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By Root 2977 0

’s northern fur seal from extinction, and helped save other mammals as well.7 “The treaty produced a significant dividend: almost as an afterthought it prohibited the killing of sea otters,” the historian Frank Graham Jr. noted in Man’s Dominion. “At that time they were considered extinct or nearly so on our shores. Under protection, that delightful little animal has reappeared, to the nation’s aesthetic profit, in some numbers off the coast of California.”8 And there was a healthy, noisy colony of sea otters on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians. The Natives had fled Amchitka, worried about a volcano; this gave the sea otters undisturbed waters, kelp, and shellfish. Amchitka was the greatest sea otter sanctuary left in the world—a fact that Hornaday cited with nationalistic pride.

Following the victory in Congress, Roosevelt and Hornaday delivered the knockout punch—concluding a twenty-eight-year conservationist fight started by Henry Wood Elliot in the 1870s. Congress agreed to ban the slaughter of all seals and otters in all American waters. The New York Times declared the victory in 1912 a triumph for the CFCA. “This battle against animal murder for profit was won,” the Times said. “Congress ordered that no man should kill a seal on American territory for five years. The friends of the seal wanted a ten-year closed season, but they were pretty well satisfied with what they got, for the reason that now the seal-slaughterers are on the run it will not be hard in 1917 to get Congress to give a five-year extension.”9

Although Hornaday—who liked to be called “Doctor”—had been a hunter all his life, the Alaskan seal slaughter caused him to drop his gun. Nobody in the CFCA—which was filled with sportsmen—held it against him, although there were murmurs that Hornaday had turned soft on animal rights. In Hornaday’s mind, it was unseemly for rifle companies such as Winchester and Springfield to donate money to wildlife protection groups. Putting the seal butchers out of business encouraged Hornaday to try to save Dall sheep and caribou in Alaska. “All large hoofed animals have a weak hold on life,” Hornaday wrote. “This is because it is so difficult for them to hide, and so very easy for man to creep up within the killing range of modern, high-power, long-range rifles. Is it not pitiful to think of animals like the caribou, moose, white sheep and bear trying to survive on the naked ridges and bald mountains of Yukon Territory and Alaska! With a modern rifle, the greatest duffer on earth can creep up within killing distance of any of the big game of the North.”10 Hornaday went on to say, “I have been a sportsman myself, but times have changed, and we must change also.”11

Enter Roosevelt again. After siding with Hornaday on the fight of 1911–1912 over protecting seals, Roosevelt now favorably reviewed Our Vanishing Wild Life in Outlook. This praise, coming from the very popular ex-president, created quite a stir, and put wildlife protection in the forefront of the progressive movement alongside civil rights, women’s suffrage, and public education. The Colonel blamed the American people—yes, the people themselves—for the deplorable fact that such birds as the Carolina parakeet (Conuropsis carolinensis), passenger pigeon, great auk, Labrador duck (Camptorhynchus labradorius), and sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) were nearing (or had reached) extinction. An incensed Roosevelt challenged citizens to change their outdated mind-set, to more fully comprehend the farmyard fact that songbirds gobbled up noxious insects and that raptors devoured rodents. As a member of the CFCA, Roosevelt was duty-bound to rid Alaska of overfishing. He wanted the traditional salmon grounds of the Haida and Tlingit of Alaska-Canada protected from corporate canneries. As Darwin taught an entire generation, there was an intricate biological order on Earth that humans barely understood. Both Roosevelt and Hornaday, however, recognized that U.S. wildlife was part of a continental biota; therefore, Mexico and Canada had to be included in all studies. As Robert