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Epilogue
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199 ) _ EPILOGUE O N APRIL 18, 1912, George Orville Shields pulled his copy of William Temple Hornaday’s Two Years in the Jungle off the shelf for a little evening reading. After thirty minutes, he took out his pen to write the book’s author, his old friend. “I have kept you busy explaining and apologizing for me,” Shields wrote, “but we may both console ourselves with the assurance that 100 years hence people will understand both of us better than they do now, and will be sorry that our warnings were not heeded more generally than they are.”1 Actually, within the next twenty-five years, a younger generation would view Hornaday as a needlessly polarizing presence and outmoded thinker. Members of this generation of conservationists noticed that Hornaday’s predictions of imminent extinctions, like William Miller’s prophesies of Christ’s Second Coming in 1843 and 1844, all too often failed to materialize. In giving Hornaday the very last speaking slot in President Franklin Roosevelt’s five-day wildlifeprotection conference in 1936, the younger generation acknowledged his irrelevance to them. In his lecture “The Last Call for Game Salvage,” Hornaday did not deviate from his message of the past fifty years. Now a wizened eightytwo -year-old, he unrepentantly reiterated the central message of his conservation career. “Let no man or men talk to me about other causes than shooting by sportsmen for game decrease or extinction,” he told the remaining delegates. Hornaday was clearly out of place amid the cooperative mood and shared desire of the delegates to move past the strife-ridden 1920s and reconstruct a broad, viable wildlife conserva- THE MOST DEFIANT DEVIL 200 tion coalition. The conference endorsed both the Duck Stamp Act, to which Hornaday never reconciled himself, and the Darling regulatory reforms of 1935, which he favored.2 The delegates reacted positively to the Roosevelt administration’s push for unification of the wildlife-protection movement. They formed the General National Wildlife Federation, which was renamed the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) the following year. Although dominated by sportsmen’s groups, it was a far cry from the elitist Boone and Crockett Club and the gun maker–sponsored American Game Protection Association (AGPA) that had so infuriated Hornaday. The NWF included a significant contingent of nonhunters within its ranks, who bridged the gap between the utilitarian and preservationist wings of the movement.3 The effort at reconciliation at the conference required compromises that the older generation of conservationists had previously been unable to make as they fought bitterly over key features of the Norbeck Act. But compromise would allow both sides to gain something they wanted. While Hornaday would have been gratified had he lived to see the bald eagle finally receive protection in 1940, he would have been horrified that public shooting grounds were permitted in migratory bird refuges. In an odd twist, the Norbeck Act (one of Hornaday ’s greatest triumphs) had been completely undone. A hunterfinanced duck stamp had replaced payments from the general treasury to acquire bird refuges. The addition of public shooting grounds to the refuges in 1949 and their expansion in 1966 marked a thorough repudiation of Hornaday’s stand throughout the 1920s. Compromises among wildlife-protection advocates were needed to make these changes. But not all of Hornaday’s pet issues met the same fate as the migratory bird refuges. His proposed regulations on baiting animals, use of live decoys, and the number of shells a hunter could carry in his shotgun were implemented in 1935 and have remained on the books for more than seventy years. If Congress rejected his sanctuary plan in 1916 and 1917, states enacted versions of their own, thanks to the lobbying efforts of local organizations. Buffalo refuges have fared well since the establishment of the Wichita refuge in 1905. Although the current population of about four hundred thousand buffalo in the United States is dwarfed by the tens of millions of buffalo that existed when Columbus landed, the current [3.236.57.1] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:21 GMT) epIlOgUe 201 number vastly exceeds the numbers that roamed in the wild when Hornaday undertook the “last scientific buffalo hunt” in 1886. The seals prospered after the restoration of harvesting in the 1920s, and reached 2 million in 1950, before a new enemy, pollution, triggered another population crisis. Commercial harvesting ceased entirely in the 1980s. Protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the seal population numbered 750...