Mr. Hornaday's War (30 page)

In February 1905, through the federal Lacey Act, Congress authorized President Roosevelt to create a game reserve in the Wichitas—the first big-game reserve in the United States, in fact—and Roosevelt had the unmitigated joy of creating, with one stroke of the pen, a 60,800-acre sanctuary for big-game animals. In his comments about the Wichita National Forest and Game Reserve, Roosevelt spoke of deer, elk, and antelope, but he did not specifically mention buffalo. But back in New York, Hornaday was already mentally trying to figure out where to build the buffalo fences and calculating how much it would cost.
14

One other thing about the Wichitas that Hornaday probably did not know: the mountains had long been considered sacred to the Comanche and other plains people. According to prophetic revelations revered by the Kiowa, it was into Mount Scott, the highest of the granite domes, that the buffalo had disappeared, and from which
they would reappear one day, pouring forth like rivers of living water.
15

In April 1905, the popular young “cowboy president,” Teddy Roosevelt, arranged a four-day hunting holiday into the Oklahoma Territory, coursing for wolves near Sheridan's Fort Sill. Like everything else he did, this lark was accompanied by huge publicity and mobs of onlookers. As his train, the “Roosevelt Special,” stopped at stations on its way west from Washington, enormous crowds turned out, and when it arrived in Frederick, Oklahoma, on April 5, a throng of 6,000 people crowded into a specially built grandstand to see him. Besides looking forward to “four days' fun under God's blue heaven,” hunting game birds and “prairie wolves” (coyotes), Roosevelt had a couple of other things in mind. For one thing, he wanted to look over the Wichita reserve as a possible home for the nation's first reintroduced free-ranging bison herd. Going out there to look the place over, Roosevelt, in a sense, was acting as an “advance scout” for Hornaday.
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The other thing Roosevelt wanted to do on this trip was get to know Quanah Parker a bit better and see him on his home ground. A month earlier, in March, Quanah had ridden in an open car, wearing buckskins and a war bonnet, in Roosevelt's inaugural parade. When Roosevelt and Parker first met, the two men seemed to feel a profound kinship. Roosevelt loved Parker's reverence for the buffalo, his dauntless courage, and his almost mystical presence, in which his every utterance seemed to have some sacred import. Parker, for his part, could sense that Roosevelt shared his reverence for the glories of the grassland and all its inhabitants.
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Roosevelt asked Parker what he could do for the Indian chief, and Parker told the president that he wanted the last of the tribe's grazing lands in Oklahoma to be preserved. When Roosevelt told Parker about the American Bison Society's vision of bringing buffalo back to the west, perhaps to the Wichitas, the old warrior's eyes rimmed with tears. What Quanah had been unable to do with sheer courage and force of arms, perhaps this white man could do with his wealth, power, and laws.

Like Roosevelt, Quanah Parker was an extraordinary man who transcended his time and place. He understood that unless he and his people were able to change, they would be destroyed, and he ably led them into a changed and hostile world, profoundly transforming himself along the way. He adopted the white man's clothing, often
wearing a bowler hat with his long black braids, negotiated grazing rights with Texas cattlemen, became fluent in English as well as several Indian dialects, and even became part owner of a railroad (the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific).
18

Back in New York, meanwhile, Hornaday pored over maps of the Wichita reserve. He decided that one particularly choice spot, called “Winter Valley” because it provided rich grasses for forage and sheltered canyons for warmth in winter, would be the centerpiece of a fenced-in reserve of about 8,000 acres, or 12 square miles.
19
Hornaday also began selecting animals from the New York herd, choosing bulls and cows from four different bloodlines to avoid inbreeding and using his understanding of genetic integrity and herd dynamics to maximize the chances of reproductive success in the new herd. He had hand-fed most of these animals and grown fond of them; he even named four of them after great Indian chiefs—Lone Wolf, Blackdog, Geronimo, and, ironically, Quanah.

Eventually the executive committee of the New York Zoological Society, through the Secretary of Agriculture, offered the United States and its people a special donation. They would give the government twelve to fifteen pure-blood bison (that is, animals that had not been interbred with cattle), provided that the government supplied enough money to fence in grazing grounds in the newly created Wichita preserve. And so, in due time, it was agreed. Roosevelt was able to keep his promise to Quanah Parker, at the same time that the ancient prophecy of the buffalo's return was about to become manifest.
20

Now it was the autumn of 1907, and Quanah Parker stood in the windswept railroad siding in Cache, Oklahoma, to witness something he could scarcely have imagined thirty years earlier. He stood there watching as wranglers offloaded the contents of the Arms Palace horse cars: the shaggy, prehistoric silhouettes of fifteen bison, nine cows and six bulls, each in its own cage like a pampered show horse, emerged from the dimness of the rail cars. An audible sigh went up from the crowd. Old warriors peered through the bars into the cages, showing their grandsons the animals that they had once hunted from horseback in a world now receding into the dimness of memory.

It was a crashing irony that these animals that were being sent
back to repopulate the Great Plains from which they had vanished had been sent from, of all places, New York City, at the behest of a white man named Hornaday, of the New York Zoological Park. The whites who had nearly destroyed the buffalo were now attempting the first animal reintroduction in North American history.
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It was an effort to turn back the bloody pages of time and achieve, to whatever extent might be possible, a kind of redemption.

Observers at the scene said the stone-faced Parker was momentarily overcome with emotion. Then he began helping the men load the caged bison onto open wagons to be transported the twelve miles to the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve.

One big concern was an outbreak of tick-borne “Texas fever,” which had devastated cattle herds in the area. So once the bison arrived at their corral at the park (where they would spend the winter before being released into the reserve in the spring), a veteran cowpuncher named Frank Rush, who'd been put in charge of the operation, had them thoroughly fumigated with tick-killing crude petroleum.
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As a consequence, these “last representatives of a mighty race” would return to their ancestral prairie home reeking of oil and civilization.
23

But the herd thrived under the watchful eye of the old cowboy. Less than a month after their arrival, the first calf was born. Because it came into the world on November 16, 1907, the same day the Oklahoma Territory officially became a state, the calf was named “Oklahoma.” A second calf was born around the same time, and the little bull was named “Hornaday,” in honor of the man who, more than any other person, was responsible for pulling the buffalo back from the brink of extinction. Hornaday, the
New York Times
opined in 1907, “deserves the gratitude of the Nation as the chief preserver from extinction of the American Bison.”
24

By 1919, the American Bison Society had been directly involved in creating nine different bison herds across the United States. One of its most notable accomplishments was the creation of the Montana National Bison Reserve, at the foot of the Mission Range, in western Montana. At the society's request, and with the backing of other conservation organizations, Congress was able to buy and fence in twenty-nine square miles of prime buffalo range. Hornaday spearheaded a massive national campaign to raise the $10,000 needed to buy the bison needed to seed the herd, browbeating the public with shame, coaxing them with the call of duty.

Not everyone responded to his pleas. The
Kansas City Journal
ran a snide editorial deriding Hornaday and the Bison Society as self-important buffoons, pointing out that “President Hornaday is now in the position of having a government reserve in which to place bison, but he hasn't any bison. He has appealed to the country to get him bison so he can protect them, but as yet not a single, solitary beast has been driven up to his front door. He thinks that if he had $10,000, he could buy bison, and then protect them with the money congress
[sic]
has set aside for the purpose; but this is not a cause that appeals strongly to the American public.”
25

In fact, though, it was a cause that
did
appeal to Americans, who contributed enough money for the reserve, and much more, over the ensuing years. By the end of its first decade, Professor Osborn was able to write: “The Society has accomplished the main object for which it was established ten years ago: not only is the American bison no longer in danger of extinction but it is firmly restablished in all parts of this country.”
26

The most vocal enemies of the bison, those men who had at one time sworn undying enmity toward the animals that were the primary source of material and spiritual sustenance for the savages, were now long dead. (The savages themselves were now mostly subdued and confined to reservations, so the immediate threat of war-whoops and tomahawks was receding, even as concern for the buffalo was growing.)

General William Tecumseh Sherman died in 1891, at the age of seventy-one, never having renounced or softened his views on the buffalo. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano, with his fearsome eyebrows and apocalyptic glare, was forced to resign his position in 1875 for gross mismanagement, living out his last years as a self-satisfied bank president in Ohio. General “Little Phil” Sheridan, however—who once famously commented “let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated”—devoted the last days of his life to a personal crusade to save Yellowstone Park and its wildlife, chasing out unscrupulous developers and standing fast against thieves and poachers. When he died of a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-seven, Sheridan was fighting along with Hornaday on the side of the angels. Perhaps even more important, the mood of the country had begun to change, and—at the last possible moment—people began to realize the gravity of what they had very nearly lost.
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Although a geyser of buffalo never issued from the mouth of Mount Scott, nevertheless “a great thing had happened,” historian Douglas Brinkley later wrote. The gift of bison to the people of Oklahoma, to the country, and to the world, engineered by Hornaday, enacted by Roosevelt, and blessed by Quanah Parker, “was a true token of peace, generosity, wisdom, and goodwill.”
28

The story of the return of the American bison from the verge of extinction was an inspiring one, certainly among the most moving and important stories in the history of American conservation. But Hornaday, who was widely credited with having been the most significant single person in that fight, was not one to rest on his laurels. In fact, he wrote, on every pioneer monument in the Great West, there should be a statue of a bronze bison or an antelope with the words “Lest we forget” engraved underneath.
1
As if any more proof were needed, the murders of game wardens Guy Bradley, Columbus McLeod, and Pressly Reeves were lasting reminders that the war for wildlife was often bitter and sometimes bloody, and the outcome was never certain.

Even so, by 1912, there had been huge and lasting battlefield victories in the war. Iowa senator John F. Lacey, an enthusiastic defender of Yellowstone National Park, had become incensed that game wardens were unable to punish poachers of the park's wildlife, and in 1894 he sponsored a bill to empower to the Department of the Interior to arrest and prosecute game-thieves in the park. (He was well acquainted with the lawlessness inside the park; his stagecoach had been robbed there in 1887.)
2
To Hornaday, it seemed incredible that this was progress—how can you have a national park if there were no real laws to protect its wildlife?—but progress it was. A few years later, in 1900, Senator Lacey became best known for the passage of the Lacey Act, which made it illegal to ship from one state to another birds killed in violation of state laws. This was the first truly effective, nationwide
weapon against the plume hunters (though it was not enough to save the life of Guy Bradley). The same year,
Bird-Lore
magazine, started by Frank Chapman and later renamed
Audubon,
proposed having an annual Christmas Bird Count, to replace the shooting competitions traditionally held on that sacred day.
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The American public seemed to be waking from its long and deadly slumber, at long last. The National Audubon Society, born in 1886 when the crusading young editor of
Forest and Stream
magazine, George Bird Grinnell, harnessed the outrage of his readers over the feather trade, suggested a “model bird protection law” to state legislatures; and between 1895 and 1905, thirty-seven states adopted some variation of the law. Hornaday's great friend William Dutcher helped create a national alliance of state Audubon Societies, and in 1905 he became its first president. In 1911, through Dutcher's heroic and unflagging efforts, New York State—the nerve center of the global feather trade—passed the Audubon Act, more familiarly known as the Dutcher Law, prohibiting the sale of native wild birds in the state. As a result, soon after, the streets of New York began to empty of the eerie sight of exotic birds riding along as unwitting passengers on women's heads (except for feathers of farm-raised birds like pheasants and ostriches, which remained legal).
4