Free Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel Page A

avatar to crumble like a tower of sand.
    One of his neighbors on the Little Missouri, a rancher named Frank Roberts, later said that Roosevelt “was rather a slim-lookin’ feller when he came out here, but after he lived out here his build got wider and heavier . . . he got to be lookin’ more like a rugged man.” He earned the cowboys’ respect by working long hours in the saddle, by lassooing and branding and sleeping on the ground like everybody else. He went up against cattle thieves and lawless gangs and learned to break and ride wild cow ponies. He became as robust and fearless as any frontiersman. His experiences in the Dakotas “took the snob out of me,” Roosevelt later said. It did something else, too: “I have always said I would not have been President, had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.” 17
    Like Roosevelt, William Temple Hornaday was a man of almost inhuman ambition. Back in the winter of 1886, before his train had even returned to Union Station in Washington after the “last buffalo hunt,” Hornaday had laid out four strategic tasks for himself. Together, they would involve enough effort to consume several lifetimes, but he immediately began pushing ahead on all four tasks simultaneously. Newly energized by abject fear, he became a blur of action.
    His first strategic task would be to organize, create, and complete the magnificent six-figure habitat group of bison for display at the National Museum. Nothing could communicate the almost transcendant nobility of these animals but the animals themselves, displayed in their natural habitat.
    The ideal thing, of course, would be to show the American public the living, breathing animal, just as Hornaday had seen them on the great plains—the big bulls breaking into a gallop, throwing up clots of snow; the frightened cows, crowding together to protect their young;the sound and the smell and the thrill of them. But that was impossible—and even seeing them in a zoo was improbable because there was only one real zoo in America at that time, and that one was only twelve years old—so Hornaday would have to show the American public six mounted animals, re-created with as much realism as his talents could conjure.
    To reconstruct these animals out of the formless skins and bones the party had brought back from Montana, Hornaday would use the multistage “clay manikin process” that he had developed at the taxidermy table, which was a dramatic improvement over the primitive “rag-and-stuff method” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. First, he completely discarded all the bones and innards of the animal (in the process, eliminating the skeleton as a source of support). Then he carefully cleaned, dried, and preserved the skin, cutting around bloodstains, bullet holes, and other evidence of a violent death. Then he sculpted a plaster cast of the buffalo’s body, supported by a wooden frame or armature wrapped in rope. This artful creation, called a
manikin,
then was coated with textured clay to give the animals’ forms their final contours. Essentially, he had created a life-size statue of a buffalo, over which the preserved skin, head, hooves, and other parts were stretched. In his famous 1891 textbook
Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting,
Hornaday maintained—with his usual bravado—that the clay manikin method was the only proper way to “produce a specimen which fitly represents the species.” But not everybody could do it. The task required the field observations of a wildlife biologist, the deft artistic hand of a sculptor, and the practical ingenuity of an engineer, especially when it came to re-creating the 1,600-pound bull.
    What Hornaday wanted to do was, as far as possible, simply “bring ’em back alive”—to display birds, mammals, and now buffalo as he had actually seen them in their natural habitat, in a