The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife

2. Collecting Naturalist and Hunter

31 2 ) _ COLLECTING NATURALIST AND HUNTER I N 1876, William Temple Hornaday embarked on a two-year adventure to Asia that few Americans of his day could have contemplated . During his earlier “two trial trips,” Hornaday (“my western man,” Henry Ward called him) had demonstrated his keen eye for valuable species, a willingness to take risks, and an uncanny ability to keep his expenses to the barest minimum. Unmarried, energetic, proven, and only twenty-one years old to boot, Hornaday was the right man to fill several large orders for Asian specimens.1 Hornaday expected to be gone for at least three years. Before departing , he took leave to visit friends and family in Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan. Among these was Josephine Chamberlain, a young schoolteacher he had met the year before in Battle Creek, Michigan. “I remember you, vividly, in your best black silk gown at the never-to-be forgotten dinner party of Emily Fellows, blessed Emily Fellows, whose hospitality gave me the opportunity to meet the finest girl on earth,” he would write Josephine in 1900. “And how you loomed up above all the other girls I had ever met up to that time—or since!” Born in Connecticut , Josephine was the daughter of an army officer and homeopathic doctor who worked at the sanitarium in Battle Creek. Hornaday proposed to Josephine, who accepted. Concerned for Josephine’s safety with no man in the house, he taught her to fire a handgun before departing . “It seemed to have a salutatory effect,” he wrote Chet Jackson two months later from Paris, “for the burglars come no more.”2 THE MOST DEFIANT DEVIL 32 In October, after Hornaday had returned from his farewell tour, he and Ward settled down to business and negotiated a contract. Hornaday pledged to follow a rigorous routine. “Mr. H. agrees to give his entire time and attention to the matter of collecting with the exception of such as may be occupied at odd times in the writing of notes, letters, journals, etc., and matters of like character,” the agreement stipulated. “But it is hereby understood that such matters of private interest shall in no case be allowed to interfere with the regular work of the expedition.” As demanding as this stipulation might have been, Hornaday gained a concession in the form of express permission to write and publish a memoir of the expedition. But like all the other parts of the contract, this caused considerable tension. Although mutually accepted in a spirit of comity when both men sat across the table in Rochester, the terms became a sore subject when half the globe divided them. Issues such as salary, itinerary, time management, demands for specific species, and, most of all, expense funds caused frequent disagreements. While it was difficult to implement the exact terms of their arrangement given the vast distance between employee and employer, where the exchange of ideas could take months, there was an equally important personal dynamic at work. For the controlling and manipulative Ward, the future of his business and reputation rested on the ability of a twenty-two-year-old to collect high-quality specimens of animals with which he was totally unfamiliar. To the young man, he was risking his life, alone, in an unknown land.3 Ward joined Hornaday for the first leg of the expedition, a twomonth tour across Europe and North Africa to collect specimens and gather information on Asia. Ward found numerous valuable items, but they stumbled badly when it came to collecting information. For all of their meetings at museums, universities, and the like, Hornaday and Ward had only the dimmest picture of what to expect in Asia. Once in India, Hornaday was often surprised by the dearth of collectible wildlife. Indeed, the wildlife population of India was declining in the face of British sports hunting, interior development, and population growth. Lacking accurate information, Ward frequently demanded species and in numbers that Hornaday could not possibly fulfill in the allotted time frame. Nor did they make any significant contacts in South Asia. It was Ward’s good fortune that Hornaday was such a gregarious and charming young man, because it allowed him to forge connections with important people and obtain valuable leads on the locations of desired animals.4 COlleCTINg NaTURalIsT aND hUNTeR 33 While Ward met with museum officials and university professors in England, he dispatched Hornaday on side...