The Most Defiant Devil

William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife

Gregory J. Dehler

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813934341
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century were a brutal time for American wildlife, with many species pushed to the brink of extinction. (Some are endangered to this day.) And yet these decades also saw the dawn of the conservationist movement. Into this contradictory era came William Temple Hornaday, a larger-than-life dynamo who almost uncannily embodies these conflicting threads in our history.

In The Most Defiant Devil, a compelling new biography of this complex figure, Gregory Dehler explores the life of Hornaday the hunter, museum builder, zoologist, author, conservationist, and anti-Bolshevist crusader. A deeply religious man, he was nonetheless anything but peaceful and was racist even by his era's standards, going so far as to display an Mbuti pygmy as a "living specimen" in a zoo. A passionate hunter, Hornaday killed thousands of animals, including some of the last wild buffalo in America, but he was far ahead of his time in his influential views on the protection of wildlife. Hornaday designed and built the New York Zoological Park (which became the Bronx Zoo) and was chief taxidermist for what would later become the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.In this single, fascinating individual, we can discern some of the Progressive Era's most destructive forces and some of its most enlightened visions.

1

IOWA FARM BOY

WILLIAM TEMPLE HORNADAY was born into a family of mythmakers. The origins of the Hornaday clan have baffled generations of family genealogists who have been unable to reliably trace the family name to Europe. Various family legends claimed that the Hornadays immigrated to America from England, Northern Ireland, Germany, Norway, Hungary, and even Spain, but none of these stories can be fully substantiated. William Temple Hornaday himself believed that his ancestors were Englishmen who immigrated to Northern Ireland after Oliver Cromwell’s fall, before setting sail for America. To account for their untraceable past, several origin myths emerged. In one such story, two wealthy brothers escaped the heavy burdens of their aristocratic birth by sailing to the colonies and creating an entirely new name for themselves. In another tale, an orphaned cabin boy who dispensed water once a day in a hollowed-out horn to the ship’s passengers and crew earned the nickname “horn-a-day,” and adopted it as his own surname. Certainly, the truth of the family origins must lie somewhere between aristocrats and poor orphans, but no one knows for sure.¹

The first Hornaday in America, John, appears on a tax table in Orange County, North Carolina, in the early 1750s. This location suggests that the Hornadays, like the great bulk of their neighbors, emigrated from the borderlands of England, although of course it does not explain the uniqueness of the name itself. The borderlanders adhered to dissenting Protestant faiths and continuously demonstrated a spirit of rebelliousness against all forms of centralized authority. Individual convictions strongly favored personal independence through militant means. It was natural for the borderlanders to seek refuge on the frontier of the American colonies, where they made lives for themselves as far from the king’s tax collectors and clergymen as they could. A common man now visible to us only in outline, John seems to have been as rebellious as his neighbors. He was a frontiersman who flirted with the Regulator movement in the late 1760s and owned a few slaves. At some point during the American Revolution, he became estranged from his wife, Christian. He died sometime between the censuses of 1800 and 1810 while farming in South Carolina.²

John’s children dispersed throughout the Carolinas, but his son Nathan sold his slaves and immigrated north to Ohio in his middle age at the insistence of his second wife, a Quaker. Nathan’s son Ezekiel, born in 1795, took the Hornaday name farther west, settling in central Indiana in the early 1820s. Ezekiel embraced the great wave of religious revivals known as the Second Great Awakening that swept through the country after the War of 1812, and helped found the Christian Church of Plainfield, Indiana, in 1830. A moderately successful farmer by the standards of the day, Ezekiel amassed more than 1,000 acres of prime farmland in the White Lick Valley before he died in 1876.³

Born in 1818, William, the eldest of Ezekiel’s twelve children, did not share his father’s good fortunes in health or land. William’s wife, Orpha Hadley, died in 1851, leaving him with a daughter, Mary, and three sons, Calvin, Clark, and Silas. The following year he married Martha Varner Miller, a widow, with two sons of her own, David and Minos. “He and my mother were a fine and noble pair,” their youngest child recalled. They added a daughter, Margaret, in 1853, and a son, William Temple, who was born on December 1, 1854 in the walnut-paneled, mahogany-furnished home of his paternal grandfather.⁴

The Varner family had a less mythic origination story, but the Pennsylvania Dutch blood of the Varners and the Scotch blood of the Pughs, William Temple Hornaday’s maternal grandmother’s family, flowed through William Temple’s veins as well. He seems to have had a closer relationship with his mother’s parents than his father’s. Although Ezekiel survived his son, William Temple wrote little of him, while he characterized “Grandmother Varner” as “a wise woman, of strong and sterling character, and truly fit to help found a pioneer state.”⁵

Although William Temple Hornaday described his father as a progressive farmer who kept abreast of the latest agricultural advances and frequently adopted innovative techniques, William Sr.’s Hendricks County land was located in the worst agricultural area in the state. Its clay soil proved largely unproductive, regardless of the methods employed to improve its yield. In 1857, William Sr. decided to do what his father and grandfather had done before: go west in search of cheap lands. He took the Hornaday name to Iowa.⁶

The wagon train, which consisted of several branches of the Hornaday family, lumbered slowly through Indiana and Illinois before crossing the Mississippi River into Iowa. At one of the railroad crossings, Billy, as William Temple was called in his youth, got scared by the shrieking noises of an “iron monster rushing straight for us” and hid under the team of horses pulling the wagon. As the train approached, the horses grew restless, then frantic. Martha’s excited screams caught the attention of one of the men in the company, who pulled Billy out before the horses trampled him. He claimed that he could still remember his mother’s screams almost eighty years later. It might have been the first time William Temple Hornaday cheated death, but it would certainly not to be the last.⁷

After crossing the Mississippi River into Iowa, William Sr. settled his family into the southeastern part of the state and purchased a 270– acre plot in Eddyville, Mahaska County, not far from Miller Creek. Iowa was not the land of milk and honey for William and Martha as they struggled against nature, ill-health, and loneliness in their new home. The winter of 1859 was especially difficult. Tragedy struck when Billy’s fourteen-year-old half brother, Silas, died in November. A harsh and snowy winter followed, and many families struggled to survive. “Some of our neighbors are next thing to suffering,” Martha wrote to her parents. “But we can’t help them much for they are too numerous and the time until harvest too long to risk much in the way of charity for we remember charity begins at home.” Drought and torrential downpours defined the following year of 1860. Billy either chose not to share these pre–Civil War experiences, which clashed so sharply with what he described in his unpublished autobiography, “Eighty Fascinating Years,” as “halcyon days,” or he simply had no memory of them. Yet, his own stubbornness and independence made matters worse as he drove his mother to the point of despair. Billy “is an awfull bad boy,” Martha wrote in exasperation to her son David. He “knows how to hold his own in a quarrel as well as common boys does [sic] at 10 or 12 years old and no wonder for he has a great sum of practice.” William Temple’s streak of stubbornness was a defining characteristic of his personality, and it would prove just as exasperating to his allies, employers, enemies, and friends alike over the next seventy years as it had to his mother.⁸

William Sr.’s poor health intensified the family’s struggles in Iowa. He suffered a constant and at times acute pain in his left breast, the result of an old injury that often prevented him from working his farm. Within two years of staking his claim in Iowa, William Sr. came to realize that the pain would not go away. As his wife noted in a March 1859 letter to her parents, “he never expects to be well like he once was.” When William took a short, slow ride on horseback, it nearly crippled him. “The jar hurt his side so much that his whole system was put out of order for a week or more,” Martha wrote to her mother one August. In the face of such pain, William relied on his older sons and a number of hired hands to do the hard physical labor while he managed the business side of the farm. This plan might have worked had war not engulfed the country.⁹

Like all families in the United States at the time, the Hornadays could not escape the effects of the American Civil War. Patriotism overwhelmed both William Sr.’s hired hands and his sons, and they flocked to the colors. William Sr.’s eldest son from his first marriage, Clark, enlisted with friends from Plainfield in the Nineteenth Indiana Regiment. Minos Miller, Martha’s second son from her first marriage, who worked closely with William Sr. on the farm’s business, also enlisted in the army. After a stint in an Iowa regiment, he became an officer in the Fifty-Fourth Colored Regiment. David Miller, Martha’s eldest son, returned to Indiana to manage the family farm when Martha’s brother Allen Varner enlisted. The depleted labor pool for William Sr.’s farm consisted of only Billy, who was too young for significant labor, and Calvin, William Sr.’s son from his prior marriage, who was thirteen in 1861. Calvin suffered from such painful bouts of rheumatism that his younger brother later described him as suffering “more than a thousand deaths.”¹⁰

The war caused no end of worry among the adults in the Hornaday home. Martha fretted endlessly about the safety of her sons Minos and David, and followed Minos’s troop movements in his letters and newspapers. After one battle in Arkansas in July 1863, however, she had neither received a letter from him nor seen the names of the dead. “As to poor Minos I fear he is gone forever,” she forlornly told her parents. Minos survived the battle and the war, but she worried about him throughout. For David she concocted various schemes to help him evade the draft, including borrowing money to hire a substitute, but he never received the dreaded call to arms. Clark proved less lucky. Working with the wounded, he contracted dysentery and died in a Philadelphia hospital in early 1863, just weeks shy of his twentieth birthday.¹¹

The spectacle of the war fascinated young Billy. He demanded souvenirs from Minos, who responded with a variety of trinkets, including Confederate bills and coins. Billy became cranky when he did not receive letters as frequently as he thought he should and admonished Minos for not writing often enough. But like most soldiers, Minos was hungry for news from home and just as frustrated with the slowness of the post system. By 1866, the whole issue of letters developed into a battle of wills between eleven-year-old Billy and Captain Miller. “I guess Billy has concluded he can remain silent as long as I can,” Minos wrote in August 1866. “Tell him I admire his spunk but think he might write once in a while and tell me what he thinks about me not writing to him.” The dispute clearly frustrated Martha, who like her husband was suffering from recurring physical ailments: she informed Minos that Billy had in fact written him recently, but that the letter must have gotten lost in the mail, as so many did during the war and its immediate aftermath. Indeed, several letters sent back and forth between Minos and his family in Iowa, including ones with money, never reached their intended destination.¹²

The misunderstanding between Billy and Minos over the letters was indicative of a pattern of behavior that started very early in Hornaday’s life and continued throughout. He often became inflamed over relatively minor matters and took affront at things that he interpreted as personal slights. The triggers for the personal disputes that resulted could be circumstantial, unintended, and beyond the control of any one individual, such as lost letters or a soldier’s lack of time to write. But when the other party failed to meet his rigid demands, and this occurred frequently, Hornaday’s normally genial personality changed, and he became embittered and full of animosity.

The Hornaday family’s financial struggles compounded Martha and William Sr.’s wartime worries over the safety of their children. Indeed, after half a dozen years of fruitless toil in Iowa, Martha wanted to return to Indiana. But William Sr.’s daughter Mary, his eldest child from his first marriage, convinced him to remain in Iowa. Instead of moving east, William Sr. attempted to turn his farm into a less labor-intensive cattle ranch. But he could not raise the capital required for the conversion. “William is trying to get money from Minos or anybody he can to buy cattle with but if Minos let him have any I hope he will do better than he did with his other money but I say nothing to nobody,” Martha confided to her son David. By the end of the year, he sold the farm and purchased a twenty-acre plot in Knoxville, twenty miles to the west of Eddyville, in Monroe County.¹³

Soon after William Sr.’s decision to stay in Iowa, Martha’s health completely broke down. A severe back injury was her most immediate problem. In May 1864, Billy wrote his half brother David to say, “Mother is getting better.” But the boy failed to understand the gravity of the situation. “He seems to think I am better but if he knowed [sic] all he would not think so,” Martha wrote to David after reading Billy’s note. “He thinks because I can walk and sit up most of the time I am nearly well but I am far from well and if I am to believe the Dr. have no real hope of ever being well these five years to come.” The doctor’s inability to determine the source of Martha’s pain and thus offer an accurate diagnosis compounded her sense of despair. William Sr. did not accept the situation at all. Though she advised him that “I could not do so much hard work and he might shape his affairs according,” as she later related to David, “he would get mad and so would I.”¹⁴

Martha and William Sr. turned to their faith for comfort. Hornaday hardly mentioned the subject of religion in “Eighty Fascinating Years,” writing only in passing that the family’s leanings were “profoundly moral; and significantly, but not painfully religious.” Nonetheless, William Sr.’s and Martha’s conversion to Seventh Day Adventism in 1863 had a powerful, if unconscious, effect on their son. They subscribed to the Adventist Review and other newsletters, invited preachers to meetings in their homes, and hosted days-long revivals on their farm. None of this escaped Billy’s attention. To David, he described meetings held by a Reverend Snook in February 1864 as “fine meetings.” These events, with their bonfires, charismatic preachers, picnics, and wagonloads of people coming to his house, left a deep and lasting impression on Billy. In 1926, he would tell U.S. Senator Samuel Shortridge of California how he remembered the legislator’s father, a bearded Adventist preacher who gave “powerful” sermons. Reverend Shortridge frequently visited Martha and William’s home.¹⁵

Although Hornaday drifted away from Adventism in adulthood and worshipped in other Protestant churches, three particular messages of Adventism left their imprints on him: absolutism, immediacy, and evangelism. Throughout his life, Hornaday understood people and events in absolute terms. Things were righteous or evil, black or white. There was no room for a middle ground with shades of gray, hence his inability to compromise on what he regarded as principles of morality. Many people who dealt with him, however, tended to view this behavior as inflexible and self-serving. Adventism’s message of immediacy, as reflected in the belief in the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the need to atone for sins before it was too late, had an equally deep effect on Hornaday’s view of the world. In later years, one can reasonably hypothesize, it led him to demand instant correctives through drastic measures, if required, because moral correction should never be postponed. Opponents frequently mistook this for simple impatience, but it was more than that. And all of Hornaday’s educational work and conservation writings directed toward the general public had an evangelical flavor. One Iowan contemporary noted that an Adventist “carried a theological chip on his shoulder, waiting for discussion.” That description fits Hornaday quite well. In later years, when he incorporated this evangelical style into his conservation writings, he was not merely laying out the facts before the reader. Rather, with pictures and grisly “truths,” he was appealing to the emotions of his readers, and not simply seeking their support for a measure because it was the logical course, but proselytizing on the righteous cause of conservation. No matter the particular bill or issue, he was looking less for supporters than for lifetime converts. Frequently he framed his numerous appeals to the public as a preacher would have. He condemned bad and immoral behaviors, predicted dire consequences for failing to act, and raised the specter of fire and brimstone if no action were taken.¹⁶

Adventism had three more conscious impacts on Hornaday’s thinking. First, the Adventism temperance reform movement provided a blueprint for his conservation campaigns. Both exhorted the public to do the right thing, praying the sinners would find enlightenment. If not, however, they had no qualms about enforcing correct behavior through the power of the state. Although he was not a strict teetotaler, Hornaday wrote a pamphlet in 1887 entitled Free Rum on the Congo for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Second, Adventism was stridently anti-Catholic, an ugly disposition Hornaday maintained throughout his life. In 1876, he caused a ruckus in Northern Ireland and blamed it all on the backwards and superstitious nature he attributed to their faith. “They were all Cath...