He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create
enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man
who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he began as
a taxidermist and an adventurer who tracked tigers in Borneo with
friendly headhunters, lead crocodile-hunting expeditions in the Orinoco,
and scouted the last remaining bison in the Montana territories.
William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937) was also a man ahead of his time. He
was the most influential conservationist of the nineteenth century,
second only to his great friend and ally Theodore Roosevelt. When this
one-time big-game collector witnessed the wanton destruction of wildlife
prevalent in the Victorian era, he experienced an awakening and devoted
the rest of his life to protecting our planet's endangered species.
Hornaday founded the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., served for thirty
years as director of the renowned Bronx Zoo, and became a fierce
defender of wild animals and wild places. He devoted fifty years to
fighting gun manufacturers, poachers, scandalously lax game-protection
laws, and the vast apathy of the American public. He waged the "Plume
Wars" against the feathered-hat industry and is credited with having
saved both the Alaskan fur seal and the American bison from outright
extinction.
Mr. Hornaday's War restores this major figure to his rightful place as
one of the giants of the modern conservation movement. But Stefan
Bechtel also explores the grinding contradictions of Hornaday's life.
Though he crusaded against the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, he was
at one time a trophy hunter, and what happened in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo,
when Hornaday displayed an African man in an "ethnographic exhibit,"
shows a side of him that is as baffling as it is repellant. This
gripping book takes an honest look at a fascinating, enigmatic man who
both represented and transcended his era's paradoxical approach to
wildlife, and who profoundly changed the course of the conservation
movement for generations to come.
