like East Africa and Alaska. Grant, who never married, sometimes spent four months of the year on lavish hunts.
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When Grant, Osborn, and the other committee members began searching for someone to serve as the actual hands-on director of the
future zoo, the name of William Temple Hornaday came up at once. Hornaday was one of the few men in the country who had ever been involved in the building of a world-class zoo, however briefly. He was also a nationally known naturalist, author, specimen collector, and advocate of wildlife conservation. He was a hunter, though now a reformed one. (One unsympathetic historian has referred to him as “a classic example of the repentant hunter” who, “with all the zeal of the convert, set about atoning for his early sins.”)
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But if Grant and Osborn were born to fine china, good genes, and overbred horses, Hornaday was born to a clapboard farmhouse in Indiana, no particular genes or connections at all, and the love of a good honest street fight. He'd achieved what he had in life by sheer will, natural ability, and good luck. Next to his pair of patrician Medicis, Hornaday later confessed to always feeling inferior, fearing that Osborn and Grant viewed him as merely “a Philistine from the jungles of Buffalo.”
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Grant was by nature and breeding a behind-the-scenes man who preferred to work by having a Macanudo and a drink at the Century Club with some influential friend. Not only would there be no news account of such encounters, there would be no written record at all beyond a charge to Grant's private account at the club. Hornaday, by contrast, preferred to fight his fights in the open, often very loudly, on a level that the common man could understand and in a way that attracted a great deal of attention. He did not mind getting a bloody nose. In fact, his nose would be bloody for most of the next thirty years.

William Temple Hornaday's first assignment after he was hired as director of the still-imaginary New York zoo was a delicious one: to scout out a location of about 300 acres, not too far outside Manhattan, to be the site of New York's most spectacular new attraction. After surveying all the undeveloped land on the city's margins, he went for a ramble one sunny afternoon in February 1896, all alone, in what was then known as South Bronx Park, along Pelham Avenue.

“At that time,” Hornaday recalled later, the park “was an unbroken wilderness, to the eye almost as wild and unkempt as the heart of the Adirondacks.” When he first saw it, he experienced a sense of “almost paralyzing astonishment and profound gratitude. It seemed incredible that such
virgin forest
. . . had been spared in the City of
New York in 1896!”
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In a two-hour hike on that winter afternoon, Hornaday imagined it all: Here were the great outdoor flying cages for immense raptors; here the stately houses for primates, small deer, antelope, large birds, lions, elephants, reptiles. Here, the bear dens for the giant brown and Kodiak bears from Alaska, and grizzlies from the American West. Here, the immense open-air enclosures for hoofed and horned herd animals, including bison, six or eight times as spacious as anything in Europe. When he reported his find to Grant and Osborn, they were both delighted, and eventually—after much political wrangling and backstabbing—the city handed over 264 acres to the newly formed New York Zoological Society.

Hornaday's second assignment was even more enjoyable than the first: in April 1896, he and Josephine were dispatched on a tour of fifteen European zoos, including the renowned Berlin Zoo, where Carl Hagenbeck had pioneered the use of moats and barless enclosures to enhance the zoogoing experience. Hornaday's task was to learn what these venerable zoos had done right and what they had done wrong.
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Over the next three years, Hornaday was the on-site supervisor of the construction of America's premier zoo. He reported to work each morning promptly at 8 a.m., worked until sundown, then went home to write his books and direct the movement of his troops in the broader war for wildlife, shepherding legislation through Congress and lending a prominent national voice to little-known local battles. His energy, his punctuality, and his attention to detail were legendary. He argued with the zoo's architects over tiny details, insisted that not a single tree be cut without his permission, directed the purchase, shipping, and care of animals, mediated employee disputes, and acted as chief spokesperson to the press.

For several of these frenetic years, Hornaday was working out of a modest office at 69 Wall Street and living in a rented house on East 30th Street, in midtown Manhattan, while Josephine stayed in Buffalo trying to sell the house on Humboldt Parkway. They bridged the 300 miles that separated them with a constant flurry of letters, often sent every day. Despite the prominence of Hornaday's new position, his letters to Josephine make clear that the young couple was almost continuously worried about money. “I have now just $175 left and got to have a new suit of clothes before the 12th,” Hornaday complained. “I cannot appear before the Academy of Sciences on that night without it. My trousers are simply
done,
and they show it.” There were
newsy updates on doings at the infant zoo, like the death of a baby eland, and the beautiful great anteater bought off a steamer from Venezuela for $40 and “temporarily quartered in my office til next Monday, when the new Keeper's shed will be ready.”
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Yet his letters always seemed to end on the same note: in adoration and longing for Josephine. “What a perfect
sun
you have been to my existence, ever since I found you!” he wrote in May 1902. “Dear heart, without you the world would be dark indeed, not only to me but to many others. So bright and good a woman as you should be endowed with the strength of an Amazon and the longevity of Methuselah. The women who bless the world the most should live the longest.”

His letters also show a side of Hornaday that could be short-tempered and even a little cruel. “My last letter is for a definite purpose—to end everything between C. J. and me & to keep him from coming to my office and lounging around as he was in the habit of doing,” he snapped in one letter. “Henceforth we are total strangers. I was a fool to ever begin to treat him decently after all he has done to disgrace himself. He is a skunk and I mean to keep him at a
skunk's distance.”
Hornaday was also not above occasional cattiness about prominent people he'd been getting to know. The famous naturalist and writer John Burroughs, he wrote to Josephine, was “a real, true
cad!
He speaks meanly of his wife because she is not his mental equal—he, with the Giant Intellect that barely keeps him and his poor wife alive in a
shanty!
”
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As the zoo's opening day approached, railroad cars filled with exotic animals came pouring into the Bronx: an immense Alaskan brown bear from north of the Arctic Circle, an African Black Rhino, elephants, kudu, waterbuck, Grevy's zebras, a lumbering elephant tortoise, tapirs, capybaras, kangaroos, harpy eagles, red-crested turaco, impeyan pheasants, ostriches, and cassowaries. A sixteen-foot python escaped and was recaptured its first night in the zoo. And for a short time, a small group of queasy orangutans had to be quartered in the Hornadays' living room, where Josephine (who had by now moved to New York) patiently fed them a teaspoon of Fletcher's castoria each day to settle their stomachs.
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On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 8, 1899, a cold, overcast day with a knifing wind, the New York Zoological Park officially opened. A huge crowd of about 2,000 people turned out, with attendees ranging from the Park Avenue peerage, including J. P. Morgan,
a generous patron of the zoo, to a few of the short-order cooks and scullery maids who'd gotten off work to come to the opening and who would soon desert the Central Park menagerie in favor of this magnificent animal park, even though it was farther out of town.
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Director Hornaday wore a cap mounted with a gold eagle, and his assistant curators were all arrayed in gray and green uniforms, like soldiers on parade. Hornaday, Professor Osborn, Madison Grant, and other dignitaries were seated at a bunting-draped podium when Osborn stood to make a few brief remarks. “Unlike the small closed zoological gardens of Europe, this is a free Park, projected upon a scale larger than has ever been attempted before,” he began. After extolling the splendors of the new park, he promised even grander exhibitions in the future. In an innocent-sounding line that would eerily foreshadow one of the new zoo's darkest days to come, he added that “later we shall find a place upon the buffalo range for the Indian and his teepee.”
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Then Hornaday officially opened the zoo's gates to “the millions.” The zoo would not be fully finished for another seven years, but when it opened that November afternoon, it already boasted a stately collection of (still incomplete) Beaux-Arts pavilions grouped around a circular sea-lion pool, with 22 exhibits featuring 843 animals of 157 different species.

From the very beginning, the zoo was a smash hit. In 1900, its first full year of operation, it drew a half million visitors. Within three years, there were a million visitors a year; and by 1914, more than 2 million.
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By 1909, there were 5,000 birds, mammals, and reptiles in the collection, making New York's zoo the largest in the world not only geographically, but also in terms of the number of specimens. Under the exacting direction of Hornaday, Grant, and Osborn, the zoo had become, one distinguished foreign critic wrote, “at once the envy and the despair of all European makers of zoological gardens.”
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Even so, what happened at the newly opened New York Zoological Park for eighteen days in the autumn of 1906 would stain Hornaday's reputation permanently—and, more darkly, the reputation of Madison Grant as well. It was as if, beneath the sumptuous neoclassical gardens and lawns of the zoo, there was a poisoned river murmuring in the darkness, and for those few days in September, it emerged, alarmingly, into the light.

The episode began in seeming innocence—or at least, what passed
for innocence in that long-ago time. In 1904, a flamboyant explorer, missionary, and perennially impoverished entrepeneur named Samuel Phillips Verner was hired to bring back about a dozen African pygmies for an “ethnographic exhibit” at the St. Louis World's Fair. Hoping to legitimize the fledgling science of anthropology, Dr. William McGee aspired to display “representatives of all the world's races, ranging from the smallest pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites.” The exhibit was to be called the University of Man.
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It is helpful to remember that turn-of-the-century America was a place where such a “University” was not entirely unthinkable. The great Apache warrior Geronimo, billed as the “Human Tyger” even though he was approaching eighty and a prisoner of war under constant armed guard, was also on display at the St. Louis Fair.
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And in 1897—to name just one other example—Arctic explorer Robert Peary returned from Greenland with six Eskimos, who were put on display (for twenty-five cents a look) at the American Museum of Natural History. Within eight months, four had died of tuberculosis, and renowned anthropologist Franz Boas had their skeletons stripped of flesh, bleached, and added to the museum's collections. Yet this episode provoked hardly a murmur of outrage in the press.
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Verner disappeared into the interior of Africa and, after two months of searching, succeeded in buying a twenty-one-year-old Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga from slave traders, in what was then called the Congo Free State. The total purchase price was a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner probably saved Ota's life: not only was the murderous Force Publique of King Leopold of Belgium rampaging through the Congo, and Ota's wife and children had already been murdered, but Ota was also being held captive by the slave-trading Bashilele tribe, who were inclined to eat their prisoners. He was in danger of being murdered or eaten when the blue-eyed
muzungu,
or white man, offered to buy him from the Bashilele. This may well explain why, when Verner asked Ota if he wished to accompany him across the ocean, he agreed. Even though Ota no doubt failed to fully understand what he was getting into, he seems to have come along willingly.
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