Book Review: Mr. Hornaday's War

December 1st... Happy birthday to William Temple Hornaday!

By the closing years of the nineteenth century, just about anybody with an ounce of common sense would have written the American bison (popularly known as the buffalo) off as a lost cause.  The herds that once darkened the Great Plains and sustained the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other plains Indians were now a thing of the past – even the sighting of a solitary animal was considered impossible.  The largest land animal in the New World had been slaughtered for its meat, for its hides, and for the purpose of starving the last free Indians into submission.  So when a pugnacious young taxidermist from the Smithsonian Institute went west in search of bison specimens for a museum display, it’s not surprising that those who knew best told him that he was wasting his time and ought to go home.  We’ll never know how different the world would have been if he had.

William Temple Hornaday was a small man in life, but he has since achieved giant status as a founding father of American conservation.  Read any book of the legacy of zoos in America or the foundation of the conservation movement and his name is sure to pop up once or twice.  He appears as a supporting role in the biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and other giants of the era, but always on the periphery.  At long last, however, he has been given the credit he has been due: an excellent new biography by Stefan Bechtel for once tells the exciting, complicated life of one of the most remarkable men in American history, one who not only saved the American bison from extinction (with, Hornaday might grudgingly acknowledge, some help from a few others), but also changed the world of zoos forever.

Bechtel focuses his narrative on Hornaday’s first great crusade - the salvation of the American bison.  After collecting (read: killing, more on that later) some of the last free bison on the face of the earth for the Smithsonian, Hornaday became an activist agitator for the preservation of the species.   His book The Extermination of the American Bison is perhaps the first wildlife book that not only seeks to educate the public but to inspire it, calling upon the American citizenry to save its vanishing bison.  As the years wore on, Hornaday became increasingly concerned about the fates of fur seals, wetland birds, and other species being hunted into oblivion.  Concern gave way to anger.  Anger gave way to action.

Hornaday’s concern led to the establishment of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park.  Though he was instrumental in establishing the zoo and collecting its first animals, his involvement ended shortly thereafter.  Infighting with Smithsonian Secretary Langley led to his resignation.  What Washington lost New York gained, however; Hornaday was later recruited to plan, build, stock, and run the New York Zoological Park (now known as the Wildlife Conservation Society, informally the Bronx Zoo), what many consider one of the greatest zoos in the world.  Of course, at the time zoos were popping up all over Europe and America.  What made these zoos remarkable, however, is that they were established not only for education or amusement, but for the conservation of species through captive breeding.  Hornaday’s vision was eventually realized with the release of Bronx Zoo bred bison to the plains of the American west.  Hornaday saw himself as a soldier engaged in a war with diverse enemies – hunters, developers, politicians – with the prize being a very existence of wildlife in America.  It was a war that he fought for the rest of his life, and was determined to win.

Hornaday has always been a hero of mine, but like all heroes, he was human, and had his faults, which Bechtel does not shy from showing.  He did, after all, begin his career as a hunter, a hired-hitman for science who traveled the world collecting specimens for sale to museums.  I don’t know how many bison were left on the plains when Hornaday went out seeking specimens for his exhibit, but there were twenty less by the time he was done.  His expedition to Borneo resulted in the killing of over forty orangutans, a total that would make most modern poachers blush.  Hornaday of course was not alone in this – his good friend Theodore Roosevelt was also one of the “repentant butchers” who turned to conservation after having spent much of his life gunning down various animals (and kept on hunting even afterwards…)

Bechtel also calls plenty of attention to perhaps the most infamous escapade of Hornaday’s career: Ota Benga, the pygmy in the zoo.  The author explores Hornaday’s racial attitudes and, as he would with any Victorian-era naturalist, finds plenty of faults.  He does, however, refrain from taking the easy road and painting Hornaday as a flat-out racist, but portrays him as a complicated man in all aspects, including his relations with other races.  His exploitation of Ota Benga is weighed against his time in India, when he tended to famine victims and personally led a search party for a missing Indian child.

A person should be judged, I’ve always felt, by the world that they left behind them.  William Temple Hornaday, for all of his faults and occasional excesses, should feel no shame in this regard.  He created two of the world’s finest zoos, both of which have contributed tremendously to the conservation of endangered species.  He helped save the American bison, and while the species will never reclaim its former glory, it at least is no longer in danger of extinction.  Perhaps most importantly, he helped awaken a passion for wildlife conservation in the hearts and minds of millions of fellow citizens for generations.  I consider myself one of these, and I thank Hornaday in part for that.  Likewise, I also thank Stefan Bechtel, for helping to share the story of William Temple Hornaday with the world.

Mr. Hornaday’s War at Amazon.com