Mr. Hornaday's War Read Online Free PDF

Hornaday called a “war for wildlife,” but it was more accurately a war
against
wildlife—and very few people seemed to realize how badly outgunned the friends of wildlife were. In fact, according to Hornaday’s own calculations, the enemies of wildlife outnumbered the friends by at least 500
to 1.
Worst of all, the enemies included enormously influential people like General William Tecumseh Sherman, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, and even, by his failure to act, the former president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. 24
    Meanwhile, gun manufacturers were churning out ever more deadly and efficient weapons, like the new Winchester Autoloader, which could get off five shots in four seconds and was loaded and cocked by its own recoil. These weapons were like machine guns, more suited for war than for sport. At the same time, in states and localities across the United States, the legal system for protecting wildlife was like a defensive perimeter made of sticks and leaves—bag limits, hunting laws, hunting seasons—almost all of them had been dictated by hunters and hunting lobbies to ensure that they could kill as much game as they liked. A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.
    Now, hurtling westward, Hornaday could think only of the greatquest that lay ahead. Were the ranchers and hunters right? Had the “extinction event” already overtaken the few buffalo that were left in the wild? Would this journey turn out to be a requiem? All he knew for sure was that the gauntlet had been thrown down, and he intended to answer the battle call. There was not a moment to be lost.

CHAPTER 4
Souvenir of a Lost World
    The Smithsonian museum party, with its rattling six-mule wagon and assortment of Indian ponies and saddle horses, soldiers, hunters, and taxidermists, carefully trundled their way down the dusty switchbacks on the north scarp of the divide, which opened out across a world so vast it appeared to reveal the curvature of the earth. When they reached the bottom, they found Little Dry Creek, a small tributary of the Missouri which, despite its name, had a faint ribbon of muddy water coursing through it. The water was foul-tasting and, because of the alkali, slightly soapy to the touch. The party followed the creek twelve miles, through copses of aspen and cottonwood along the bottom, to the LU-Bar Ranch. The ranch had a lonesome, slapped-together appearance—it was really just a stone and adobe shack with a few outbuildings—with saddle horses tethered to the porch rail and a spindle of smoke trailing up out of the cookhouse into the big sky. 1
    The place was deserted except for a young cowboy named Irwin Boyd, who’d been left in charge of the ranch while the other cowboys were at a roundup on the west branch of Sunday Creek. Boyd, glad for the company, welcomed the museum party heartily and asked them to spend the night. Hornaday and Hedley rode onto the range on their Indian ponies before nightfall, scouting the territory and looking for game, and when they returned, Boyd had a hot supper ready. That night, Hornaday jotted in his journal, the soldiers and taxidermists crowded inside, sheltered from a light rain, and “there was lots of talk in the shack by candlelight about bad cowpunchers and good ones, deperadoes, fights, outrages, capers, etc.”
    The next morning, they continued north for eight more miles, where they found a clear spring and stopped to set up the expedition’s permanent camp, on Phillips Creek, about eighty miles north of Miles City. They unpacked the wagon, which could go no further in this rugged country, and sent the mule team back to Fort Keogh with a drover. Then Hornaday and George Hedley set about trying to hunt buffalo, if they could find any.
    Hornaday and Hedley began scouting the country in a