Academic scare of my life!

In 1907 Crane & Company of Topeka, Kansas published ex-buffalo hunter John Cook’s memoir Border and the Buffalo. Cook’s book stands out in the historiography of the buffalo literature for its singular account of General Philip Sheridan advising the Texas state legislature in 1875 to abandon an effort to protect the buffalo. Cook quotes Sheridan as praising the buffalo hunters for advancing civilization, taming the Native Americans, and making the Great Plains habitable for white settlers, their farms, and livestock. Moreover, in Cook’s telling Sheridan advises that the legislators supply the buffalo hunters with ammunition to aid them in their service to manifest destiny. Cook’s story with his juicy Sheridan “quote”, implying that the US Army supported the buffalo slaughter as a total war measure to destroy the Native American resistance was repeated all through the secondary literature on the buffalo all throughout the twentieth century. And, I will confess that I too cited this “quote” in my master’s thesis. 

In American Serengeti— a most enjoyable history of the charismatic megafauna of the Great Plains — environmental historian Dan Flores discredits Cook’s account. Granted, he is not the first historian to do so. At the least Cook’s story is an uncorroborated tale that cannot be verified in any other source, and at worst is a total fabrication. Flores sees the use of the Cook quote as an example of how untrained popular historians trusted a source too uncritically and kept repeating the error decade after decade. 

This is the context in which I got the scare of my academic life. As I was listening to the audiobook of American Serengtion my noon walk I got hit like a bolt out of the clear blue with the biggest shock of my academic life. Here are the words: “It has appeared in books as recent as a 2012 biography of William T. Hornaday himself (p. 122).” The “It” is in reference to Cook’s fabricated story. This scared the living hell out me because all I could think of is that this might be a reference to my biography of Hornaday, Most Defiant Devil(MDD). Now, I have to say that MDDwas published in 2013, but I did not catch the year in my initial hearing. Did I somehow quote Cook’s Sheridan, even though I knew it was suspicious? Was I so bogged down in all the other details that I somehow missed some old note card made its way on into the manuscript? As soon as I returned to my office, I pulled the copy of MDDoff my shelf and was relieved to find that this was no reference to MDD. Instead, Flores was referring to Stefan Bechtel’s Mr. Hornaday’s War, another example of a popular historian who did not consider the sources critically. What’s more, Bechtel cites a website for the quote, not even the original source. Although I was greatly relieved that Flores was referring to another biography, I must candidly admit that I was sorely disappointed that he had not consulted mine!