Two rifle shots rang out along the shore. An enormous crocodile, wounded, angry, and deadly dangerous, made its way across a sandbar to the edge of the Orinoco River. Not far away, two hunters stood watching the beast they had been attempting to kill. The hunters were Chester Jackson and William Temple Hornaday.
The injured animal was halfway across the sandbar when young Hornaday suddenly dropped his weapon and began to run after it. He hoped to head it off before it vanished into the water.
“You fool, Bill! Don’t go near him!” Chet shouted, frantically working an empty shell out of his rifle where it had stuck fast.
Ignoring his friend’s warning, Hornaday caught up with the fleeing crocodile. “Bring my rifle, quick!” he called, trying to get behind the animal to grab its tail. Just then, it turned swiftly around and lifted its head high above the sand. Its jaws gaped open, its double row of terrifying teeth only a foot away from the young hunter.
Chet answered angrily. “You young fool! Get away from there!” By then his rifle was ready for action. One more bullet went crashing into the neck of the crocodile. And in a matter of minutes the once-dangerous beast was dead.
“What in the name of heaven were you thinking about anyway?” Chet asked, still angry. “You could have held a train of cars as easily as him. I thought he was going to grab you up and run into the water with you!”
“I just wanted to keep him busy and keep his mind off the water while you came up and finished him,” Hornaday replied in a shaky voice. “Come on, let’s get that tough hide off him, just to change the subject.”
Soon the two men were absorbed in the painstaking task of skinning the crocodile.
Twenty years old, Bill Hornaday had come to the jungles of Venezuela to kill wild animals. His mission was to bring their skins and skeletons back to Rochester, New York, where he was employed at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. There they would be mounted for display and sold to museums all over the country. If his expedition was successful and he returned to Rochester with a good supply of jungle beasts, perhaps Professor Ward would finally consent to the East Indies trip that he had been trying to wangle. Even as a boy on his father’s farm, he had dreamed of those distant dark green jungles. As much as he was enjoying his present adventure, he could not help wishing he had been able to talk Professor Ward into that other trip instead.
He realized, of course, that he had come just about as close to his boyhood dreams as any twenty-year-old might hope. How many others of his age born in Plainfield, Indiana, had managed to have such adventures in South America? None at all, he guessed.
William was born in December, 1854, six years before the Civil War. He was the youngest of several sons. His father was a farmer. When he was almost four the family and its flocks and horses outgrew their lovely little farm. Although they knew they would miss the clear streams and blue grass of central Indiana, and their relatives in and about nearby Indianapolis, they decided to move to Iowa to a larger farmstead. They had relatives there, too.
William and his mother and the household belongings were settled in covered wagons. The men—his father, his older brothers, and several hired hands—drove the horses and guided the flocks and herds that followed along behind. It was a typical pioneer wagon train, a familiar sight in those days.
One sunny afternoon their journey took them alongside a branch line of the Chicago and Indianapolis Railroad. Railroad trains, and the wood-burning, smoke-belching locomotives that pulled them, were a much less familiar sight than wagon trains. The little boy had never seen one. Neither had most of the horses.
When they came to a curve in the railroad tracks, they looked north and saw a locomotive with a passenger train rushing, it seemed, right toward them.
“Hold those horses!” shouted his father, realizing that they were about to bolt in panic. “Everyone out! Grab the bridles! Quick! Get out, everybody!”
Instantly the wagons halted, and everyone obeyed. William, the littlest pioneer, was right near the railroad fence, next to the lead team of horses. He could hear the awful roar of the locomotive. He was terrified. Nothing in his brief experience of the world had prepared him for this. He looked up and saw a big black monster racing directly at him.
Before his mother knew what was happening, he dashed toward what seemed to him to be a safe place —underneath one of the horses. He didn’t know—how could he?—that the horses were as frightened as he, and might run at any second. If they did, he would be crushed under the wagon.
He heard his mother scream. “William! Someone save William!”
One of the farm workers reached under the wagon and snatched the boy to safety. Another held the horses, which even then were stamping, trying to run.
But he learned that the locomotive was not to be feared, that it made a great noise but stayed on its own path. The wagon train reorganized itself and the pioneer trek continued.
The farm in Eddyville, three miles south of the Des Moines River, was a wonderful place for a boy to grow up. He had chores to do, of course; and he got some schooling. But mostly he could watch the changing seasons, the wild roses when they came, and the virgin Iowa prairie. He chased the prairie chickens, quail, ground squirrels, pocket gophers, and hundreds of kinds of prairie birds. When the family went back to visit their relatives living along Eagle Creek in Indiana there were different animals to become acquainted with—turtles, yellow perch, little green herons.
It was on the Iowa farm that he had his “first interview with a skunk.” As he told it afterward, “the meadow larks were sweetly warbling, and all Nature was smiling and glad, when a big, bad skunk suddenly rose out of the landscape. He was a perfect whale of a skunk. He was heavily armed, and I was not. He carried a deadly revolver. He faced me. His beady, black eyes glared. He made a series of short runs at me,—snarling, showing his teeth, and stamping on the ground with his black front feet, most defiantly. Few and short were the words we said.”
As William imagined it, the skunk said: “Run, you little skeezicks! Run, or it will be the worse for you.”
“You get off this prairie,” the boy answered. “You are too fresh.”
“I dare you to try to put me off,” the skunk said. “If you dast to try it, I’ll make you bury your clothes for four weeks.”
Realizing that the skunk meant business, the boy whistled three times. It was a signal. William’s older brother Calvin, working on another part of the farm, came running with his new shotgun in his hand. And that was the end of that skunk.
A sudden encounter with six big and beautiful white birds on the same bit of prairie provided a different experience, however. The sight of them shining in the sun was so thrilling to the boy that he could not sleep. His impression of those birds would stay with him always. And years later, at college, his vivid recollection would be matched by an illustration in a book, and he would be able to identify them as whooping cranes.
William’s father and brothers were all crack rifle shots, and Calvin undertook to teach the boy how to shoot. The first lesson involved a gray squirrel which, together, they spotted in the top branches of a large maple tree. William was given a Kentucky rifle, put in position, and told how to use it. Then Calvin crept around to the other side of the tree to distract the squirrel.
It worked. The younger boy easily shot the small animal, and it fell to the ground.
As he picked it up he felt the thrill of catching his first game, but only for an instant. Then it seemed to him that it had been too easy. The squirrel was just posing there for him. He had gotten it on his first shot. “The squirrel didn’t have a chance!” he said sadly. “It’s unfair, and it’s no fun at all.”
But he did learn how to shoot. He became quite good at it. He used this skill sparingly, however, while he was growing up. Over a period of time he shot a blue jay, a green heron, two prairie chickens, and a woodpecker. He examined their plumage; he looked at them thoroughly, to see how they were made and put together and what they were fitted to do. The chickens at least could be eaten. But the heron, the jay, and the woodpecker had to be thrown away. He was disappointed, and somehow he felt guilty for having taken life, even a bird’s life, to no purpose.
When he reached sixteen he thought it time to consider his future seriously. He knew farm life. He loved animals. He had learned to tend and doctor them. He could handle a gun as well as anyone he knew. But he definitely did not wish to become a farmer.
His parents had both died a few years earlier, and his uncle, with whom he had gone to live, was his guardian. It was his uncle’s idea that the teenager learn dentistry, but William decided that he would like to become a newspaper editor. He realized after thinking about it, however, that, although he could claim to be “a corking good speller and could write some,” he didn’t have sufficient education to become a country editor. He knew that he must go to college.
But how, when and where? These were the big questions.
He had heard of the Iowa State College at Ames. And so he sent for the catalogue and studied it thoroughly. His schooling in Knoxville met the entrance requirements: that would be no problem. But there was no money available to pay for his tuition or living expenses. he would have to try for a scholarship.
Only two students from each county in the state could hold scholarships at a time, however, and Marion County was already over its quota with six. It would be years, he realized, before he could enroll from his home county. Then he had an inspiration. About twenty miles away was Oskaloosa College, in Mahaska County. He could probably scrape up enough money to enroll there for a year of preparatory study while living at home. Then, under the Mahaska County scholarship quota, which was usually unfilled, he could apply to Ames.
Everything went according to schedule: after a year at Oskaloosa William went to Ames. He took courses in zoology, botany, stock-breeding, forestry, surveying, map-making, and free-hand drawing. He was letting his interests and inclinations lead him. At the same time he was laying a sound cornerstone for the career he would build in later years.
The State College at Ames was starting a museum. A friendly sophomore told William, who was a freshman, that a ten-dollar reward had been offered by the college president the year before to anyone who could mount a specimen and thereby prove himself capable of caring for the growing collection.
William had once seen the zoology professor at Oskaloosa prepare and mount a crow, and so he thought he knew how.
With great self-confidence he went looking for a small animal in the nearby woods. He found a dead gray squirrel and brought it back. With broomwire, hemp fiber known as tow, shoe buttons for eyes, and a hickory nut as a prop, he went to work, skinning, cleaning, stuffing, and mounting the squirrel. He got the squirrel to sit up, and proudly went to show his work to President Welch.
“Not good enough,” was the verdict, delivered without any encouragement whatever.
This encounter left William full of dismay. Fortunately, a young man who was a teacher of zoology and botany, Professor Charles E. Bessey, became aware of William’s aspirations and took an interest in him. One day near the end of the school year Professor Bessey invited William to come to his office.
“Now, young man, we’re going to see how much you know about taxidermy! I’ve got a fresh bird for you, and if you mount it decently you may yet get to work in our museum.”
“Show me the victim,” said the freshman, outwardly brave but inwardly nervous about the unexpected test.
Professor Bessey lifted up some newspapers that were spread out over what had appeared to be a lump in the carpet. An enormous snow-white pelican was uncovered, its body like a great pillow of down, its bill looking as long as a fence rail to the would-be taxidermist. It had been shot down while flying north, its seasonal migration having taken it right over the campus.
Next, Professor Bessey showed young Hornaday a large book, handsomely bound in morocco leather. It was John James Audubon’s famous Birds of North America. “There,” he exclaimed, as he opened it and placed it on his desk. “This is a fine picture of your bird, the Great White Pelican. You can shape and pose him from it.”
The Audubon book stunned the student. When, years later, he stopped to think about it, he wrote of it as the discovery of a New World. It told him not only how to mount his pelican, but more important, that there was such a thing as a professional naturalist; that one could make a career out of working with animals and still be neither a college teacher nor a farmer. It told him that, far from Iowa, there were zoological museums that contained many stuffed and mounted specimens, where men could become absorbed in learning the hows and whys of nature. And it identified for him the wonderful Whooping Crane of his boyhood.
“Now, young man,” Professor Bessey challenged him, interrupting his thoughts. “Can you mount that bird?”
“Yes, Sir!” the boy answered. “But you must help me get some tools and materials together.”
All went well while he skinned, cleaned, and stuffed the bird, and posed it following Audubon’s painting. But when it came time to fasten the stiff wires that held the bird in position, the old pliers he had been given to work with nearly failed him. After a struggle, however, his determination carried the day. And with justifiable pride he was able to display the bird.
His reward soon followed. He was given the post of taxidermist and custodian of the school museum.
The museum, such as it was, was now his, to do with whatever he would, and could. It contained about two hundred birds, perched, with the aid of some loose wires, on wooden pegs, an assortment of unmounted game birds, cranes, and ducks, and a row of empty cabinets with shelves and glass doors. The remainder of the semester and most of the following school year were spent in getting as many of these as possible into shape, and setting them up in the cabinets. Helping the student taxidermist was one small book, an old English Manual of Taxidermy. But when it came to teaching him how to arrange the neck feathers of a heron so the bird would look decent enough to be put on public view, or how to remove grease and caked blood from delicate plumage so that the true colors, and not an unsightly stain, would greet the eye, the volume was of no use. Frustrated, William vowed not only to learn the art of taxidermy to perfection but, when he should master it, to write his own manual. He would write it so plainly and illustrate it so clearly “that any farm boy could learn from its pages how to clean and preserve and mount birds and animals.” He had as yet only an inkling of how much he himself still had to learn. Twenty years later he would keep the vow he made as a student at Ames.
During his second year he came to a definite decision about his future. One afternoon he was walking alone across the campus. He paused in a great open space and then made his resolution. “I will be a zoologist. I will be a museum-builder. I will fit myself to be a curator. I will learn taxidermy under the best living teachers—and I will become one of the best in that line. That will make a steppingstone for travel. for field studies of animals, and for work in a museum. This settles it! I will bring wild animals to the millions of people who cannot go to them!”
Having no idea of how to go about achieving his goal, he confided in Professor Bessey. And a few days later, while William was at work in his museum, Bessey dashed into the room, a copy of the latest issue of the American Naturalist magazine in his hand.
“See here, Hornaday! Listen to this! Keep working while I read it to you.”
He had come upon an article describing Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, where there was a workshop in which zoologists, taxidermists, osteologists, and other technicians prepared fresh animal specimens for museum display. Ward, a professor at the University of Rochester, hired experienced workers trained in the museums of Europe, as well as a select group of promising young American men.
Professor Bessey and William lost no time in deciding that a job with Henry Ward was the next step. And that very night a letter went from Ames to Rochester. William asked to be accepted and given the opportunity “to learn taxidermy in all its branches, and salary no object.”
A prompt reply from Ward brought encouragement, but not final acceptance. Then both Professor Bessey and President Welch wrote to Rochester recommending their prize student, and in due time he was accepted.
In November of 1873, at the age of nineteen, William Temple Hornaday left the state where he had spent most of his life until that time. He was off to Ward’s, where he expected to “spend at least two years in intensive museology work and study.” His salary was to be six dollars a week.