"Keep the Bowels open, at all hazards" and more advice on fighting the Spanish-American War in 1898

Unlike most Americans in 1898, forty-three year old zoologist, author, taxidermist, conservationist, and hunter, William T. Hornaday had spent considerable time in the tropics "collecting" wildlife specimens for Henry A. Ward's Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Ward sold the skins, bones, and sundry other materials collected by Hornaday and dozens of other young men to the nation's growing number of natural history museums. Honraday traveled and hunted extensively in Florida, Cuba, several smaller Caribbean islands, Venezuela, India, Malaysia, and Borneo between 1874 and 1879. Two Years in  the Jungle, a memoir of his experiences in Asia, was published in 1886. 

Like a patriotic American who believed his country was doing the correct thing in declaring war on Spain, Hornaday offered advice for better living in tropical conditions based on his own experiences. In one regard, though, he was either sugarcoating his own memory or being downright disingenuous in stating that his most debilitating experience had been "slight attacks of jungle fever" in India. In fact, as his letters from the times show, he suffered several crippling attacks. In one such instance, he survived thanks to the ministrations of a good samaritan. He offered his advice for the Cuba campaign in the pages of the New York Sun newspaper on May 22, 1898 (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1898-05-22/ed-1/seq-4/).

Here are his suggestions: 

1. Sleep in a hammock. "This is for the  very simple reason that the malarious exhalations from the earth,  from the stagnant water and decaying vegetation, are densest and most dangerous at the surface of the ground." Hammocks had the added advantage of being handy for other purposes (i.e. carrying wounded), light, and easy to carry. 

2. Use a mosquito shirt. By this he meant more of what we might think of as a screen that would create a tent over the hammock to keep mosquitos out during sleep.  

3. Don't drink any water without boiling it first. 

4. Wear a ventilated hat that has little or no direct contact with the head, such as a pith or cork helmet. He particularly warned against the wearing of felt or straw hats because they were too warm and invited heatstroke. One can see in images of the famous Rough Riders and other units that this advice was ignored. 

5. Never rest or sleep in wet clothes. Therefore, always have a dry outfit wrapped in the rubber blanket in your pack to protect against dampness.  He doesn't mention much else about clothing, i.e. no comments about wearing heavy wool uniforms during summer in a tropical environment. Nor does he state outright that a rubber blanket is a necessity.

6. Be temperate in habits. Don't eat too much meat. Don't eat any unripe fruits. Drinking alcohol sparingly.  This is pretty standard thinking among the American middle class of the day. Bananas are the one food he recommended as being nutritious and tasty. I'm sure he didn't foresee the gross cans of meat that made soldiers violently ill.  

7. You got it, keep the bowels open. And he recommended some sort of flannel bandage around the midsection for diarrhea. Sounds kinda like a diaper.

8. Lastly, don't overdo the quinine. His experience is that it was an effectiveness wore off with use. So, save it for when you really need it.

Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts

Instead of a more traditional review of Beloved Beasts, I am going to provide my three biggest takeaways from this book. I come to Beloved Beasts as an environmental historian. Although familiar with the full range of the subject, most of my research and expertise (such as it is) is in the first part of the book, the years prior to World War II, especially the conservation movement of the Progressive Era. Before proceeding, I do want to clarify that Beloved Beasts is not a book written for specialists in the field. It is indeed an excellent introduction for anyone who is deeply concerned about the status of wildlife in the world today and wants to know how we got here and what has been done to protect animals over the prior century. In addition to historical research, Michelle Nijhuis includes some of her own original reporting and experiences. This gives the book a very personal feel. 

First takeaway is that between 2002 and 2019 1800 people “were murdered in the course of defending land, water, plants, and animals from poaching and other human insults (p. 7).” That is a staggering number, of course. As a specialist in the conservation movement of the Progressive Era, Guy Bradley’s name and story is very familiar to me. Bradley was an agent hired by the National Association of Audubon Societies to protect herons and egrets in the Everglades because Florida did not enforce laws against hunting. He was murdered in 1905 by poachers and became a martyr to the cause of wildlife protection. His death clearly demonstrated the inherent violence of market hunters who slaughtered wildlife for the plumage trade. Every conservationist of the day knew his name and story. It saddens me that there is no such recognition for the 1800 people who were killed since 2002. 

 

Second takeaway is that over 18,000 new species are classified every year. For whatever reason, it amazes me that we are discovering so many new species every year. Yet, with deforestation, especially rainforests, and destruction to other ecosystems, we are killing even more off without even identifying them. Again, like Bradley, it’s a matter of recognition. Everyone in the early twentieth century could name the recently extinct species: auk, Carolina parakeets, dodo, passenger pigeon, etc. They became a rallying cry, like “Remember the Maine” that activists used to remind the public of what extinction meant. It helped that they were somewhat charismatic wildlife, compared to smaller snails, frogs, insects, and other less charming species that make up the bulk of more recent extinct species. Even so, we cannot memorialize them if we did not know they ever existed. I know that this is a very human-centric perspective, but it not knowing shrouds the impact of our actions and limits our capacity to convince others who do not see this these invisible extinctions as an ecological or even moral problem.  

 

Third takeaway is that mistakes were made. This is not a story of a logical unfolding of a single, unified movement. Bad things were done for what seemed like good reasons, good outcomes emerged from poor reasons, there were numerous policy reversals, experts and scientists fought amongst themselves, and other inconsistences. What seemed right in 1910 was not true in 1930, let alone in 2010. When Rosalie Edge, for example, confronted the Audubon Society in the 1930s, she was literally taking on the established consensus view of wildlife protection. Her effort to expand protection to hawks, eagles, and other predatory birds was less a simple policy change than a total paradigm shift. I was familiar with Edge, but Nijhuis intrigued me with the story of how Elinor Ostrom took on conventional wisdom, especially Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” thesis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not all “new” approaches are so new. Much as Guy Bradley was a former poacher hired to catch market hunters, a century later the same logic is being deployed to protect elephants and other targeted species in Africa. In Namibia former poachers are hired to protect rhinoceroses and other endangered species. While this is producing some tangible results, the necessary relationship and trust building is very time consuming when there is so little to spare.

Crusading Spirits: David Brower and William Hornaday

Prior to The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss published by Columbia University Press in 2016, my most thorough introduction to environmentalist David Brower came from John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Arch Druid (1971). While it has been a long time since I read McPhee’s account of dialogue between arch-nemesis’ Brower and Bureau of Reclamation Director Floyd Dominy during a rafting trip, Brower came across to me in that work as amiable and casual. That is definitely not that the characterization given by Wyss who, in contrast, depicts Brower as manic, domineering, and demanding. While he may have been charming to meet, he was also a stern taskmaster and troublesome subordinate who followed his own moral compass to the great consternation of his employers who found him difficult to keep focused. As I read through Brower’s life, I kept noting some striking similarities to William Temple Hornaday. Hornaday is not mentioned at all in the index, and I would not be surprised if Brower had never even heard of him in anything more than a passing reference. 

Hornaday focused almost all his conservation efforts exclusively on wildlife while Brower devoted himself primarily to protecting natural landscapes. Like Brower, Hornaday caused his employers at the Bronx Zoo constant headaches. Both Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn were exasperated with Hornaday’s endless fights with everyone over everything. Anything from a seemingly simple exchange of specimens with the American Museum to complex negotiations with the city of New York turned into a brawl. Hornaday’s employers did not appreciate either the stinging barbs that Hornaday, in his zeal for the cause for wildlife protection, directed at his fellow conservations (including someone like George Bird Grinnell who was a close personal friend to Grant) or the fact that battled his adversaries as if it was a no-holds barred street fight. Hornaday publicly shamed and humiliated his adversaries and refused to play by the Queensbury rules when it came to his dealings with the gentleman sportsman. Like Brower’s employers at the Sierra Club, Hornaday’s at the New York Zoological Society eventually decided he was too hot to handle. After a prolonged battle with Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Biological Survey, and John B. Burnham, among others, Hornaday was to some extent forced to retire. 

Like Brower who went on to found Friends of the Earth, Hornaday would not be silenced by the New York Zoological Society. Long before his retirement, he formed the Wildlife Protection Fund, an endowment of $100,000 raised from wealthy contributors, that allowed him the freedom to campaign for his own causes in his own way outside of the auspices and control of the New York Zoological Society. Like Brower’s Friends of the Earth, Hornaday’s organization allowed him to take a much more radical, passionate stance.

Like Brower, Hornaday was a pioneer in the use of media and advertising. When he was with the Sierra Clun Brower produced stunning photography-books and ran full-page ads in major newspapers supporting his causes. Fifty years prior to Brower’s use of these techniques, Hornaday had done similar things. He was the first person to write a book devoted exclusively to wildlife protection, Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913). He also pioneered in the use of photographs in his publications, which was then an expensive and new technology. When Hornaday’s publishers balked at the expense, his wealthy friend and patron Andrew Carnegie financed the projects. Hornaday also used the new medium of film in the cause, such as when he and T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society showed a clip of egrets being killed and skinned in their lobbying campaign to persuade Congress in 1913 to support a ban on plumage imports as part of Woodrow Wilson’s tariff revision. They were ultimately successful in accomplishing this historic and long-sought objective of wildlife protectionists.

Both men were uncompromising and came to that position after learning some lessons the hard way. For Brower it was acceding to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam to protect Dinosaur National Monument. For Hornaday, it was working with sportsmen and even gun manufacturers. In both instances, Brower and Hornaday felt  betrayed and became unyielding in their pursuit of what they considered the pure and just cause. 

Both men were workaholics. Brower to the extent, according to Wyss, that he damaged his marriage and even relationship to his children. While Hornaday’s marriage and relation with his daughter remained solid as bedrock, he worked long days as director of the Bronx Zoo followed by long nights and weekends writing. He wrote, as he mentioned in several letters over the years, until he could no longer keep his eyes open.

Both men were builders. Brower took a small California mountaineering club and turned it into an influential national environmental organization. Hornaday built the largest zoo in the world from scratch and made it the international standard in animal conservation and education.

The last similarity that I wish to bring up is that both Brower and Hornaday relentlessly battled federal governmental agencies. For Brower, it was the Bureau of Reclamation. For Hornaday, it was the Bureau of Biological Survey, forerunner to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Both were scathing in denouncing these agencies, their motives, their use of science, and their unhealthy connections to business interests. 

  

I am not sure what all this means. Perhaps, the most that can be teased out of this is that agents of change can be prickly, principled, and unyielding characters unwilling to accept things as they are when they see things as they should be. 

William Hornaday and Gun Control

Was author, conservationist, and zoologist William T. Hornaday (1854-1937) a gun control advocate?

One might think so and make that argument as David Kopel did in the Washington Post in June 2017. You can read the story here. Basically, his argument is that because Hornaday advocated for a limitations in the use of pump and automatic shotguns and silencers for hunting, he advanced the cause of gun control. The guest host of the Thomas Jefferson Hour radio show and podcast, David Swensen, equated the shotgun regulations with gun control, although his was more a passing comment and he did not mention Hornaday. Here is a link to the show.

The introduction of pump and automatic shotguns in the first years of the twentieth century alarmed Hornaday. He was gravely concerned that Americans killed wildlife, particularly birds, exponentially, while animals reproduced arithmetically. In other words, hunters killed wild animals at a much greater rate than they could naturally reproduce. In time, Hornaday believed, we would exterminate nearly all animals, if his contemporaries did not stop the slaughter. He reckoned that would occur by 1950. Hornaday's preferred solution was to ban the use of these deadly weapons, but failing that his fall back position was to limit them to a maximum of three rounds. Hunters, including the conservationist sportsman, resisted this. Every time Hornaday went on a rant about shotguns, George Bird Grinnell dropped a dime on him to his pal Madison Grant. Yes, that Madison Grant! Notorious, Nazi-inspiring racist that he was, Grant was also a conservationist, Hornaday's boss at the Bronx Zoo, and Grinnell's friend. Finally, in 1935, after more than thirty years of Hornaday's agitation, the federal government implemented the three cartridge limit. An old and embittered Hornaday thought it was too little, too late. We still have a limit on cartridges. A plastic plug is included with any new pump shotgun purchase. You can read all about in my biography of Hornaday, The Most Defiant Devil.

I am not going to say that this isn't gun control. But, I do want to demonstrate that Hornaday's views on guns was quite complicated. In 1925 the Society for the Prevention of Crime offered a $2,500 prize for the best plan to reduce crime in New York City. Hornaday submitted his proposal on December 10, 1925 (a copy is in Hornaday's Wildlife Conservation Society papers at the Bronx Zoo). Hornaday hated Italians (he devoted a chapter in Our Vanishing Wildlife to how Italians were killing songbirds) and considered them natural criminals. He was alarmed by the growth and brazenness of organized crime in the 1920s. He was particularly concerned about the spirit of lawlessness during prohibition in New York City.

What was Hornaday's proposal? Among other things he wanted to repeal the Sullivan Law that required handgun owners to get a permit to carry their weapons concealed. Moreover, he wanted to encourage all homeowners, business owners, and any "custodian of money" to purchase a handgun. "It is utterly impossible to prevent by law, " he wrote, "or even to check, the sale of firearms and ammunition to members of the criminal classes, and it is a waste of time to attempt it." He also called for longer prison terms, penal colonies, hard labor, increased application of the death penalty, and three strikes and you are out sentencing. Hornaday urged a total overhaul of the criminal code. And, lastly, he considered the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution "dry rot." "They should be repealed, or otherwise nullified," he added. Going even further, he suggested that courts compel defendants to testify under oath. It should be noted be never suggested the repeal of prohibition.

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! 

Context, Caro's Working, pt. 2

One of the most important tasks of the historian is to put events, movements, people, places, etc., in historical context. It really gets to the heart of the questions of “why and how” did something happen. Robert Caro takes this to new levels when it came to providing the “context” of Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) youth in west Texas. What was it like? What relationships did he have with his family? What role did the environment play in his development? 

An urban New Yorker, graduate of an Ivy League university, and Jew could not have been more distant from background of the thirty-sixth president. Caro quickly realized that he had no understanding of where LBJ had come from and decided that the only solution was to immerse himself in west Texas. To wit, his superhumanly supportive wife, Ina Caro, quipped, “Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?” (p.103) Nonetheless, the couple departed for hill country in 1976, only three years after LBJ’s death. It stood to reason that Caro could meet enough of his subject’s contemporaries that he could get a good flavor of what it must have been like for LBJ. 

The Caros lived in Johnson country for three years, getting to know his former classmates and neighbors and emerged from the experience with a much better understanding of the environment that made LBJ. It was a hot, dusty, isolated country, mostly poor, and without electrification or running water. To some extent this explains LBJ’s notorious crudity, but also what inspired the future congressmen, senator, and president to his New Dealerism.

Family, of course, provided another context, that was rooted in the same place. Caro got to know LBJ’s surviving siblings. One of the most interesting parts of Workingis his description of how he finally tricked Sam Johnson, Lyndon’s youngest brother, to tell him what the family life had really been like. The problem was that Sam was a notorious bullshitter and Caro discounted most of the information that he received from that source. But how could he get some reliable information from Sam? In a most novel approach, Caro convinced the National Park Service to let him into the LBJ childhood home, put Sam Johnson at the kitchen table, stood behind him, and asked him questions, ones designed to probe deeper into the visceral experience of being at the Johnson kitchen table. Sam seemed almost hypnotized by the experience and described the family scene in intimate detail. And it proved that the kitchen table was not to be a warm and fuzzy place where family members came to break bread after a weary day; instead, it was a place of frequent clashes, some even violent, between Lyndon and his father. Poor Sam Johnson, the elder and father of the Lyndon and Sam, was a classic ne’er-do-well, prone to drink, hyperbole, and poor decisions, especially in financial matters. Young Lyndon came to see his father as a loser and source of embarrassment. This upbringing imparted a relentless drive to succeed. One can also see where LBJ got his west Texas populism, hunger for wealth, womanizing, and willingness to skirt legality. 

I am not arguing that every graduate student should immerse themselves in some obscure, out-of-the-way place for three years during their dissertation to understand context. Certainly not! I did not follow that path myself, other than visiting the Bronx Zoo, which I had to do anyway for my research on William Temple Hornaday. Moreover, from what I picked up somewhere, what had once been Hornaday’s father’s farm is mostly paved over and subdivided. As many hardships as farm life possessed in the 1990s when I started my research, it would be hard, I would think, to get the same sense of what life was like 150 years before from an Iowa immersion. That level of understanding for me came through more clearly in his mother’s letters to her family Indiana in the 1850s and to her son Minos Miller during the Civil War. Her letters ooze with regret for having left a more settled and comfortable life for scratching out a new homestead from the earth in what still felt very much like the frontier. Despite Hornaday’s later accounts of an idyllic childhood, it was a hardscrabble, tough life. It was a story that only his mother told.   

But, what I am saying, is that Caro calls to mind that context can have multiple definitions in historical and biographical writing. It was within Caro’s means to come into direct contact with the world of LBJ. He understood that was the case and acted to maximize its fleeting advantages. 

Turn Every Page, Caro's Working, pt. 1

Caro’s principle on research is to “Turn every page.” That is advice an editor gave the young reporter six decades ago and he has used it ever since. Caro admits that one cannot turn every page in a collection as enormous as the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) Presidential Library where the amount of material numbers over thirty million pages. In that case, he adds a corollary that it is critical to turn the most important pages; that is to say, find the people most valuable to the event, issue, or question that you are currently working on. 

Here’s one example from Workingthat relates to The Path to Power, the first volume of the LBJ biography that was published in 1982. As Caro was turning every page in the House Files of the LBJ archives on the Texan’s congressional career, he noted a dramatic shift in the tone of the correspondence. Only weeks before he was practically begging his fellow congressmen for some attention. Then, suddenly, the very same congressmen were pleading to him in the same desperate tone. Moreover, this transformation happened precisely in October 1940.  

At this early stage, Caro was interviewing everyone still alive who had known LBJ, so he asked veteran Washington, DC Democrat Party fixer Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran. The Cork’s response to Caro’s inquiry, “Money, kid, money.” “But you’re never going to be able to write about that. Because you’re never going to find anything in writing.” (p.89)

When Caro returned to the archives he began to widen his search in the LBJ archives beyond the House Files series.  Who were LBJ’s trusted relationships? Whom did LBJ have financial connections to in 1940? Where else in the archives might confidential material be squirreled away? LBJ was very closely connected to a construction company named Brown & Root. He got them federal contracts and they kicked money back to him. Pulling files related to Brown & Root, he found a telegram date October 19, 1940 referencing checks from subcontractors and which congressmen should receive what amounts. What’s more, Caro found LBJ’s response, which included a reference to how “the boss” was paying attention to LBJ. The boss was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Caro started turning more pages and more pages, uncovering more evidence in the story of how LBJ became the central figure in Washington, DC funneling fat campaign contributions from Texas to congressman throughout the nation desperate for funding. I am not doing justice to the story and the way that Caro tells it. It is worthy of inclusion as a chapter in the classic Historian as Detective(1969), edited by Robin Winks.   

Caro gets to the heart of the historian’s role as researcher. Sometimes what you need is obvious, but for many biographers and historians it takes years of combing through the archives. It is fun, exciting, and, admittedly, sometimes tedious and dull. One has to learn not only about their subject, but all of their correspondents. If you cannot turn every single page, how do you limit that? 

My own example involves over a decade of researching The Most Defiant Devil: William T. Hornaday and his Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife(2013). Hornaday left behind two huge collections of papers. While not as vast as LBJ’s millions, Hornaday’s numbered in the tens of thousands. He intentionally left behind such voluminous collection because he thought that wildlife would be extinct by the end of the twentieth century and he wanted to show posterity that he and others tried to prevent the cataclysm. The papers at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in the Bronx Zoo are mostly related to conservation and professional, while the Library of Congress (LOC) collection consisted largely of personal letters and documents. The overwhelming effort was spent was on the WCS papers. Honestly, I decided not to turn many of the LOC pages. While it might have been fun, I could still be there reading through such ephemera as the plays that Hornaday wrote that were never published. When it came to letters, I realized that each one of his corresponds played a different role to Hornaday. This is where critical reading of the source material comes in. There were those whom Hornaday considered proteges and dispensed advice to, but did not share full confidence with. Other correspondents were people he needed to keep as happy as possible and therefore tried to restrain his vitriol. This could also include financial backers who did not want to hear how terrible some of their friends might be in Hornaday’s estimation. There were numerous correspondents that he had only a minimal relationship. But there were a few people that he did share his inner most thoughts and plans. One such person was Edmund Seymour, an investor who later became president of the American Bison Society. I am not even sure when or how exactly they met, but Seymour was Hornaday’s alter ego. Those letters were hot stuff! I made sure I turned everyone of those pages. 

William T. Hornaday on Hetch-Hetchy

Here is an item from the cutting room floor, so-to-speak, that never made its way into The Most Defiant Devil. It seems fitting to mention it after the pervious post on Hetch-Hetchy. Hornaday focused his attention like a laser beam on wildlife conservation. He did not engage in conservation issues outside of those that related directly to wildlife, but that did not mean that he was inattentive. A hard-hitting and fiery campaigner unafraid to sling mud, if not worse, his comments about John Muir are not surprising. The excerpt below comes from a letter Hornaday wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn on November 8, 1913. Osborn, a paleontologist who served as president of the New York Zoological Society and president of the American Museum of Natural History was a friend of John Muir. I don't know if Hornaday and Muir ever met. They served on the same committee in a conservation congress held in Indianapolis in 1912, but I have no evidence that Muir actually attended. Hornaday wrote:

"It seems to me that the Hetch-Hetchy campaign is sadly missing the bullseye. There is too much firing into the air, instead of firing at guilty men! There is some ginger in the campaign; but only about 10 per-cent of what there should be. It is within the power of the managers to make the enemies of Yosemite National Park hurt .... in mighty short order; but the managers don't seem to know how to do the trick. It is significant that the managers of the campaign feel that they are so nearly beaten that they are directing their appeals to President Wilson."

It is interesting to think of how Hornaday might have handled the campaign to save Hetch-Hetchy differently from Muir.

The above excerpt is from the Hornaday papers at the Bronx Zoo, outgoing correspondence, vol. 6, page 422. The omitted words are due to the fact this is an old note in pencil and there are two words I could not make out in my notes.

100 years ago, William Temple Hornaday and the Migratory Bird Treaty

One hundred years ago this week the United States and Great Britain ratified the Migratory Bird Treaty, which extended protection of migratory birds from the Rio Grande to the arctic. William Temple Hornaday was instrumental at several key points on the road to this landmark act of international conservation.

His first important contribution was to call a dinner of key conservationists in September 1912 to discuss the stalled Weeks-McLean bill. Led by John Burnham of the American Game Protection Association (AGPA), sportsmen lobbied for a bill to protect migratory game birds. In other words, their proposed legislation would protect only birds that hunters wanted to shoot. Hornaday was critical of this approach. For starters, he felt that the bill was too narrow in focus. He advocated a bill that protected all migratory birds, including non-game song birds. Moreover, he did not trust Burnham who represented an organization that was funded by the gun and ammunition manufacturers. This was more than a conflict of interest. Hornaday believed Burnham and his overlords posioned the very soul of the conservation movement and threatened the future of American wildlife. Because of his zeal, Honraday and Burnham had several public and acrimonious skirmishes in the the last couple of years -- indeed, they would spend the next two decades in a protracted knock-out, drag-out fight that led to a lawsuit . At the September dinner Hornaday and T. Gilbert Pearson advocated the expansion of the bill to include all migratory birds. They conveniently waited to vote on it until after Burnham had left. Those who remained voted to accept their revision and the bill was recast to protect all migratory birds.

Hornaday lobbied hard throughout the fall of 1912 for the bill, and his greatest contribution was his seminal book, Our Vanishing Wildlife. Unique in the early conservation canon as a work dedicated exclusively to wildlife conservation, Our Vanishing Wildlife was written in a strident moral tone, full of exclamation points and sarcasm, and with the full-throttle vigor of the most successful muckrakers. Hornaday shined a bright light on the "army of destruction" as he called, which included the game hogs and market hunters, but also the sportsmen whom Burnham represented at the AGPA. Our Vanishing Wildlife had one significant drawback, however. It used racism to argue for migratory bird protection. Southern Congressmen opposed the Weeks-McLean Act because it would extend federal power into an area that had always been reserved to the states. To counter this, Hornaday depicted African Americans, Native Americans, and Italian immigrants in the worse possible light as game hogs extraordinaire. Photographs showing groups of southern blacks walking armed across a field was clearly designed to provoke the worst fears of the Jim Crow era in the hope that the Southern Congressmen would support the bill. In the end, it was a parliamentary maneuver that secured protection of migratory birds. The measure was tucked in an appropriations bill, and signed by President William Howard Taft in the closing minutes of his administration in 1913. Taft later commented that he would not have signed the bill had he known the migratory bird protection measure had been added to it.

Not surprisingly, conservationists were worried about the future of migratory bird protection. It passed Congress through legislative sleight-of-hand and the president who signed it stated he would not have done so had he known that the migratory bird protection provision was buried in the bill. Congress was already backing away by not providing the necessary funds for implementation or hiring the required game wardens. A constitutional challenge seemed imminent, and conservationists  feared that the conservative United States Supreme Court would strike down the measure. As an alternative to amending the constitution Senator Elihu Root of New York recommended a treaty as a way to ensure constitutionality of migratory bird protection. Under article VI, a treaty becomes the supreme law of the land. This approach made great sense because international borders made no more difference to migratory birds than did state boundaries.

The Wilson administration was cool to the idea and had to be pushed into negotiations. Conservationists suggested approaching Mexico, but political instability and revolution eliminated that possibility. By necessity, the United States turned to its northern neighbor, Canada. Great Britain managed the foreign affairs of Canada. With war waging in Europe, a treaty about migratory birds had low priority. If anything pushed Britain to consider the treatyl it was simply to appease the United States. Still negotiations dragged on.

Hornaday grew impatient with the slow progress of the treaty. On February 12, 1916 he walked into the United States State Department in Washington and demanded to know the physical location of the treaty. The clerk found a receipt that he had been delivered to the British embassy the year before. Hornaday proceeded to the British embassy. The treaty, he wrote to Theodore Palmer of the Biological Survey (forerunner of the Fish and Wildlife Service), "by an accident had been filed without any action, and forgotten!" Although Hornaday had a penchant for publicly exposing and embarrassing rivals, he chose not to publicize the bureaucratic mishap at the embassy. This was not the time to embarrass a treaty partner! "Of course you will immediately recognize the necessity of saying nothing whatever about the accident at the embassy," Hornaday added to Palmer.

Hornaday's visit to the embassy got the treaty back on track. Six months later both powers ratified it, although it took another two years for Congress to pass the necessary enabling legislation. In 1920 the United States Supreme Court upheld the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) in the case of Missouri vs. Holland, thus preserving one of the most important pieces of wildlife protection in American history. In 1936 Mexico and the United States signed a migratory bird treaty.  

Ota Benga, part 1

I am happy to report that the “The Most Defiant Devil:” William Temple Hornaday and his Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife  has received some positive reviews in such scholarly publications as The Journal of American History, Annals of Iowa, Environmental History, Western Historical Quarterly, AAG, and CHOICE. In addition, a very favorable review by the Associated Press in late August 2013 was carried in papers nationwide, including my hometown Denver Post. Most reviewers commented that I presented a balanced view of William Temple Hornaday and did not shy from flaws, including his insidious racism. However, there was one rather negative review in the New York History that claims I should have devoted more space to the decision in 1906 to place African Ota Benga on display with the monkeys in the New York Zoological Park.

My decision to contain the story of this deplorable incident to two pages was motivated largely by considerations of page count as well as my intent to keep the focus on Hornaday the conservationist, hence the subtitle my biography. I will come back to one more reason in a moment.

In my brief coverage of the Ota Benga “incident” I wanted to call attention to two facts. First, Hornaday’s employers, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Madison Grant deserve as much, if not more, blame for the decision of placing Ota Benga on display in the Monkey House. Both men were themselves notorious racists who were just as eager as their director to boost gate receipts. Second, the idea of living “scientific specimens” was not unique to the New York Zoological Park in September 1906. Ota Benga had been on “display” previously at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. He was not the only African on “display” in St. Louis, nor were Africans the only people so exhibited at the exposition. At a time when the foremost men of science, like Henry Fairfield Osborn, used Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to promote racial hierarchy, including the concept that different peoples on the earth were in various stages of evolution, it not surprising that human beings were used as living object lessons at expositions and museums in the early decades of the 20^th century. It was the provocative placement of Ota Benga in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo that makes September 1906 stand out as a particularly deplorable event. Surely, Hornaday was a racist, but his motivation was largely to boost attendance. A deeper discussion of scientific racism and humans on display was well outside the scope of The Most Defiant Devil, especially since Hornaday never adhered to the theory of scientific racism.

Finally, readers would be disappointed if they think that New Yorkers in 1906 condemned the zoo. In fact, this sensationalist stunt succeeded in drawing tens of thousands of paying New Yorkers to the zoo. Men of science defended the decision and powerful political leaders led by Mayor George B. McClellan backed the New York Zoological Society. In other words, the uncomfortable fact is that it was not as widely protested or condemned at the time as we in the 21^st Century would like to believe. While posterity might remember Hornaday as the zoo director who displayed an human being in the Monkey House of his zoo, his reputation as the leading zoologist of his generation, foremost spokesperson on wildlife conservation, and undisputed expert in all fields relating to animals was undamaged among his contemporaries because of the events of September 1906. It was not a defining moment for Hornaday, it was a ripple in an otherwise long life.

Empire of Extinction

Ryan Jackson Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867

As the Russians spread east, across the rim of the North Pacific, from Kamchatka across to the Aleutian Island chain in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, they created a wave of extermination for the fur-bearing animals of the region. The Russians wiped out huge numbers of sea otters. In fact, the animal never recovered from the hyper-killing of 1749-1750, but it did not go extinct. The same could not be said of the sea cow, which vanished from the earth sometime in the late 1760s. As Jones points out, the sea cow was already in trouble before the fur-greedy Russians showed up and wiped them out. As global temperatures warmed in the aftermath of the little ice age, the sea cow headed north (it had ranged as far south as Baja California), huddling on a cluster of islands in the North Pacific. The last recorded sighting of a sea cow occurred in 1766. It is hard to say when the species went extinct because it would be another thirty years before the Cuvier introduced the idea of animal extinction. In 1802 Martin Sauer postulated that the sea cow had gone extinct within a couple of years of the last confirmed sighting.  

Naturalists were in an uneasy position in the Russian imperial expansion. Mostly made up of non-Russians, they were critical of an empire they considered somewhat mickey mouse. On the other hand, the Russian rulers were their bosses who demanded positive affirmation about the grandeur and vastness of their empire. Wanting to play on the same stage as the French and English, the Russians wanted to appearance of science to give them some enlightenment credibility as a modern state, but they were not terribly interested in hearing what the naturalists had to say. Moreover, the secretive and suspicious Russians did not want scientists in their employ spreading information outside of the borders, clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding of the value of cooperative, transnational science. So much for appearances. Ironically, when the consequences of dramatic fur-bearing population decline were obvious – read, tax revenues from skins shrunk dramatically – conservation measures were implemented without even consulting naturalists.

Like the French and English in east North America, the Russians ensnared native peoples (Yakut, Kamchadal, Aleut) into their market network. The new imperial overlords assessed a tribute to their colonial peoples that was payable in furs. This was only the tip of the iceberg, like every other native population in North America, the people of the North Pacific experienced devastating epidemics with the arrival of Europeans. The Aleuts suffered a 50%-80% mortality from disease. As their population declined and their environment degraded, they became more reliant on the money they made market hunting to feed their families. As fur bearing animals became increasingly difficult to find, Russian overlords sent their native hunters on longer and more dangerous missions, causing yet more stress on their society.

I checked Empire of Extinction out merely to look at how he covered the fur seals of the Pribilof Islands. The cause of the fur seal was close to William T. Hornaday’s heart, and he ardently fought for their protection between1909-1920 against what could be called the scientific establishment led by David Starr Jordan. For more on Hornaday’s fur seal conservation campaign check out The Most Defiant Devil, or his digitized scrapbooks online at the Wildlife Conservation Society.  Despite my initial limited interest in this book, I found Empire of Extinction to be an enjoyable read that really pulled me in, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the environment or wildlife in particular, especially to American historians looking for a little perspective on what was happening outside of our borders.