Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel Page B

animals still sheltered in private reserves or zoos, which would later be used to seed new herds, that the buffalo survived at all. 17

CHAPTER 6
A Mysterious Stranger
    One winter afternoon in 1888, about two years after his return from the Montana Territory, William Temple Hornaday was kneeling in the ersatz buffalo grass and sage of an immense museum display in the Hall of Mammals, at the National Museum in Washington. The diorama, the most ambitious undertaking of his celebrated career as a taxidermist, was housed in the largest display case ever made for the museum: sixteen feet wide, twelve feet deep, and ten feet high, surrounded by a burnished mahogany frame. In addition to its size, what was genuinely new about the exhibit was that it was an immense glass cube, its contents visible from all sides. Virtually all other museum displays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were visible from only one side, or at most two sides. This was to be, Hornaday hoped, his masterpiece, his Sistine Chapel of celebration for a vanishing—and perhaps vanished—species. 1
    The museum’s chief taxidermist had his sleeves rolled up above the elbows and was wearing a full-length oilcloth apron. As was the Victorian custom, he also was absurdly overdressed for the occasion, wearing a white turnover collar and tie. On his face, along with brushstrokes of plaster of paris, gray sculptor’s clay, and genuine Montana dirt (brought back for this exhibit on the 1886 expedition) was a look of ferocious focus, like a surgeon preparing to make an exacting incision. Scattered around him in the grass were a carpenter’s bag of taxidermy tools—flat pliers, cutting-pliers, two kinds of forceps, three-cornered files of various sizes, a huge glover’s needle stuck in abar of soap, a glue-pot. 2 They were the tools with which he was conjuring the dark arts of resurrection. Towering above him, stuffed and mounted but so real it seemed ready to snort, was the lordly bison bull he had brought down in the Montana snow two winters before. Nearby stood the half-completed figures of a two-year-old “spike” bull, a yearling, two cows, and Sandy, the little blond calf who had perished, making this whole display a kind of sepulchre of innocence.
    A heavy canvas privacy screen had been drawn around the four-sided exhibit to shield Hornaday and his assistants from rubberneckers trying to get a premature peek; but even so, Hornaday could still hear the laughter and footfalls of museumgoers echoing through the high-ceilinged hall. Unperturbed by these distractions, he devoted his tenderest attentions to re-creating the scene, an imagined moment on the northern Great Plains in which an alpha bull, several cows, and a calf stopped to drink at a little alkaline watering hole (re-created out of layered wax and glass to give the illusion of depth). Nearby lay a couple of bleached buffalo skulls, discarded by hunters who had lain in wait at the spring.
    Hornaday was not a man above wondering about his place in history. As he worked, in fact, he was nearly as enthralled by the idea that this six-figure habitat group would become the masterpiece for which he was remembered, as he was about celebrating a vanishing species. Before he was through with this exhibit, he would feel compelled to speak directly, though secretly, to future generations whom he feared might not remember him. One day almost seventy years later, in 1957, the curatorial staff at the Smithsonian was finally taking down Hornaday’s buffalo group—which had been on prominent display at the museum’s ground-floor entrance, greeting millions of visitors with forbidding glass eyes for more than six decades—when one of the curators discovered a small metal box embedded inside the floorboards at the foot of the great bull. Inside were a few yellowing newspaper clippings, a couple of sketches of buffalo, and a handwritten note, in Hornaday’s flamboyant