Mr. Hornaday's War (31 page)

But if an assault was beaten back in one place, the enemy seemed to mount another one somewhere else. In October 1910, one of Hornaday's allies in the hunting world came down to the New York Zoo to bring the director some unsettling news. At that time, a few states had laws on the books prohibiting the sale of two or three species of native game, but not one state had a comprehensive law prohibiting sale of
all
birds and game. As a consequence, “market hunting”—the grim, relentless, year-round slaughter of birds and mammals for sale to groceries and restaurants—continued unabated. And nowhere were the market hunters more indefatigable, or more vocally opposed to any attempt to regulate them, than on Long Island.

The sportsman told Hornaday that “the Long Island bunch,” apparently sensing that their days might be numbered, had formed three organizations whose intent was to “wipe off our statute books all the laws for the protection of feathered game. They are going to send a man to the legislature expressly to do whatever they tell him to do about game; and they intend to make a clean sweep of all the wild life protection laws they don't like.”
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To Hornaday, this grim news was like a bee in a bull's ear.

“Well, then, damn their souls, we will give them the fight of their lives!”
the director thundered.
“We will introduce a bill to stop the sale of game, and carry the war right into the enemy's camp!”

The old soldier sprang into action. With the blessing of Grant and Osborn, his bosses at the zoo, Hornaday turned out a blistering four-page circular meant to enrage the wildlife lovers of New York and raise money for a campaign to pass a comprehensive game law in New York State. He pointed out that New York City was not only the greatest market for ducks, geese, and shore birds that were being slaughtered along the Atlantic Coast, but it was also a “fence” for birds killed illegally in other states all across the Eastern seaboard. He mentioned the mausoleum of native birds found in one New York cold storage locker in 1902, including 8,058 snow buntings, 7,607 sandpipers, and 7,003 snipe. “I did not ‘beg' for support,” Hornaday wrote later. “I
demanded
it!” Contributions poured in, including gifts from plutocrats like Henry Clay Frick and George Eastman.

Once the campaign discretionary fund could pay for it, Hornaday hired a young lawyer named Lawrence Trowbridge, who drafted a bill, went up to the state capital in Albany, and began trying to enlist support among legislators. To sponsor the bill, Trowbridge and Hornaday chose Senator Howard Bayne, of Staten Island, who later confessed that at first he was “perfectly certain that [the bill] never would be passed.” But the bill gained momentum, and Governor John Dix even hosted a lavish state dinner at the executive mansion in support of what was now known as the Bayne bill.

Sensing that the tide of popular opinion was beginning to turn against them, the market-gunners of Long Island sent Hornaday a proposed compromise, “to let the bill go through.” But when one of the Bayne bill's supporters asked Hornaday what he thought of these proposed concessions, Hornaday bellowed, “No compromises with the enemy.
Never!
If we make any compromise now, it will be sure to rise up and plague us in the future.” When various friends and supporters began to lose their nerve, claiming the bill was “too drastic,” Hornaday declared that he would “go through with it if it killed me.” Eventually, when the bill came up for a vote in the legislature, it passed the Assembly unanimously, and with only one dissenting vote in the Senate.

At 7:15 the next morning, in a Washington hotel room, Hornaday
dashed off a letter to Josephine, addressing her as “My Dearly Beloved Empress Josephine and Queen of Hearts”:

In 57 1/2 hours I will hear the Twinkledog's honest bark bay in deepmouthed welcome as he heels it down the road to meet us! Roll Swift around, ye Wheels of Time, and bring the welcome Hour! . . . Yes, the Bayne bill has
passed
the Assembly and victory is ours! The hour to shout has now arrived . . .! I have refused to feel elated until the bill had passed both houses. Now, however, I feel
thankful
that such a sweet victory has been given us. This signal victory will lead to many others elsewhere. We will make drastic protection
measures fashionable.
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The Bayne bill was a huge victory for the game birds of the eastern United States, and similar laws were quickly passed in Massachusetts and California. Still, Hornaday could not resist a certain amount of ill-tempered grousing when he recalled this fight years later. “What did I get out of it?” he wrote in
Thirty Years War for Wild Life.
“Nothing but a few brief mentions of my name by my jealous rivals far down the list of those who ‘assisted in passing the Bayne law.' Not one publication (so far as I am aware) ever gave me one-half the credit for initiative and leadership to which my efforts were entitled; and that same spirit has continued right down to this day—save in the inner circle of my most devoted and generous allies.”
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Nevertheless, he and his army of partisans continued to rack up significant victories for wildlife. The Weeks-McLean migratory bird bill was passed into federal law in 1913, after first failing to pass Congress and seeming to be almost dead. It was followed by a treaty with Canada to restrict further the hunting and sale of migratory birds. At last, a web of regulations and restrictions that would protect the wildlife of the United States from poachers, pot-hunters, and plumers was beginning to take shape. There were even a few lonely and courageous men who volunteered to serve as wardens in the forgotten places where these crimes against nature were being committed.

Yet still, everywhere Hornaday turned there seemed to be another alarming story unfolding—more dangerous, exhausting, upaid work to be done, fighting hunters, lobbyists, members of Congress, and the somnolent public to protect something that many of them might never see—a mountain sheep on a distant crag, an albatross far out at
sea. The Bayne law was a great achievement, but it applied to only one state. What about all the other states?

Through all these bitter battles, some victorious and some not, “Dearest Josie” remained Hornaday's faithful companion and confidante. When they were apart, her letters arrived almost as punctually as the Sun. One day in April 1909, when he was at work in New York and Josephine and their daughter, Helen, were spending a few days at Bethany Beach, in Maryland, she wrote to him:

Dearly Beloved,

Helen suggests that I do not write you today since she is writing, but how can I allow a mail to go without writing some sort of tribute to you, my own . . . this distance makes one hopelessly helpless. . . .

Last night we took a charming stroll through fragrant sighing pines, yet within sound of the booming ocean. Oh I longed for you, dear heart, and my sighs that it could not be seemed taken up and echoed by the pines. . . . Oh you must someday come here and wander hand in hand with me in these quiet, restful places. . . . No matter where I go, or what I see, there is a sense of incompleteness ever with me, but if my dear comrade were beside me, nothing more could I ask.

Hornaday was by now a respected and well-known figure, constantly in the papers, and he used his growing national reputation as a soapbox from which to preach the gospel of conservation. The downside of his prominence was that he was continually approached by people who came to him with some desperate story seeking his help to save a threatened marsh, a patch of woods, or yet another species that seemed to be under attack. Most of these worthy requests he had to turn down, simply because he was utterly consumed by all his duties, but in 1907, a gentle young watercolorist and amateur naturalist named Henry Wood Elliot came to him with a plea which Hornaday could not refuse.
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In 1872, at the age of twenty-six, Elliot had been sent under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. government to the remote Pribilof Islands, 300 miles off the west coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea, to study the Alaskan fur seal. Elliot became the first
person to study, paint—and become enchanted by—these complex and intelligent animals, whose scientific name,
Ursus marinus,
means “sea bear,” and which congregated in immense rookeries on the fogbound rocks of the Pribilofs.

Little was known about them except that they had such luxuriant pelts that hundreds of thousands of them were being killed by American and Canadian sealers every year. Elliot became a firsthand observer of the massacre, and after he enlisted Hornaday's help, the two men spent the next eight years waging what Hornaday later called a “war of the greatest bitterness ever waged in any fight over a wild animal species.” The seal population plummeted from 130,000 to less than 30,000, but at the end of the day, it was Elliot, Hornaday, and the sea bears of Alaska who emerged as the winners.

One thing that became evident in this great battle royal was that, without
international
cooperation, any treaty was useless. After all, the U.S. Congress passed a law in 1898 to stop pelagic (open-sea) sealing by American sealers—but that simply left the rookeries ripe for plundering by fleets of Japanese and Russian sealers. International borders are figments of the human imagination; they mean nothing to the ancient migrations and movements of wild populations. (More modern attempts to hammer out international whaling treaties encounter the same difficulties.) It was not until 1911 that the Hay-Elliot Fur Seal Treaty was passed, between Japan, Britain, Russia, and the United States. Stopping all pelagic sealing immediately, it was the first international treaty to protect wildlife. It also put in place a complete five-year ban on
any
sealing anywhere on the islands. By 1930, there were believed to be a million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Although Hornaday is often credited with having saved the fur seal from extinction, in his own account of what happened he gives most of the credit to Elliot, a man with “unquenchable personal courage.”
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Yet even so, these victories often came at such personal cost that they felt almost like defeats. “I have many ex-friends who never will forgive me for having started that fur-seal campaign,” Hornaday later wrote. By now he was nearing sixty, and he didn't have the stamina for the fight that he once had.

Furthermore, it made his soul sag to come face to face with the reckless blood-lust that was so common throughout the country. For
so many, it didn't matter that the fur seal would likely be wiped off the face of the Earth. That last bundle of sealskins, that last dollar, was all some people ever thought about. So long as there was profit to be had, so long as there was one last nickel to be made, every creature that walked or flew was in peril. And by some dark perversity of human nature, the rarer a species became, the closer it got to its absolute and utter end, the more coveted a trophy it became. It had very nearly happened to the buffalo, and now it had almost happened to the fur seal as well. Didn't anybody ever learn? Was there no end to the greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness of man?

It was necessary and important to fight for federal, state, and local laws to protect wildlife, but there was something else much more fundamental that seemed to be lacking in America: a sense of
moral responsibility,
and
moral outrage,
at what was happening. Wildlife did not
belong
to the hunters, who comprised only about 3 percent of the population, Hornaday argued in his books and articles. It didn't
belong
to the people who lived in rural areas, who tended to think of local birds and game as their birthright. It “belonged”—if it belonged to anyone—to all the people of the United States, and to the world, so it was a shared national responsibity, as well as a national blessing. William Temple Hornaday may not have added any new species to the incunabula of science, but he knew how to stir people's sense of ownership and outrage and, in this way, how to change the world.

In 1911, late at night, after his duties as director of the New York Zoological Park and all the rest of his work were through, William Temple Hornaday would sit down to write one of the angriest and most important books about endangered species ever written. It was to be called
Our Vanishing Wild Life,
and it would catalog, in text and photographs, the appalling condition of birds and game across the United States. Wild things of all kinds were being driven to the brink of extinction not by poachers but by the “armies of destruction”—millions of legally licensed hunters taking to the woods in a country where the hunting laws, such as they were, had essentially been written
by hunters,
to maximize the killing of game. “It is time for all men to be told in the plainest terms that there never has existed, anywhere in historic times, a volume of wild life so great that civilized man could not quickly exterminate it by his methods of destruction.”
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Even the victories of conservationists seemed tenuous in the face of such unrelenting firepower. It was true that, by the second decade
of the twentieth century, the profusion of feathered hats that had crowded the streetcars and boulevards of New York back in 1886 had now almost disappeared. But that didn't mean the feather trade was beaten—far from it, in fact. From his office in the Bronx, all Hornaday had to do was hop a streetcar over to the Manhattan clothing store of E. & S. Meyers, at 688 Broadway, and take a look in the shop window. There on display, like the raiments of angels, were
600
plumes and skins of birds-of-paradise, to be sold for millinery purposes. Birds-of-paradise were, in truth, almost too beautiful for this world. One species had a glimmering green gorget at the throat; others had spectacular explosions of yellow or crimson plumes, with iridescent green and black markings down the neck. Feathers of these birds were so coveted that, between 1904 and 1908, 155,000 carcasses were sold at auction in the London feather markets, according to one contemporary accounting.
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