Mr. Hornaday's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

windswept northeastern reaches of the Montana Territory, wrote to Hornaday that he felt it still might be possible to find a few scattered buffalo, but only in three places—on the headwaters of the Powder River, in Wyoming; and in the Judith Basin and along the Big Dry Creek, both in Montana. 18
    Along the banks of the Little Missouri River, the train passedthrough the tiny cow town of Medora. Theodore Roosevelt, then a twenty-eight-year-old New York assemblyman and author who had abandoned his political career temporarily to become a Dakota rancher, had bought a place near here recently. It was still lawless country, plagued by cattle rustlers, and just a month before Hornaday’s train passed through Medora, Roosevelt had made the much-celebrated capture of a notorious horse and cattle thief named Mike Finnegan. Roosevelt walked forty-five miles with Finnegan in custody to deliver him to the local jail. At one point, Roosevelt borrowed the rustler’s dime Western to read, so he could stay up all night while guarding his prisoner at gunpoint. 19
    The Montana Territory in 1886 was still a raw, wild, and dangerous place. It was only ten years earlier, in June 1876, that a reckless cavalry officer whom the Crow called “Son of the Morning Star” attacked an enormous gathering of Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors under chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, camped on the banks of the Little Bighorn River, in the Montana Territory. General George Armstrong Custer, who had graduated dead last in his class at West Point, was slaughtered by the Indians, along with 268 of his men. 20 Elsewhere, rustlers and outlaws were commonplace. In many places, the Northern Pacific Railroad line into the territory was so new that the rails were still shiny as mint dimes. 21 People back East, extravagantly overdressed in their
fin de siecle
hats, crinolines, corsets, frock coats, and twenty-button shoes, were fascinated by this almost unimaginable openness and wildness. A teenage boy from St. Louis named Charles M. Russell became so obsessed with sketching cowboys and Indians that his parents allowed him to go out to the Montana Territory in 1880, at the age of sixteen, where he got work as a cowhand and began sending back a steady stream of drawings and paintings of Western life to the people of New York, Chicago, and Boston. The images of wranglers, rustlers, and feathered braves in war paint were as startling as pictures from another planet. 22
    But there was another story unfolding in the United States at the same time, a story that very few people had heard or seen. It was a story that William Temple Hornaday was determined to shout from the rooftops, even if it made him look like a kook, a crank, or a busybody. It was a story that was not readily apparent to others becausefew men of his day had spent as much time as Hornaday had in such remote places—from the Orinoco River delta, to Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. He had been appalled to realize that, even in these wild places, enormous regions had been almost completely “shot out”—where the forest had been emptied of birds, mammals, reptiles, and almost everything else that breathed. Returning from these exotic locales to the United States, he’d been able to see that here too, a virtual war of extinction was in progress, and the war was going very badly indeed.
    On two successive winter afternoons in 1886, an ornithologist from the American Museum of Natural History named Frank Chapman took a stroll down Fourteenth Street, in Lower Manhattan. In the course of this ramble through the crossroads of New York fashion, Chapman observed more than 700 extravagant Gilded Age women’s hats, bearing the plumage of forty different species of birds, from the white-throated sparrow to the bobolink, the laughing gull to the sanderling. Was anyone paying attention? Was anyone outraged? 23
    There was a bitter, bloody war going on—what