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mammal taxidermist of his era. When working on a buffalo, for example, he took the extra step of ridding his specimen of screwworm flies (Cochliomyia macellaria), which frequently laid eggs in an open wound or sore. He was an artist skilled enough to prepare an exhibit of a buffalo grazing, stampeding, or simply looking forlorn, bringing out the personality of the animal vividly in any mood or situation. Most famously, Hornaday himself shot a huge 1,800-pound buffalo in Montana; it became the centerpiece of a popular diorama at the National Museum of Natural History. Upon skinning this buffalo, however, Hornaday made a startling discovery, later claiming that it triggered an effusion of sorrow. “Nearly every adult bull we took carried old bullets in his body, and from this one we took four of various sizes that had been fired into him on various occasions,” he recalled. “One was sticking fast in one of the lumbar-vertebrae.” 17

When Roosevelt moved to Washington, D.C., in 1889 for his civil service job, he befriended the bawdy Hornaday, then chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian. Despite his skill at mounting, Hornaday was pushing for the Smithsonian to open a “live animal” department. Hornaday insisted that people preferred to see a real wobbly little buffalo rather than a stiff, old, stuffed one. The global killing of wildlife for science was the hackneyed way, Hornaday came to believe, for truly enlightened men and women to study animals. Newly developed netting techniques made it possible to capture everything from a hippopotamus to a cougar alive. He even wanted to start tagging animals in the wild. Once Hornaday was given permission to show live specimens at the Smithsonian turnstile increased three-fold. The public roared its approval and Hornaday pratted on about the advanced wildlife protective ethos.

Hornaday’s new vision led to his founding of the National Zoological Park in 1889, in Washington, D.C.18 But such brilliant, original thinking (like that of Robert B. Roosevelt) can often go hand in hand with a difficult personality. Since Hornaday loved being out in the field, chief among the targets of his lacerating criticism were those zoologists and ornithologists who didn’t get grimy tracking down wildlife for science. You might say he had an outbank Audubon complex, like Theodore Roosevelt. Often smelling of buffalo or bears, Hornaday was far more comfortable in alpine hiking clothes than in a suit. Sometimes his hair was matted with dry grass and mud. There was, as noted above, a farmyard crudeness to his manners, and his rumored atheism did nothing to endear him to the pious Methodists and Episcopalians he worked with at the Smithsonian. In fact, when the people who were financing the National Zoological Garden started telling Hornaday how to run his shop, and radically changing his Darwinian plans for animal displays, he resigned and moved to Buffalo, New York. Once he was settled there, he tried to change the city’s name to Bison, New York, to be more zoologically accurate.

Although Roosevelt never approved of Hornaday’s vulgarness or imperiousness, he knew that Hornaday was the most knowledgeable expert in the world regarding buffalo. It was said that Hornaday, in a quick glance, could identify the precise home range of a buffalo—for example, Nebraska or Manitoba or Oklahoma—by the constitution of its dung. Furious that these wild creatures were treated so shabbily, he nevertheless remained hopeful that repopulation programs and new game laws might be able to reverse the trend toward extinction. When Hornaday told Congress in April 1896 that national bison ranges should be created to save the vanishing herds, Roosevelt fully agreed. Even though Hornaday wasn’t considered refined enough for the Boone and Crockett Club, Roosevelt had no hesitation in asking him to head the Bronx Zoo. To Roosevelt’s thinking Hornaday was wasting his talent working in the Erie County real estate business and merely serving as a trustee for the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Roosevelt promised to let Hornaday develop exhibits