Mr. Hornaday's War (34 page)

Reduce all bag limits from
50
to
75
per cent.

Shorten all open seasons at least
50
per cent.

Stop, all over the world, the killing of birds for commercial or millinery purposes.

Establish 5- or 10-year close seasons for all endangered species.
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It was, in effect, a bold and ambitious battle plan to make the world safe for the wild things. To accomplish this, more close-quarters combat would be required than any one person could ever execute, even someone as tireless as Hornaday. It would take decades,
or even centuries, to achieve. But it had to be done. Because through long and bitter experience, William Temple Hornaday was convinced that the enemies of wildlife had not been defeated.

They had just paused to reload.

On the pale winter afternoon of January 4, 1937, an ailing, nearly crippled, eighty-three-year-old William Temple Hornaday began dictating a long letter to someone he considered an old friend, whom he nonetheless addressed with appropriate diffidence as “His Excellency, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States.”
1

That same day, a grainy black-and-white close-up of FDR graced the cover of the latest issue of
Life
magazine. The long story inside was essentially a congratulatory victory lap for Roosevelt's frenetic first term in office, describing the popular president as “a triumphant hero with a smile of silver and a voice of gold.” In other news stories, the prominent modernist clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick was quoted as predicting that “war, in time, will go the way of torture chambers, religious persecution, slavery, and a hundred other social ills that once ruled the world.”
2
Meanwhile, it was reported that in Germany, a twenty-one-year-old Dutch stonemason named Marinus Van Der Lubbe was beheaded after confessing to setting a fire in the Reichstag. The executioner, wearing evening clothes and white gloves, pushed a button on the scaffold and Van Der Lubbe's head rolled into a pail of sawdust. The new German chancellor, a gloomy little man named Adolf Hitler, blamed the communists for the fire and vowed revenge.

For Hornaday, what was happening in Europe was another frightful menace about which the world needed to be warned. But by now, after forty years of fighting, Hornaday was growing weary, and his
body was failing. Besides the neuritis that plagued his feet and legs, he was tormented by arthritis, by cataracts, and by ill-fitting dentures. Every day was a cavalcade of pain. Still, he longed to be back on his feet and back in the fight. He wrote to his nephew Willis:

The doctors are completely baffled. I have been most searchingly examined by a famous nerve expert of New York who is an old friend of mine, who after he had finished his second investigation rose wearily and said to the other doctor in consultation, “There is nothing the matter with this man except those damn legs.”

Above the hips, Hornaday told Willis, “I am sound as a nut.”
3

Meanwhile, although his beloved wife, Josephine, also was growing feeble with age, their devotion to each other had never faltered. In 1929, the
New York Tribune
ran a story about the Hornadays' fifty-year wedding anniversary. Two professors at Stanford had come out with a controversial study claiming that the men of America were being “feminized” by their wives, but if that was so, Hornaday said, it wasn't hurting them. “I hate domineering men and I don't admire domineering women. It should be a fifty-fifty proposition.” Because of the fact that he and Josephine “scrupulously and honestly respected each other's rights,” they had not had a quarrel in half a century, he said.
4

Yet despite all the successes and accolades of his life, there were times in the previous years when Hornaday saw clearly how badly his war for wildlife was going, and he succumbed to despair. More and more, he took to referring to his life's work as “The Thankless Task.”

“I am too tired to think about our wildlife protection campaign,” he'd written his friend Edmund Seymour a few years earlier, “but I do know that the general situation is 90 per cent hopeless.”
5

Now, on what he knew would soon become his deathbed—his life would end here on this pillow two months later—he summoned the strength for one last appeal. This time, he wished to address “His Excellency” on behalf of all the glorious migratory waterfowl of the United States, which he desperately feared were going the way of the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the auk, and all the other vanished species of the earth.

“Because of our long acquaintance and unbroken friendship,” Hornaday began, dictating to a secretary named Betty who was seated
beside the bed.
6
He hoped that President Roosevelt “would be willing to grant me a brief interview if I were well enough to stand on my feet and go to Washington to call on you in person.” But this was utterly impossible, owing to the fact that he was now bedridden and “secretly and confidentially, I am thinking that the miseries I am undergoing here in my bed will finish me pretty soon by nervous exhaustion. It may easily happen that this is the last letter that you will ever receive from your long-time but faithful and sincere friend.”

Then Hornaday laid out what he was after: a complete ban on all hunting of waterfowl, for three consecutive years. In a country in love with its guns, and in which duck hunters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, it was an impossibly bold request, a non-starter, ridiculous. But he didn't care. The hour was late, and the damage to waterfowl populations across the country was so severe that it would take at least three years for them to recover, if they could recover at all. “Secretly,” he told the president, “I am hoping that before January goes out, you will boldly and forcefully make an announcement that there will be no open season on waterfowl. . . . I say to you in all seriousness that the only way to bring back the ducks in our country at large, and stock the sanctuaries that you have created, can be accomplished only by
three straight years
of absolute closed season.”
7

The situation had grown so dire that “in spite of a long and painful illness, I published during the last year two more warnings to the President, to Congress, the general public and all sportsmen, of the impending doom of our remainders of North American waterfowl,” Hornaday wrote. But now, in his pain and isolation, he had begun to feel that all his appeals had gone unheard.

Hornaday knew well enough that Roosevelt had a long history of concern for the natural world. Like many early conservationists, he was a patrician, and as a young man, he had replanted trees on worn-out farmland at his family's Hudson River estate in Hyde Park. When he registered to vote in 1910, he'd given his profession as “tree grower,” and over his lifetime, he calculated that he had grown half a million trees. He created waterfowl sanctuaries at Hyde Park and posted his land to keep birds and game safe from hunters. And he was an avid fisherman. Now Hornaday leaned heavily on these sympathies, knowing that Roosevelt would be receptive to some of what he had to say, if not all. The way forward, as Hornaday saw it, required a stark choice:

Most earnestly and respectfully I point out to you the fact that because of the multitude of curses that have been afflicting the game of the United States during the past 40 years, and the utter inability of the game-defenders to catch up with the game-killers and pass them, you now stand at the forks of a road.

For Hornaday, there was always a fork in the road, always a stark choice. His Seventh-day Adventist upbringing had imbued every human action with the imperatives of moral force. There was right and there was wrong. There was triumph or there was disaster, eternal reward or eternal damnation. Hornaday was self-righteous, he was stubborn, he was inflexible, and he might not always be right. But he was always sure. Now he tried to coax the president onto the right path, like an obstinate mule:

The right hand road . . . lead[s] to the conservation of the remnants of our waterfowl fauna. . . . The left-hand road that lies before you leads to total extinction—of not only our waterfowl, but also in equal probability, though not quite so quickly in effect, to the extinction of our faunas of upland non-migratory game birds and small mammals, and finally all of our free, wild, and killable big game animals outside of protected areas.

In conclusion, the old man thundered, summoning the old fire from his sickbed, “I am opposed to seeing the United States become a desert destitute of wild life or forests, or both. I urge you to be the master of this situation, and not the servant, or the victim of it.”

He closed on a note of hopefulness. He was not alone in this fight—even though in his younger day he had sometimes felt as if he were—and neither was the president. A groundswell of rage and fear had swept through the country in previous years, leading to the creation of vast armies of conservation-minded citizens across the country. In some significant ways, the tide actually seemed to be turning in favor of the wild things. In the summer of 1935, Hornaday told Roosevelt, fully one-third of all the duck hunters in the United States—210,000 men and women in all—had chosen to hang up their guns for the season because they, too, had seen what was happening to the great migrations of waterfowl that once darkened the skies from Currituck Sound, North Carolina, to the lost lakes of
Minnesota. Flights of ducks and geese in a pale autumn sky were as stirring and majestic a thing, as
American,
as the heartland's “golden waves of grain.” These reformed hunters wished to be part of the glory of the birds, not part of their annihilation. They wished to be on the side of the angels on Judgment Day. And the president could be, too.

A couple of weeks after Hornaday mailed his ten-page letter to the president, an important-looking envelope with an embossed return address marked “The White House, Washington, D.C.” fell through the mail slot at 20 West North Street in Stamford, Connecticut.

“My dear Dr. Hornaday,” the letter from President Roosevelt began, “it is with feelings of great regret that I read the note accompanying your letter of January fourth and learn of your suffering. I hope it may afford you some consolation to know that I have the greatest admiration for your courage and for your continued devotion in the presence of physical pain and weariness to that cause to which you have devoted your years. Since you can not give me the pleasure of an interview, you may be assured that your written statement will be carefully read and with the consideration it so eminently deserves.”
8

A few days later, from his sickbed, Hornaday dictated a letter to his grandson, Dodge. He enclosed a copy of the letter from Roosevelt. The president's letter was, Hornaday wrote, “one of the most charming and sympathetic letters that I am sure was ever sent from the White House to an old broken campaigner who wished to score once more in a public cause before closing his account.”
9

William Temple Hornaday had been unconscious for several days before he slipped away forever on March 6, 1937, in his comfortable bedroom at the place he called The Anchorage. His ever-faithful life companion, Josephine—The Empress, Her Royal Highness, My Dear Old Goose, Fairest Among 10,000—was at his side, along with their daughter, Helen.

Although President Roosevelt did not close the waterfowl hunting season for three consecutive years, or even one year, he honored Hornaday's legacy in another way. A year after the old naturalist's death, Roosevelt suggested that a mountain peak in Yellowstone National Park be named after him. Today, Mount Hornaday stands over the pristine Lamar River Valley at the northeast corner of the park,
overlooking grassy uplands and cottonwood brakes, where droves of buffalo roam in the late afternoon sun much as they may have appeared to native people 10,000 years ago. It's not too far from the scene of Hornaday's “Last Buffalo Hunt” of 1886.
10
The Boy Scouts' Wildlife Protection Medal, which Hornaday created in 1915, was renamed the William T. Hornaday Award after his death, and it is still bestowed today.

Another honorific arrived unexpectedly in the mail in October 1936, just three months before Hornaday's death. George S. Meyers, a renowned ichthyologist at Stanford University (who first described the common aquarium fish called the neon tetra), wrote the old man a letter to say that, as part of his work classifying fish specimens for the National Museum, he had come across several species collected by Hornaday in Borneo fifty-nine years earlier. A couple turned out to be completely new to science, Meyers said, and one he'd officially named after Hornaday.
Polynemus hornadayi,
or “Hornaday's paradise fish,” was a small, curious “threadfish” festooned with a cluster of graceful, translucent filaments attached near its pectoral fins, and which streamed gaily out behind, two and a half times longer than the fish itself. Hornaday had been twenty-three years old when he'd collected this shimmering oddity in a dip-net on the afternoon of October 2, 1877, in a muddy tributary of the Sadong River, in southwestern Sarawak, Borneo. In his letter and a scientific paper that accompanied it, Meyers told Hornaday that he'd long been familiar with
Two Years in the Jungle,
“one of the classics of zoological exploration in Asia,” and that he was “exceedingly glad to be able to associate your name with at least one of the fishes you collected on your memorable trip for Ward's.”
11

Even so, despite his fifty-year strut on the national stage, and all his many accomplishments, William Temple Hornaday seems to have been largely forgotten by historians. It's fair to ask why this small, loud, imperfect man's life has slipped into obscurity. Was the Ota Benga incident so repellant that it permanently expunged all his achievements from history? Were his contributions to conservation simply eclipsed by greater men like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, or John Burroughs? Or is his disappearing act at least partly payback for the long enemies list he racked up during his life? In a 1971 book, Frank Graham, Jr., a chronicler of the conservation movement in America, wrote of Hornaday: “Militants seldom attract eulogists.
The directness with which [Hornaday] attacked every problem accounts for the planned obscurity into which other conservationists let his name drop immediately after his death.”
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