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

scientifically responsible way, so that the public could actually
see
things that they had never seen before. Even seeing live animals in a zoo did not really convey what the animals looked like in their natural habitat. Animals were so embedded in their habitats, having actually been
created
by their surroundings, that the two could not really be separated, Hornaday believed.
    This was especially true of the American bison, which was a creature of the immense vastnesses of the great plains. To a large extent,the buffalo was a physical embodiment of those huge spaces, that vaulting sky, those unimaginable distances. It was a touching irony that, in actuality, Hornaday was re-creating this sense of imagined immensity inside a sixteen-foot-by-twelve-foot-by-ten-foot glass box, in a museum, in a city more than two thousand miles away from the place these animals had lived once. Even so, what Hornaday was trying to do in this exhibit was communicate what he had seen out on the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, glimpsing the last remnants of the buffalo herds in mixed groups of bulls, cows, and calves. He wanted to bring museum visitors from all over the country closer than they had ever come—perhaps, regrettably, closer than anyone
would ever
come—to
Bison americanus
in the wild. His great aspirations seemed fulfilled when, in 1888, a scholarly survey of American museum taxidermy called Hornaday’s buffalo group “a triumph of the taxidermist’s art, and, so far as known, it surpasses in scientific accuracy, and artistic design and treatment, anything of the kind yet produced.” 18
    Hornaday’s second strategic task was to write an angry book about the history of the buffalo slaughter and distribute it as widely as possible. He’d call it
The Extermination of the American Bison,
as if the end of the species were a fait accompli. On the train back home, and later in his small upstairs study in Washington, late at night, he began pounding out this furious testament and call to arms.
    The third, and perhaps most ambitious, task was to take the first steps toward creating a national zoo in Washington, D.C. All the great cities of Europe had public zoological gardens, but there was nothing of the kind in the young nation’s capital. He began imagining that a small herd of live bison might be kept in a spacious enclosure and perhaps, if captive breeding proved possible, the herd might grow to the point where some animals could be released into the wild. It would be the first reintroduction of captive-bred animals into a wild population ever attempted.
    Last, Hornaday felt that he neeeded to create some kind of a political organization that would draw attention to the deadly peril facing the buffalo and harness the public’s outrage in order to
do something.
He’d lobby Congress to draft legislation that would stop the buffalo slaughter and create reserves and ranges in the West to the bring the bison back from the precipice of extinction, if possible.
    But the task of setting up a political organization, Hornaday recognized, was not one that he was terribly well suited for. He felt farmore at home at a taxidermy worktable or in a rude hunting camp than hobnobbing with the muckety-mucks on Capital Hill or the power brokers of Wall Street.
    Enter his new friend, Theodore Roosevelt (who hated the name “Teddy,” because that’s what Alice had called him). With more of a natural instinct for politics and better connections in high places, Roosevelt also was envisioning one of the first conservation organizations in America. The year before he and Hornaday met, Roosevelt had formed an organization he called the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation group named after two of Roosevelt’s heroes, Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett. These men, who were exemplars of “ethical hunting,” the notion of the “fair chase,” and lovers of wilderness, would stand as the guiding