Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel Page A

old bullets buried in his body; more than one hunter had aimed to have him as a trophy but failed. The horns of bulls taken in their prime were smooth and glossy-black, almost as if they’d been rubbed with oil, but this was what the old buffalo hunters called a “stub-horn.” That meant that this was an old bull whose horns had begun to peel off in layers at the base, leaving a thick, blunt stub, with only the tip of what was once a glossy horn showing through at the end. Because bison add a ring each year around the base of the horn, just as domestic cattle do, Hornaday judged that the bull was about eleven or twelve years old (in an animal whose natural lifespan was roughly twenty-five years). His tongue and lips were bluish-purple; his hooves were jet black; and his eyes, with a pear-shaped iris, were reddish brown.
    Hornaday lovingly noted all these details as he prepared the skin for mounting. Later, this superb animal would become the principal figure in Hornaday’s famous bison group that was displayed for sixty years at the Smithsonian. Later still, the bull became even more famous when he was used by the Treasury Department as the model for the bison depicted on the ten-dollar bill that went into production in 1901. Greengrocers, housewives, gamblers, shopkeepers, and petty criminals all made contact, however fleetingly, with the greatbull who went down in the Montana snow that long-ago afternoon. The mighty bull, though fallen, served Hornaday’s larger purpose of bringing “wildlife to the millions” and so played his role in halting the extermination of his species.
    On the night of November 25, a ferocious blizzard came shrieking down from the north country, temporarily trapping the museum party in their camp on Porcupine Creek. The temperature dropped to sixteen below zero that night; Hornaday watched a pail of water standing within four feet of a blazing campfire freeze over solid in ten minutes. That dreadful winter, which came to be known as the Winter of the Blue Snow, would later be remembered in plaintive lines from a cowboy song:
    I may not see a hundred
    Before I see the Styx,
    But, coal or ember, I’ll remember
    Eighteen eighty-six
    The stiff heaps in the coulees
    The dead eyes in the camp
    And the wind about, blowing fortunes out,
    Like a woman blows out a lamp. 16
    The Smithsonian Expedition broke camp on December 15, during a brief thaw in the weather, packing the wagons with boxes of specimens, food, and camp supplies, saddling up the horses and ponies and heading back home. Hornaday knew that if the museum party did not get out of camp very soon, they could be in serious trouble. It was bitterly cold; they were running out of food for both men and horses; the snow made the Sunday Creek Trail almost impassable; and the Yellowstone River would soon be so choked with treacherous running ice that the ferry to Miles City would be closed for the season.
    Despite the hunt’s lingering sorrow, it had been hugely successful, producing twenty-two fresh buffalo skins, forty-four skulls, eleven skeletons, and various other skins and bones collected along the way. Hornaday reported to Secretary Baird that it was “the finest and most complete series of buffalo skins ever collected by a museum.” The buffalo, of all ages and sexes, would be an extremely valuable addition to the Smithsonian collection, with enough left over to distribute toother museums.
    Even so, Hornaday’s grim prediction, in 1889, that all the wild buffalo would be gone within ten years proved prophetic. In the winter of 1893–94, poachers killed 114 of the last band of wild buffalo cowering in the newly created Yellowstone National Park. And in 1897, the last four free-roaming buffalo were found in a high mountain valley in Colorado and shot. The hunters must have been exultant. They had succeeded in killing off the very last wild buffalo on the planet. It was only because there were a few